Sphere

In His Own Words

I started the story in 1967 as a companion piece to The Andromeda Strain. But then, I didn’t know where to go with it.

The idea of doing a story about contact with superior intelligence, a time-honored theme, is that it’s very hard, if you stop and think about it. Most writers evade the issue by making the alien recognizably human. It’s 9 feet tall, with spiky teeth, and it wants to eat you. Or it’s 3 feet tall and wants to hug you. In either case, it’s human-like.

What’s more likely about first contact with an extraterrestrial is that the alien wouldn’t look human-like at all. You might not even be able to see it or detect it. And its behavior would be absolutely inexplicable.

Trouble is, it gets hard to dream up a story where at the center there is something that’s inexplicable.

Michael Crichton

Synopsis

A group of American scientists are rushed to a huge vessel that has been discovered resting on the ocean floor in the middle of the South Pacific. What they find defines their imaginations and mocks their attempts at logical explanation. 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…

From the Archives

In His Own Words

What interested me in this was to take a book in which a very extreme situation was presented to a group of people and then to see how this group of people responded to the extreme situation. I didn’t really want to spend too much time challenging the extreme situation itself—to say, “How realistic is this?” What I was trying to do the book about was just to say, “What would happen to people if they were confronted by—as a premise—the possibility of time travel, the possibility of contact with an extraterrestrial artifact, something that comes from another civilization that’s very much more advanced than ours?” All I would say in defense of the extreme premise is: Take anyone from a hundred years ago—take Charles Darwin, a pretty knowledgeable guy from that time—and plunk him in front of a Macintosh. The chances are he would run screaming from the room: “It cannot be anything but witchcraft.” If you decide to sit down and say “Okay, Chuck. Let me explain to you how this works”—it involves whole fields of highly developed knowledge he doesn’t know anything about. The electron hasn’t been discovered yet—he doesn’t know what an electron is. He certainly doesn’t know anything about electronics; doesn’t know anything about solid-state electronics; doesn’t know anything about cathode-ray tubes. This is one giant piece of magic to him, and all he can really do is sit on the outside and look at it as some very strange rectangular object that that has funny black and white shifting images on it. It that’s true in a hundred years, then there must be something very much like it fifty or a hundred years in the future if we could see ahead—see what kinds of things we would be doing. This is a book about people who find something from, as it turns out, our own future. It’s pretty mysterious.

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sPhere (Movie)

Release Date: February 13, 1998
Running Time: 2 hrs. 14 min.
MPAA: PG13
Director: Kurt Wimmer, Stephen Hauser, Paul Attanasio
Screenwriter: Michael Crichton
Based on the Novel By: Michael Crichton
Studio: Warner Bros.
Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Coyote, Liev Schreiber, Queen Latifah

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