Contact

The much missed Carl Sagan, a wise and comforting voice in a world of chaos, was one of the great science communicators. His TV series Cosmos was a landmark and helped put planet Earth in perspective in relation to the vast universe beyond our solar system. Contact is his only novel and is a hard Science Fiction novel addressing a very big idea: contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.

Sagan's protagonist is radio astronomer Ellie Arroway, a driven, brilliant scientist in charge of the Argus project, searching the skies for a message from the stars. Just at the point where there are rumblings of discontent at the use of the radio telescopes for this purpose, the Message appears and the world starts listening. All over the planet radio telescopes are pointed at the star Vega, where the Message seems to be coming from. It's a global effort, both to capture the transmission and decode it.

Sagan's knowledge of the science involved comes across very well, communicating very complex ideas in a way that the ordinary man or woman can understand. It's here that the writing is instinctive, effortless. It's the character stuff where the book starts to go awry. Ellie is emotionally closed down but we never really get under her skin, never really get to the bottom of her character. She's there to drive the plot, our eyes and ears an the greatest mission mankind has ever undertaken. The other characters are all a bit clichéd, a bit cardboard, there to represent different arguments, different points of view: the religious fundamentalist, the decadent businessman, the sceptical politician, the rival scientist.

But despite these misgivings Contact is a very readable book and holds some very big concepts within its chapters. The Message is decrypted, and reveals plans for a Machine, which is built (not without some trouble along the way) at huge expense and the last third of the book deals with what that Machine is for. Sagan addresses our place in the universe, the nature of God, our need to start acting as one planet, not a disparate set of countries, races and religions. It's a message that still goes unheard by the great and good.

Contact is a good first novel and it's a shame that he didn't write more fiction. It would have been good to follow his imagination into the stars and beyond.

Very well written, a love story about science. However, I like a good plot, and this book is just about what it says: the events leading up to mankind first contact with an alien race.

The story is told through the main character, a woman who overcomes the prejudices of a men dominated field of astronomy and becomes the leader of the SETI program. With the help of a new kind of radioscope she helped to develop, in the imminence of the cancellation of her work, she peaks up a signal, that turned out to be a message coming from a far away galaxy in space.

There is a lot of praise for science and scientific achievements through the story.