Michael Crichton’s Sphere

Michael Crichton’s novel Sphere was published in 1987. The novel was successful and was well received by critics. The 1988 film adaptation made some significant changes and was very poorly received and was a box-office flop. The fact that Crichton himself was not involved with the film in any way may account for its failure.

The novel begins with a team of four scientists assembled by the U.S. Navy to investigate what the Navy describes as an anomaly a thousand feet below the surface of the South Pacific Ocean. The Navy’s cover story is that it is an air crash scene.

The team comprises astrophysicist Ted Fielding, mathematician Harry Adams, zoologist Beth Halpern and psychologist Norman Johnson. Their investigation will entail spending a week in a deep-sea habitat. Norman is not happy about this but it’s his own fault. He’s the one who, eight years earlier, wrote the protocol for dealing with such a situation and who recommended the inclusion of a psychologist on the grounds that the situation would put the members of such a team under extreme stress.

This is not an air crash. It is a spacecraft crash, and there is clear evidence that the crashed spaceship has been on the ocean floor for at least three hundred years. Which obviously means that it’s an alien spacecraft.

The scientific team will be dealing with the first contact with an alien civilisation.

Norman Johnson’s specialities are the effects of stress and more specifically the effects of stress on human group dynamics. In this case there will be plenty of stress and the group dynamics will be complex and potentially explosive. There are tensions right from the start. This novel is, among many other things, a psychological thriller. And Crichton integrates the psychological thriller and science fiction elements seamlessly.

Right from the start the attitude of Harry Adams is puzzling. This is because he has figured something out. It is not only clear to him that the Navy has withheld important information he has also figured out exactly what it is that they haven’t been told. He is both worried and amused.

The fact that the team members are unaware that the situation is not what it seems to be is important and it’s also important that the reader is unaware of this. For this reason I’m going to be even more careful than usual about hinting at anything that might be a spoiler. Crichton has gone to a lot of trouble to reveal a whole series of secrets to us in a gradual way. Just as we think we know what’s going on he springs another surprise on us.

There’s not just the spacecraft. Aboard the spacecraft is the sphere. What is the sphere and how is it connected with the spacecraft?

Crichton started his literary career as a writer of thrillers and he never forgot the basic techniques of that genre. His skills at building suspense and establishing an atmosphere of menace and paranoia and very evident in Sphere.

This is a classic “put a bunch of people is an isolated confined space and watch them become more and more paranoid” story.

This is also Big Ideas science fiction and in this book he combines a number of big ideas in extremely interesting ways.

This is a novel that came out just before the wave of undersea science fiction adventure films such as The Abyss and it may well have helped to kick off that boom. Sphere is certainly a vastly better story than The Abyss.

Sphere is ambitious and it’s an impressive achievement. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed many of Crichton’s books including Scratch One, The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, Binary and Congo. And I’ve reviewed his movies Coma (1978), Looker (1981) and Westworld (1973).