Congo
by Michael Crichton · first published 1980
14% recommend86% neutral
Congo is a 1980 science fiction novel by Michael Crichton, the fifth under his own name and the fifteenth overall. The novel centers on an expedition searching for diamonds and investigating the mysterious deaths of a previous expedition in the dense tropical rainforest of the Congo. Crichton calls Congo a lost world novel in the tradition founded by Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, featuring the mines of that work's title.
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The Andromeda Strait is one of the best Crichton books/movies, along with The Eaters of the Dead (skip the movie) and The Great Train Robbery. I also have a strange fondness for Congo, but by that time Crichton had gone crazypants.
on “Movies you should own: The Andromeda Strain” ↗Yes, I too had the same disparity in recognizing the author as a young 'un, reading CONGO and SPHERE and so on .. Mr. Crichton sure had his finger on the pulse of the technological world we live in. What a wild series of stories he has created .. he was my favourite author until Messrs. Stephenson…
on “NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth” ↗I may be wrong (its been a long time since I read it, and it may be just something that fits really well thematically with the book but wasn’t actually in it), but I think that was Michael Crichton’s Congo, not a Steven King book.
on “A top audio engineer explains NPR’s signature sound (2015)” ↗I asked it for "hard space sci-fi", and it gave me a book about space (not sci-fi), a book about mental illness set in the ocean (I think? It was hard to tell), Congo by Michael Crichton (not space), and one book that might have been hard space sci-fi. Edit: I asked it again, and got: a boo about space, another kind of book about space (spacetime and geometry), a…
…archaeologists use side lighting and IR film + lenses to identify that a stone wall was made out of bricks and then painted over. This hid an entrance to a special place (don't want to spoil too much). - Congo by Michael Crichton [1] The protagonists use a camera + satellite link to visually scan a mural and then send the scan back to supercomputers for processing. That mural explains a key point about the…
on “Technique for Manipulating Satellite Photos Now Reveals Ancient Images (2025)” ↗This kind of fiction presented as dry fact is absolutely the best. In my younger and more gullible years, I recall semi-believing in Congo, with the fake assertions that the story is as true as possible, but where no details are recorded, Crichton engaged in creative license. But at least with Congo I suspected a literary device. When I…
on “The fake chemical compound Isaac Asimov invented to punk science writers” ↗Michael Crichton loved writing books on this trope. e.x. Jurassic Park - Stuck on an island full of dinosaurs Congo - Stuck in a lost city full of deadly intelligent apes Sphere - Stuck in an alien ship on the bottom of the ocean
on “Typography in Alien (2014)” ↗I think the old Crichton novel, Congo, mentioned using a very low bitrate codec over a digital satellite link. So maybe something already exists off the shelf that one could try over amateur radio.
on “Codec 2 700C” ↗…to hire him and he pretty much said he was done with the hype (rather amusing considering I’m about his age at the time and also fed up with our industry hype). (Also, if you read Michael Crichton’s “Congo”, he got the diamond color names wrong)
on “Shaking Up the Diamond Industry” ↗Michael Crichton had this shit working for Congo with apes like two decades ago. This is nothing! hacker news dismiss w/ flourish
on “Microsoft Research uses Kinect to translate between spoken and sign languages” ↗This reminds me of reading about Africa's size in the introduction to Michael Crichton's Congo back when I was a kid: "Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us from recognizing the enormity of the African continent. Covering nearly twelve million square miles, Africa…
on “The True Size of Africa (2015)” ↗Impure diamonds for semiconductors were a plot device in Michael Crichton's Congo. I never knew if there was much basis to it.
on “Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined” ↗This (overenhancement) was a minor plot point in Crichton's novel Congo, IIRC.
on “Subpixel: A subpixel convolutional neural network implementation with Tensorflow” ↗Sounds a lot like Michael Crichton's Congo
on “Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found” ↗That reminds me of Congo from Michael Crichton!
on “Flawed Diamonds Make Perfect Quantum Sensors” ↗