Fred Hoyle & John Elliot. A is for Andromeda (1962)

     Fred Hoyle & John Elliot. A is for Andromeda (1962) Radiotelescopy was brand new in the 60s. People immediately assumed that signals from other civilisations would be received. Since then, cooler logic has shown that the odds of intercepting such signals are vanishingly small. This story feeds the continuing fascination with extra-terrestrial beings. Signals are received, and John Fleming, a brooding, intense, and obsessive computer scientist, figures out a way to decode them. They turn out to be instructions for building and programming a computer. That machine in turn provides instructions for synthesising proteins, and eventually a complete human being, Andromeda. But its method of acquiring the information causes the death of a human. The artificial human is apparently a copy of the dead woman. It becomes clear that the intelligence embodied in the computer does not intend the furtherance of human objectives. Eventually, John Fleming destroys the machine, and the code used to build it. Some time before that, the transmissions have ceased, so there is no possibility of replicating the machine.
     It seems fairly obvious that a society that invests in technology to transmit messages to the rest of the universe is as likely to use that message to reproduce itself in some form as to merely announce its presence. Hoyle’s idea, that instructions to build a computer could further the aim of reproduction is plausible, but it seemed far more plausible in the 1960s when the limitations of computers were not as well understood as they are now. In particular, the technology of the time (faithfully described by Hoyle) was simply not up to the task imagined for it. Nevertheless, as a riff on the bug-eyed monster invading Earth the book is interesting.
     Elliot (who has had a long and successful career dramatising fiction for TV, among other things) supplied the human interest and narrative skill, but like most hard SF, this book’s characters are barely believable. The twist, that in copying the dead woman, the machine also imbued its slave with human feelings and attitudes, is a good one, for it is those feelings that enable Andromeda to disobey her master and help Fleming destroy the machine. A number of subplots involving attempts by outsiders to gain control of the machine, are underdeveloped. Proper treatment of these and the tensions within the working group would have doubled the length of the book, which most readers of SF wouldn’t tolerate. ** (2008)