ET doesn't always have to come on a ship... A For Andromeda is the classic of British science fiction in which First Contact is via a complex message from the stars. The remote aliens send a blueprint and the gullible and hawkish military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned only a year before Andromeda was published can't wait to build it.
That, of course, leads to further challenges and problems which the combination of super-scientist Hoyle and scriptwriter Elliot handle very well. The book is of its time but the questions it asks and poses its characters are timeless. The science, thanks to Hoyle, is as it stood in 1962. So is the fiction, with British women just starting to emerge from the home into science. Interestingly, the stable characters here - Judy Adamson the security specialist, Madeleine Dawnay the super-scientist, and Andromeda herself - are all women. The computer-whiz John Fleming is unmistakably Hoyle, the truculent big brain who most times turned out to be right in the end. The two research bases, Bouldershaw and Thorness are almost certainly Jodrell Bank and Windscale-Sellafield.
Yes, there's an element of the formulaic about A For Andromeda, but the ending caught me by surprise.
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