The Andromeda Evolution

I finished this book. It's a tough one to recommend but it just reaches the threshold of a decent time-waster.

Although the book screams "Michael Crichton" in big red letters at the top of the cover, the book is co-written by a couple authors I've never heard of. The are barely competent.

But you can't hate everything just because the tone and tenor of this book reflects the Zeitgeist of the Times. Or maybe you can. This book was clearly written with a movie in mind. You could see the de rigueur Hollywoodized scenes pop up on every other page. Not that a few of them (very few) weren't good gimmicks or plot twists. But most were pretty onerous.

But those are small faults next to this books main fault: Almost at every level, at every time, at every place, the plot is completely illogical or implausible. And I don't mean that an extra-terrestrial bug of some kind is a loopy idea. That's very plausible sci-fi.

However, this book is a deluge of Things That Don't Make Sense. Early on, not so bad. Later on you are swamped by them. And I'm not talking about nit-picky things. I'm talking about the whole damn structure of the book, fine points and large points.

Take this one example (spoiler alert, but you're not going to read this anyway): A chick in the International Space Station who is on the Wildfire Team (the team that monitors any threats from the Andromeda Strain) surreptitiously reprograms the extraterrestrial bug so that it (what for it) builds an entire space elevator (of the type seen in Arthur C. Clarke's mostly excellent The Fountains of Paradise).

You can't just build something that complex just because you can imagine it. Something like that is enormously complex and would need to be tested, tested, tested. But, of course, she's just a brilliant chick and the elevator works perfectly first time. How you would program that into a virus is beyond me...and certainly beyond even liberal notions of sci-fi plausibility.

And the above is the central plot of the story. But this implausible wreck of an idea might be barely noticed by some because of the hundreds (at least) of other stupid or implausible plot devices.

All of this is so bad, I won't even bother downgrading for the politically correct and environmental wacko themes in it. Oh, if only that was my complaint.

All I can surmise is that these mundane yutes who grow up programmed with the idea that men can be women (and vice versa) have lost their grip on reality. Sci-fi can and should take some liberties with things. I don't at all expect even 75% plausibility. It's a story, after all. But this is such a wreck of illogical thinking that you have to believe that the beta males who write this kind of garbage may be reality-challenged. Even for sci-fi.