John Elliot (1) (1918–1997)

Set on earth, this aged novel has a great similarity to Ian Fleming's and John Buchan's spy fiction stories. Not very scientific, but adventurous and easy to read. The scientists based in Scotland had built a computer using instructions from Andromeda, and created a humanoid. One of the scientists thought these could be a malicious intent by Andromeda to destroy earth's civilization so he destroyed the computer and ran away with the humanoid, ending up in Azaran...the seas became infected with a bacteria which caused oxygen in the atmosphere to be reduced...some political power-struggles and coup d'etat...… (meer)

Andromeda Breakthrough continues on the story from A for Andromeda, we commence with the main characters believing the alien designed computer has been destroyed. However shortly thereafter John Fleming and Andromeda are kidnapped by the secretive Intel cooperative and made to work on their version of the alien designed computer which they constructed in secret in the fictitious middle eastern country of Azaran.

The story itself I felt lacked some of the pizzazz of A for Andromeda, certainly the absence of man vs mystery forces story line that formed such a central part of the former meant the amount of material the book had to work with was substantially less. Whilst such does re-emerge a little in the latter half of the book when it becomes apparent a biological contaminant has escaped from the initial testing ground I didn't find the narrative as compelling as the earlier battle of John vs computer we saw in the former.

Overall, it was a decent story, continued the Andromeda world a little more and did make for an enjoyable read even if not quite up to the standard set in the first book. Still worth reading if you enjoyed the first in my opinion.… (meer)