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.
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