The Sherlock Holmes Connection In Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain
Michael Crichton’s breakout success was inspired by one of his favorite writers.
Michael Crichton’s breakout success, The Andromeda Strain, was actually inspired by one of his favorite writers. Crichton says the idea came from “George Gaylord Simpson’s scholarly work The Major Features of Evolution.” In a footnote, Simpson suggested “that organisms in the upper atmosphere had never been used by science-fiction writers.” Simpson is not the writer I’m alluding to. In The Andromeda Strain’s dedication, Crichton writes, “for A.C.D., M.D. who first proposed the problem.”
So, who is this A.C.D., M.D.?
I haven’t found any interview or source where Crichton clearly acknowledges who he means, but I think we can suss it out. We don’t have to be rocket scientists to infer that M.D. means doctor. We know that Crichton was briefly a doctor and studied medicine at Harvard.
Could this be one of his professors or a classmate?
No, I think it’s clear, if we take a step back and look at Crichton’s breadth of work, we can see the contours of another figure. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to discover his true inspiration.
A.C.D., M.D. is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and, like Crichton, a doctor-turned-writer.
Doyle didn’t just write Sherlock Holmes stories. He wrote historical fiction, a history of the occult, a silly yet earnest treatise on “the coming of the fairies” (yes, little green sprites like Tinkerbell), and fun young adult adventure books and stories.
So, what does Crichton mean by “who first proposed the problem?”
Well, let’s keep in mind the Simpson footnote: “organisms in the upper atmosphere.” In Doyle’s short story, “The Horror of the Heights,” published in The Strand Magazine in 1913, a pilot encounters dangerous organisms that live in the upper atmosphere, or as the “aeronaut” calls it: “air-jungle.” So dangerous are these jungles that the pilot doesn’t survive. His notebook is discovered in taters and it’s that notebook that helps the narrator piece together the incident.
Organisms that live in the upper atmosphere that can harm humans? Sounds a lot like The Andromeda Strain. “The Horror of the Heights” is told in a similar vein to Crichton’s novel, in that it is told as though it were nonfiction. We’re presented with the facts, and then the rest of the story is the first-person perspective from the uncovered notebook.
So, this was the story that inspired Crichton?
Not so fast.
I’d argue that that’s not the whole picture. There’s another piece to the puzzle.
Crichton had another multistory protagonist: Professor George Challenger
We first meet Professor Challenger in Doyle’s The Lost World (yes, Crichton borrowed the title of his second Jurassic Park book from A.C.D., M.D.). In that story, dinosaurs survived extinction on a remote plateau in the South American jungle. In another Professor Challenger book titled “The Poison Belt,” the Earth passes through a poisonous area of the solar system. This toxic “ether” threatens life on Earth. The only way to survive: the professor and his companions seal themselves in an airtight room with oxygen tanks. Once the Earth passes through the ether, they discover a grim sight: everyone is dead. Or are they? I don’t want to spoil the story, but the ending is not as bleak as it appears.
But you can clearly see Crichton’s inspiration. He replaced the toxic ether (The Poison Belt) with dangerous organisms from the upper atmosphere (“The Horror of the Heights”), or, more accurately, micro-pathogens from space.
These two stories feel the most plausible inspiration for The Andromeda Strain.
There are many places A.C.D., M.D. pokes his head through Crichton’s work (we won’t explore them all here, but maybe sometime in the future). Not just in premise, but in style. Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain as if it were nonfiction. There was great care taken to lend it verisimilitude. In Doyle’s time, people believed Sherlock Holmes was real. There’s a great interview where Conan Doyle talks about how he got letters from people who wanted to be Holmes’ “housekeeper.”
“One of them, when she heard that he had turned to the occupation of keeping bees, wrote saying that she was an expert at segregating the queen, whatever that may mean, and that she was evidently predestined to be the housekeeper of Sherlock Holmes.”
It’s worth a watch.
To this day, Sherlock Holmes is sometimes treated almost as if he were real.
Much of Crichton’s later work tries to build a sense of reality, differently than Doyle, but certainly in a similar vein. Crichton obviously felt a kinship to A.C.D., M.D., specifically both being doctors, later giving that up to write popular books, and later, as we’ll see in Travels, exploring the paranormal, a point that Doyle calls a “much more serious one.”
Sources
Michael Crichton Official Website. “The Andromeda Strain.” https://michaelcrichton.com/works/the-andromeda-strain/.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Horror of the Heights.” Library of Short Stories. https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/onlinereader/the-horror-of-the-heights.
Crichton, Michael. The Andromeda Strain. New York: Vintage, 2012. Kindle edition.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Poison Belt. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/126.