The Sinkable Blonde

A FOR ANDROMEDA (206 pp.)--Fred Hoyle and John Elliof--Harper ($3.50).

In the late 1960s, a top British mathematician, Dr. John Fleming, monitors the trial run of a newly built radio telescope at bleak Bouldershaw Fell. With just these few clues, any science fiction fan knows what to expect: signals from outer space.

Plugged Brain. Sure enough, within 20 pages the supersensitive reflector picks up a complex series of dots and dashes speeding earthward from the Andromeda constellation, a thousand million million miles away. Excitedly, Fleming discovers that the elaborate code is written in binary arithmetic and contains the design for an electronic brain far more sophisticated than any known to earthlings. Once built and plugged in. the space computer goes pocketa-pocketa-blink-thump and hands out a formula for creating human life. The formula, concocted by a human chemist, produces a disappointing first model: a large, jellied blob with one eye.

Rather testily, the machine hypnotizes a pretty girl researcher and induces her to grab two of its exposed wires. Snap, crackle, pop--the girl is electrocuted, but the machine is now able to devise the exact formula for creating a human embryo by parthenogenesis. In four months the embryo grows into a beautiful, submissive-seeming blonde named Andromeda, who behaves like a highly intelligent zombie.

Like westerns, science fiction obeys inviolate rules. The next step, of course, is for Andromeda and the machine to start taking over the world. Directed by the machine, Andromeda produces miracles: new wonder enzymes and an anti-missile missile system that confounds the Communists. British politicians begin dreaming of regaining big-power status, and villainous cartoon-capitalists from a giant international cartel get into the act. By now, the irascible Dr. Fleming is screaming that the machine is engaged in the "slow subjugation of the planet." When no one listens, Fleming attacks the machine itself with an ax. And the parthenogenetic blonde dies because she has been taught everything--except how to swim.

Drilled Minds. A for Andromeda is a novelized version of a seven-part TV serial which ran last year on BBC, where it won an impressive 80% of Britain's viewing audience. It was co-authored by TV Scriptwriter John Elliot and Mathematician Fred Hoyle. 46. Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge and a leading proponent of the theory of the expanding universe. Hoyle finds that writing science fiction (Ossian's Ride, The Black Cloud) is a "very useful relaxation" from work on his 15-year opus on astrophysics. Readers may find both interesting and irritating some Hoylean attitudes toward the U.S. role in the West: in debates with the U.S. commanding general in Britain, his British opponents give shrugs of "sophisticated impatience," and feel the frustrations of Greeks arguing with a Roman. Says one Cabinet minister complacently to the general: "I'm sure we all seem anarchistic to you because we haven't got drilled minds."

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