The Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain
by Michael Crichton
read: circa 1995
Guardian 1000 Novels

Neal Stephenson's writing reminds me a fair amount of Michael Crichton's.  I haven't read Crichton in years but read quite a few of his books when I was younger.  Like Stephenson, Crichton will often explore topics (usually science-related) of interest to him in the course of the novel.  This often stops the narration and feels a bit heavy-handed, but it is usually interesting.

Andromeda Strain has one of the lamest cop-out endings of any novel I've read.  I linked a while back to an article suggesting that we don't need to finish books, as readers or writers, and that's advice Crichton should have taken in his career.  I probably read six or eight of his books and all but one or two had lousy endings.  Andromeda Strain might have been the worst.  In fact, it almost completely obscures my memory of the rest of the novel, though I do remember liking it.