Sphere
Sphere is a 1987 novel by Michael Crichton, his sixth novel under his own name and his sixteenth overall. The story follows Norman Johnson, a psychologist engaged by the United States Navy, who joins a team of scientists assembled to examine a spacecraft of unknown origin discovered on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The novel begins as a science fiction story but quickly transforms into a psychological thriller, developing into an exploration of the nature of the human imagination.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
16mentions
14people
2013–2025years
44% recommend50% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Yes, I too had the same disparity in recognizing the author as a young 'un, reading CONGO and SPHERE and so on .. Mr. Crichton sure had his finger on the pulse of the technological world we live in. What a wild series of stories he has created .. he was my favourite author until Messrs. Stephenson and Gibson came along ..
Staying on subject, I wonder if we will see a new adaptation of ANDROMEDA STRAIN some time. As a story it seems topical and relevant.
- I've read Sphere by Michael Crichton several times and always enjoy it. I particularly like the way things are seen by some characters and then another character brings an alternate perspective that changes the reader's perception.
- Learned about this equation from the late Michael Crichton's book "Sphere". A really great first contact science fiction story.
- Michael Crichton's Sphere has a good section about the "anthropomorphic problem", about how we imagine extraterrestrial life as essentially human. Regardless of how they look, they still act human in our imagination.
Why apply concepts like "rogue", "mission", "rules", or even "individuals"? There's no guarantee such ideas mean anything to these things. For all we know, the UFOs themselves are not actual artificial spacecraft, but "biological" entities. Or autonomous drones.
Or they're not even extraterrestrial, but visitors from the future. Or some sort of interdimensional phenomenon. Or they're some sort of mythological being out of human religion- perhaps Abrahamic entities like the Angels of Mons. Or that they're the manifestation of mankind's collective unconsciousness, a sort of high-level tulpa. Or they're just some kind of weird unknown cosmic particle, a high-altitude form of quantum ball lightning.
Those possibilities are tongue-in-cheek, but my point is that if you're going to start assuming that UFOs are just spacecraft from an unknown alien race... then you start making assumptions upon assumptions and the whole thing just devolves into science fiction tropes. And honestly, those tropes are no more probable than the crazy Fortean explanations I've offered. It's fun to talk about, but why take these thought experiments seriously?
- Relevant book Crichton's Sphere.
- Thanks for posting this. Crichton was my favourite author when I was a young boy (I still remember how engrossing Sphere was for me) and to this day I had no idea that he tried his hand at programming.
