The alien was eventually revealed to be a creature or intelligence that was shown as static machine or habitat and fed by pipes on its planet.

Hoyle and Elliot's novelisation was published by Harper and Row in 1964, as Andromeda Breakthrough by arrangement with the BBC, and paperback editions followed from Fawcett World Library (1965) in USA and Corgi (1966) in Britain.

Merril concluded that the clichéd elements "provide a reasonably amusing background to a genuinely intriguing scientific puzzle.

Hoyle and Elliot published this novel in 1964 and its predecessor “A for Andromeda” in 1962 at a time when the fundamental importance of the biological information encoded in DNA was in the early stages of becoming understood.

In the real world of today, whole genomes can actually be built from chemically synthesized DNA sequences, and when inserted into a receptive cellular environment can be brought to life to create a novel organism (see for example Hutchinson et al.[2]).