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“Ingenious and beguiling.” —Time“Crichton keeps us guessing at every turn in his best work since The Andromeda Strain.” —Los Angeles Times“Sphere may be Crichton’s best novel, but even if it ranked only second or third, it would be a must for suspense fans.” —Miami HeraldA classic thriller from 1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Crichton, Sphere is a bravura demonstration of what he does better than anyone: riveting storytelling that combines frighteningly plausible, cutting edge science and technology with pulse- pounding action and serious chills. The gripping story of a group of American scientists sent to the ocean floor to investigate an alien ship, only to confront a terrifying discovery that defies imagination, Sphere is Crichton prime—truly masterful fiction from the ingenious mind that brought us Prey, State of Fear, and Jurassic Park. Read more
Publisher : Harper
Publication date : March 29, 2011
Edition : Reprint
Language : English
Print length : 544 pages
ISBN-10 : 0061990558
ISBN-13 : 57
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 4.19 x 1.23 x 7.5 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #652,297 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #26 in Technothrillers (Books) #128 in Science Fiction Adventures #3,239 in Suspense Thrillers
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Top Amazon Reviews
Rereading this book made me miss Michael Crichton even more. I can't think of another author who combines science, suspense and the woo-woo of the supernatural as well as Crichton, and this book is amazing. A psychologist was hired to write a paper on what would happen if humanity were confronted with aliens--happy to have been paid, Norman finished the paper and went on with his life. Years later, he's asked by the Navy to go on a trip to the bottom of the Pacific to be part of the team Norman had suggested so many years ago. Once he's a thousand feet down in a special habitat for high pressure living, Norman and the crew are taken by submarine to a spaceship that's hidden under coral, and that's not the weirdest part of the story--the ship has been underwater at least 300 years, and the writing on the walls of the strange ship are in English. From explaining living under 30 pressures, to unveiling the purpose of the strange sphere found inside the ship void of any signs of life except for one mummified crew member, Crichton creates a story that's hard to put down, while educating his readers on deeps sea life--black holes--the mysteries of the human imagination--along with a study of the shadow part of our minds, our unconscious. I truly can't think of an author that can cram all of that into one book, and make it hard to put down. What an amazing author.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2018 by Robin Landry
Well, Michael Crichton is starting to become one of my favorite authors. His plot lines are so creative, and he executes them pretty well. This book was no exception, in my mind, to the standard I have started to hold him to! Throughout this book's journey, I was hooked. I mean, the ideas he comes up with are simply fantastic and so original in my mind. Synopsis: A sphere is found underwater, and a group of qualified people are sent to investigate it. They are in no way prepared for what happens next, and neither was I! I don't want to say too much to give anything away, but the only things that annoyed me out of this book were two things. I thought the women characters were written poorly. Although he made the main woman, Beth, smart, he also made her emotionally unstable and a bit of a sexual object, particularly towards the end of the book, which irritated me. I feel like in real life, Beth would have had much more depth and would never do some of the things he had written. I also found some typos, including switching to first person for a couple of sentences instead of third and switching a character's name once. But I dismissed these irritations due to me really enjoying the plot line. Some of the facts sprinkled into the book were fascinating, and I truly hope they are factual and not something he made up, because I am taking them as truth. Yes, I know I can google it but I am too lazy to do that. Most of the book is set far, far underwater and I feel as if I really learned some things about the deep ocean which was fascinating. For example, the most toxic creatures of the world are water creatures! And this is due to the ocean being an older living environment. Let me just nerd out for a bit over this and the other things I have learned while reading this book. Anyway, off to pick up another book by him, and I highly recommend Sphere! You won't guess the ending, and it will definitely leave you thinking.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2019 by Amy
When he died in 2008, Michael Crichton (1942-2008) left behind a literary legacy that had captured the imagination not just of the public but of Hollywood as well. Some of the best-remembered films of recent decades include stories based on Crichton’s twenty-six novels, including Jurassic Park and its sequels as well as The Andromeda Strain. And HBO’s successful recent production, Westworld, reprises a novel Crichton published in 1973. The six-foot-nine-inch Harvard-trained physician began writing novels when he was in medical school, and he took up fiction full-time immediately after graduating. Crichton never practiced medicine. But if his 1987 First Contact novel, Sphere, had been the best he could manage, perhaps he would’ve decided otherwise. The book is a literary exercise in human conflict that stretches the reader’s credulity. Like most of his other work, Sphere is an example of what might be called “pop sci-fi.” Crichton populates the story with a small cast of characters confined to a small space and subjects them to a succession of stresses and threats designed to cause maximum conflict among them. And his narrator and protagonist, Norman Johnson, is a fifty-three-year-old professor of psychology ideally equipped to understand precisely the dynamics of their increasingly ugly conflicts. The principal characters include four scientists in addition to Norman as well as their team leader, Capt. Harold C. (“Hal”) Barnes, USN. The other four scientists on the ULF (Unknown Life Forms) team are all much younger than Norman, and it would be hard to put together a team more likely to fight among themselves. ** Beth Halpern, the team zoologist, is “Mother Nature with muscles,” a beautiful young thirty-something woman who works out with weights. ** Harry Adams is not yet thirty. He’s a Princeton mathematician, African-American, a child prodigy who is obviously smarter than everyone else by a large measure—and insists on rubbing it in. ** Ted Fielding, “compact, handsome, and still boyish at forty,” is an astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ** The marine biologist is Arthur Levine, “pudgy . . . pale and uneasy, wrapped in his own thoughts.” ** And Capt. Barnes, it turns out, is no longer in active service but appears to have left a senior position in the Pentagon to head the team. He is military to the core. For the top-secret ULF Project, the Navy has dragooned the scientists and hustled them off to the South Pacific to investigate a “spaceship [that] crashed three hundred years ago” and now lies buried under growths of coral a thousand feet down on the bottom of the ocean. The project team, along with Navy divers and service personnel, descends to the bottom and takes up residence in undersea habitats adjacent to the crash site. And then the fun begins. The eponymous “sphere” is a prop It doesn’t take long for the team’s investigation of the mysterious spaceship to trigger conflicts among them. And it soon becomes clear that the game they’re playing is for keeps. The bodies start to drop, because (of course) no cast of characters emerges unscathed from a Michael Crichton story. The centerpiece of the tale is, naturally, the spaceship itself and what they discover inside it. Complications aplenty ensue. But the eponymous “sphere” they come across proves in the end to be a prop designed to exaggerate the psychological games the scientists prove they’re all so good at playing. Michael Crichton proves in this literary exercise in human conflict that people really have trouble getting along with one another. If First Contact ever goes like this, the human race is in very deep trouble.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2020 by Mal Warwick
This was my first Michael Crichton book and it definitely won't be my last. Packaging 5/5 - No problems with the book once it was delivered Content 5/5 - Page turner and super easy read!! Book size might be overwhelming but if you're an average reader like me you'll finish it in 2 weeks MAX.
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2019 by Bond T.