Sphere

This is a serious study in how to keep a reader on edge. Maybe I'm just easily scared, but I find surprising that such a simple concept can generate such a strong reaction from me.

Four scientists are called to a crash site. It turns out to be the site of a spaceship that has been there for more than three hundred years. As they explore, mysterious events and messages begin to appear around the site of their habitat. The mission becomes a race to discover who or what is causing these attacks and why, before it kills them all.

For me, Sphere derives a great deal of its power from the veneer of science that it layers over the entire experience. We're placed among a group of intellectuals who knife away at the problems using the tools they are normally accustomed to. The origin of the ship, the nature of the codes, their mutual behaviours - I could spot no obvious, immersion breaking discrepancies and I was consequently quite vulnerable to the feelings that the book generates. Crichton uses Sphere as a way to indicate the issues surrounding alien contact, caricatured somewhat but still a real indicator to someone who is not aware of the situation. I think it would be best not take his novels too seriously, though. Not everything is quite as clear cut as he makes it out.

The other issue I would mention is the relative lack of feelings that the characters have. The main character is a psychologist, but I don't think that you can explain the weird reactions of the scientists to deaths and inexplicable events as just hiding from the reality. I think most people would have some kind of more extreme reaction than that. It makes Beth and Harry, in particular, feel like constructions more than people.

The “message” of the book then, if there is one, would probably go something like this. We're looking at a clash between the soft and the hard sciences, and their ways of interpreting problems. Norman ends up proving that the hard scientists that ignore psychology and their own psychological problems are a danger to themselves and others (although the sequence of deductions that he generates is enough to make any reader feel inadequate). The other topic is the power of the human imagination. Norman decides that the ability to control our thoughts and maintain self-control is the factor being tested by the sphere. As a species, we have to learn this kind of restraint if we are going to explore the stars.

Highly recommended if you have a little time on your hands. No literary masterpiece, but thoroughly enjoyable and it will get you thinking hard about a great deal of increasingly relevant issues.