Books: Sphere By Michael Crichton (1987)

“In the middle of the South Pacific, a thousand feet below the surface of the water, a huge vessel is discovered resting on the ocean floor. It is a spaceship of phenomenal dimensions, apparently undamaged by its fall from the sky. And, most startling, it appears to be at least three hundred years old.”

Sphere gets off to a promising start, with an interesting premise and has potential, with its melding of sci-fi book and techno-thriller. But while this team investigates what the sphere is, we get pages and pages of conversations about humanities vs natural sciences and this sort makes the book a slog through as you progress. I mean, I did read it rather quick, but if only because I wanted to know what the silver sphere was and what it was doing at the bottom of the ocean. The book is filled with your typical trope of the genre, with a black man, a brilliant man, who easily takes offense with his white counterparts, a highly intelligent, but beautiful women who has to prove herself, a storm that cuts them off from the ships above (a devise Crichton would use again in Jurassic Park)…it makes you roll your eyes.

Like a lot of his books, his prose is wooden at times, and you sense you are reading a script and not a novel. Still, his idea is interesting and I get the feeling he wrote out all the speeches the characters give, ones that are really well written and precise, and then created plot out afterwards, which then makes the whole thing a bit absurd.

And that ending…I’m not sure how I feel about it. Maybe I’m just too dumb to get what the late Michael Crichton was trying to say here.