Contact - Carl Sagan

   1985; 374 pages.  New Author? : Yes, at least since the creation of this blog.  Genres : First Contact Sci-Fi; Hard Science Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    Let’s suppose Intelligent Life exists in the Universe somewhere besides here on Earth.  How would we know?

 

    Well, we can look through telescopes at bright lights and hope to see some sort of “intelligent transmission”, although I’m not sure what that would be.  Is there anything that travels at the speed of light, besides light, of course?  Why yes, there is!  Radio waves.

 

    But radio waves come in all sorts of different wavelengths.  How can we tell which particular one an Extra Terrestrial would use to send out a signal?  And how would they transform a radio wave into a message someone on another planet would understand?

 

    That’s what Ellie Arroway has been working on for quite some time.  On taxpayers’ money.  And so far, she hasn’t found diddley squat of any intelligence via radio waves, on any wavelength, from any of the thousands of stars that’s she’s pointed her radio telescope at.

 

    Maybe we are alone in the Universe.

 

What’s To Like...

    Contact is divided into three parts, namely:

Part 1: The Message (chapters 1-9)

Part 2: The Machine (chapters 10-18)

Part 3: The Galaxy (chapters 19-24)

    Contact is a work of the “Hard Science Fiction” genre.  Carl Sagan makes an in-depth examination of how we Earthlings would (sometimes as opposed to “should”) react to finding out we aren’t alone in the Universe.

 

    The Message postulates that the most-likely means of initial contact is receiving radio signals from Outer Space.  Logical, but how do we figure out how to decode those transmissions?  The Machine theorizes that the Message gives us instructions on how to build a transport machine.  Fine, but do we have the materials and technology to build it, and dare we test it out before firing it up?  The Galaxy invites five Earthlings to sit down in the transport machine and enjoy the ride to intergalactic parts unknown.  Awesome, but are we sure we built it correctly, how do we choose who goes, and what if those ETs just want five specimens to dissect and study?

 

    The character development is superb.  Ellie is the protagonist, of course, so we expect she’ll be one of the Five selected to take the interstellar voyage.  But the other four in the group are richly developed as well, each having their own discrete traits.  Ditto for a host of secondary characters, including a number of government officials who are less than thrilled about this expensive space travel project (what if it doesn’t work?), and a fundamentalist preacher and a televangelist who are worried that God Himself, or even Satan, is the Entity behind those radio waves.

 

    Things build to a great ending, which is simultaneously cynical, revelatory, sad, and ingenious.  To give details would entail spoilers, which we eschew here.  Things close with a genealogical surprise twist for Ellie, which might sound irrelevant but explains a lot of the details in her life.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Samizdat (n.) : the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state.

Others: Armillary Sphere; (n.); Chiliasm (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 6,428 ratings and 687 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.15/5 based on 148,202 ratings and 5,016 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Now the pulses were washing against a warm world, blue and white, spinning against the backdrop of the stars.

    There was life on this world, extravagant in its numbers and variety.  There were jumping spiders at the chilly tops of the highest mountains and sulfur-eating worms in hot vents gushing up through ridges on the ocean floors.  There were beings that could live only in concentrated sulfuric acid, and beings that were destroyed by concentrated sulfuric acid; organisms that were poisoned by oxygen, and organisms that could survive only in oxygen, that actually breathed the stuff.  (pg. 51)

 

    How much better if a few of your cells could be preserved.  Real living cells, with the DNA intact.  He visualized a corporation that would, for a healthy fee, freeze a little of your epithelial tissue and orbit it high—well above the Van Allen belts, maybe even higher than geosynchronous orbit.  No reason to die first.  Do it now, while it’s on your mind.  Then, at least, alien molecular biologists—or their terrestrial counterparts of the far future—could reconstruct you, clone you, more or less from scratch.  You would rub your eyes, stretch, and wake up in the year ten million.  (pg. 340)

 

“The Earth is an object lesson for the apprentice gods.”  (pg. 247)

    There’s a smidgen of cusswords in Contact.  I counted four of them in the first 25%, all of which were of the “milder” ilk.  I don’t recall anything that I’d label an “adult situation”.

 

    Some reviewers felt the “science versus religion” angle was overplayed in the text.  They have a point, but frankly, I think Carl Sagan accurately anticipates the religious response.  Life on other worlds, in other solar systems and other galaxies, is hard to factor into spiritual dogma.

 

    The pacing felt slow in the first two section, but keep in mind their subject matter—decoding radio pulses and building a spaceship—is highly technical by nature.  You don’t want any thrills-&-spills to take place during those phases.  The “first contact” stage also felt rather anticlimactic.

 

    But hey, if I were one of the five human space envoys, I'd hope the initial contact with Extraterrestrials was a slow-paced, peaceful affair.  A “Star Wars” scenario, while exciting to read about, would not be a promising introduction to alien species.  I don’t want to come face-to-face with a Stormtrooper, no matter how bad of a shot he is.

 

    Overall, I found Contact to be a thought-provoking work, grounded in real science and logical in presenting one possible way that humanity would react to a “We Are Not Alone” scenario.  If you don’t get bored during the “Message” and “Machine” sections, you’re in for a fantastic read in the final section, “Galaxy”.

 

    8 Stars.  One last thing.  Somehow, both Hydrofluoric Acid and Laetrile make it into Contact’s storyline.  I worked for a company who manufactured HF acid for many years, and had a moonlighting venture to develop a manufacturing process for Laetrile.  Who would've thought that Extraterrestrials are familiar with, and make use of, both these compounds?