The Terminal Man
First published 1972.
ISBN-10: 0394447689
ISBN-13: 978-0394447681
Description:
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ISBN-13: 978-0394447681
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.
ISBN-10: 1101974494
ISBN-13: 978-1101974490
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.