Scientists sent to the ocean floor to study a mysterious spacecraft find a perfect, shining sphere inside
A mystery on the ocean floor
Psychologist Norman Johnson is flown to the middle of the Pacific Ocean with almost no explanation. A huge spacecraft has been found resting on the seabed, a thousand feet down, apparently for about three hundred years. Norman joins a small team of scientists in an underwater habitat to investigate, and inside the ship they discover a perfect, mysterious sphere.
Who will enjoy it
Readers who enjoy science thrillers, deep-sea settings and suspenseful stories that play with the mind.
What you will get
A tense, clever and atmospheric thriller that combines deep-sea adventure, science and psychology, keeping you guessing until the very end.
Sphere Facts: Pages, Genre and Setting
Genre
Science Fiction · Deep sea · First contact · Psychological thriller
Length
371 pages · ≈ 11 h
More about this book
The team includes Harry Adams, a brilliant young mathematician, Beth Halpern, a zoologist, Ted Fielding, an enthusiastic astrophysicist, and Captain Barnes of the Navy, who is in charge. Once they are in the habitat, they discover that the ship is not what they expected, and that it has traveled from a surprising place. Inside it they find the sphere, a polished, flawless object with no visible way in. Harry manages to enter it, and after that, strange things begin to happen.
A message appears on the computer screens from an entity that calls itself Jerry, which seems childlike but becomes increasingly threatening. A storm on the surface cuts the team off from help, and they face attacks from jellyfish, sea snakes and a giant squid. Norman, the psychologist, slowly realizes that the dangers may be connected to the fears in their own minds. Crichton builds claustrophobic tension and mixes scientific detail with a puzzle about the human imagination. There are some violent and frightening scenes.
Gripping, eerie and thought-provoking, later adapted as a film. About 371 pages in the Ballantine paperback.
Jurassic Park
The Andromeda Strain
Timeline
Contact
The Lost World
The Demolished Man
Cibola Burn
Dark Matter
Leviathan Wakes
Persepolis Rising
The Three-Body Problem
The Power