withholds crucial information from the team and his crew, following his own agenda at the expense of the others with tragic consequences. Alice "Teeny" Fletcher—a Navy chief petty officer in charge of maintaining the habitat. She is friendly and competent, despite Norman's initial skepticism. It is not specifically explained how she dies, but the survivors find a trail of blood and one of her shoes after the second giant squid attack. Tina Chan—a Navy petty officer and electronics technician who is in charge of communications. She develops a friendship with Halpern, and is one of the longest surviving Navy personnel killed by the manifestations. Rose Levy—a Navy seaman who serves as the habitat's cook. Jane Edmunds—a Navy petty officer and data processing technician who serves as the operation's archivist. She is responsible for recording events and transferring the tapes to the submarine at DH-7, which is pre-programmed to return to the surface if not reset before a failsafe 12-hour countdown reaches 0, intended to ensure that at the very least a partial record will survive in case of catastrophe. Background Crichton began writing the novel in 1967 as a companion piece to The Andromeda Strain. His initial storyline began with American scientists discovering a 300-year-old spaceship underwater with stenciled markings in English. However, Crichton later realized that he "didn't know where to go with it" and put off completing the book until a later date. 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 aliens recognizably human. It's 9 feet tall with spiky teeth and it wants to eat you. Or its 3 feet tall and it wants to hug you. In either case its humanlike... What's more likely about first contact with an extraterrestrial is that the alien wouldn't look humanlike 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 inexplicable. Adaptations Film The book was made into the film Sphere (1998), directed by Barry Levinson, with a cast including Dustin Hoffman (Norman Johnson, renamed Norman Goodman), Samuel L. Jackson (Harry Adams), Peter Coyote (Harold Barnes), Liev Schreiber (Ted Fielding), and Sharon Stone (Beth Halpern,