Books: Contact By Carl Sagan (1985)

“There are two great powers and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.” –Phillip Pullman

For centuries humanity has dreamed of life and intelligence beyond the Earth; for decades scientists have searched for it in every corner of the sky; for years Project Argus, a vast, sophisticated complex of radio telescopes, has listened for a signal indicating the existence, somewhere in the universe, of extraterrestrial intelligence. Then, one afternoon, the course of human history is changed, abruptly and forever. The Message, awaited for so long, its very possibility doubted by so many, arrives. Contact has been made. Life, intelligence, someone, something beyond Earth, 26 light-years away, in the vicinity of the star Vega, is calling, beaming across space a wholly unexpected message to say that we are not - have never been - alone.

Here is another novel that has taken decades for me to read. And while I’m not sad I finally got to it, I’m somewhat conflicted over what has NOT happened in our world when this book was released in 1985, that not much has changed, especially with those whom look to space and see a future and those who want remain firmly Earth bound, believing in a God who apparently created an expanding the universe, and only populated one world among trillions with sentient life. As Ellie noted, “the universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

While The Message received from Vega is what pushes the novel forward, what Sagan has done here in Contact, is also try to explore the world of science, mixed with belief, and with an added dollop of wonder. He succeeds fairly well here, and we see humans doing what humans have done for thousands of years, which is figure out how to separate people instead of bringing them together. Yes, everyone on the planet agrees to fund the Machine that the Message sent (and while I know this book was written in the mid-1980s, I was struck how primitive computers were back then and amazed at how the sciences have made a lot of technological leaps in 33 years), but it’s still couched in some jingoistic notion that only a handful of nations can and should respond to this call from the darkness of space –even when the message seems to be directed at everyone.

As his first and only novel, though Sagan’s prose does suffer with some long-winded lectures (and he does try to see both sides of the issue, which does not always work), and the pacing is fairly torpid at times (which is typical of the classic science fiction novels of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and many others). In the end, there have been better writers who were looking to corral non-scientific readers by wrapping popcorn ideas around real scientific thoughts, but the book meanders too much and only really comes together once Ellie and rest begin their voyage (which is left up to reader to decid whether she and the others experienced some sort outer space journey or was some form of mass hallucination, or some bizarre failure of Star Trek: The Next Generations holodeck).

I need to read more of Sagan’s nonfiction work to see his undiluted ideas on science and it’s place in the world, but Contact was still a good start. 

Finally, while I don't think Sagan was a futurist, it always made me smile when he mentions something (the book is set in 1999) that did not happen, like the dismantling of the broadcast networks and the demise of The National Enquirer. Also, he missed the microprocessor age, which would made The Message sent from Vega download much faster (and while discs were still being used to store information in 1999, I don't think they were as primitive as the ones described in this novel).