Recommended reading - 2 by Michael Crichton

The Terminal Man

First published 1972.
 
ISBN-10: 0394447689
ISBN-13: 978-0394447681
 
Description:
 

In his first novel since The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton once again combines documentary verisimilitude with hair-raising suspense to open up for the reader a new area of modern science: surgical-electronic mind control.

 

The man ‘in the hands of science” – the Terminal Man – is Harry Benson. He is a violent paranoid who has already twice attempted to kill. Against the profound opposition of his psychiatrist, a team of surgeons proposes to connect his brain to a computer that will regulate his behavior. From the conflict among the doctors, to the actual operation itself – during which forty wires are attached to forty points in Benson’s brain – to the functioning of the computers, to the terrifying results when Benson escapes from the hospital, the tension rises as the reader becomes a close-up witness to an experiment just short of the ultimate computer control of a human being.

 

Psychosurgery of the kind Crichton describes is already taking place under established medical auspices – a new form of behavior control that has become a key scientific and moral issue in our time. Crichton takes it out of the realm of the abstract, and makes immediate its workings, its dangers, and its implications, in a novel that provides urgent information and, at the same time, superb entertainment.

 

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The Andromeda Strain

First published 1969.

ISBN-10: 1101974494
ISBN-13: 978-1101974490
 
Description:
 

A military space probe, sent to collect extraterrestrial organisms from the upper atmosphere, is knocked out of orbit and falls to Earth. Twelve miles from the crash site, an inexplicable and deadly phenomenon terrorizes the residents of a sleepy desert town in Arizona, leaving only two survivors: an elderly addict and a newborn infant.

 

The United States government is forced to mobilize Project Wildfire, a top-secret emergency response protocol. Four of the nation’s most elite biophysicists are summoned to a clandestine underground laboratory located five stories beneath the desert and fitted with an automated atomic self-destruction mechanism for cases of irremediable contamination. Under conditions of total news blackout and the utmost urgency, the scientists race to understand and contain the crisis. But the Andromeda Strain proves different from anything they’ve ever seen—and what they don’t know could not only hurt them, but lead to unprecedented worldwide catastrophe.