Finished reading Carl Sagan’s only novel,
Contact, published as hard science fiction in 1985, and the basis for its 1997 film version.
After earning her doctorate in radio astronomy, Ellie opts for a riskier career path by taking the reigns of a SETI project (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence), placing her on the fringe of the scientific community. Ellie’s project eventually detects radio signals aimed at earth from Vega, an especially bright star in the northern skies. The signals consist of prime numbers, and once Ellie is able to bring aboard interest from fellow scientists, its sequences of numbers are decoded to reveal broadcasts of the earliest television footage dating back to the 1930s. Ellie and her fellow scientists interpret this as another interstellar world acknowledging mutually intelligent life on Earth. Further signal decoding ultimately reveals extensive instructions for constructing an advanced machine of unknown purpose.
Contact leans heavily into the basis of its hard science, speculating less on the potential natures and aims of extraterrestrials and focusing more on how advanced extraterrestrial life, after detecting intelligent life, would realistically go about contacting Earth by using mathematics as a universal language. As with his nonfiction books, Sagan makes the more difficult scientific concepts of his content digestible for a typical reader. Though the narrative buildup is drawn out, with construction of the machine taking years, its slog is realistic to a project like this inexorably slowed by bureaucracy, the limited pace of technological advancement, and moral opposition. And though, outside of Ellie, the novel’s characters are cardboard cutouts for voicing their agendas – religious opposition, Soviet competition, political hijacking, and Billionaires buying their way into the design phase – this is typical of older science fiction in which characters are projections of competing ideas relating to the featured science.
Contact’s final payoff is worth it.
