Product Description

In December, 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history. Who -- or what -- is out there?

In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he predicts its future -- and our own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122926 in Books
• Published on: 1985-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

Amazon.com Review
It is December 1999, the dawn of the millennium, and a team of international scientists is poised for the most fantastic adventure in human history. After years of scanning the galaxy for signs of somebody or something else, this team believes they've found a message from an intelligent source--and they travel deep into space to meet it. Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sagan injects Contact, his prophetic adventure story, with scientific details that make it utterly believable. It is a Cold War era novel that parlays the nuclear paranoia of the time into exquisitely wrought tension among the various countries involved. Sagan meditates on science, religion, and government--the elements that define society--and looks to their impact on and role in the future. His ability to pack an exciting read with such rich content is an unusual talent that makes Contact a modern sci-fi classic.

From Publishers Weekly
Who could be better qualified than the author of the highly successful Cosmos to turn the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, and humankind's first contact with it, into imaginative reality? This is precisely what Sagan does in this eagerly awaited and, as it turns out, engrossing first novel. The basic plot is very simple. A worldwide system of radio telescopes, in the charge of brilliant astrophysicist Ellie Arroway, picks up a "Message" from outer space. Ellie is instrumental in decoding the message and building the "Machine" for which it gives instructions (despite stiff opposition from religious fundamentalists and those scientists and politicians who fear it may be a Trojan Horse). Then she and fellow members of a small multinational team board the machine, take a startling trip into outer spaceand on their return must convince the scientific community that they are not the perpetrators of a hoax. Sagan's characters, mostly scientists, are credible without being memorable, and he supplies a love interest that is less than compelling. However, his informed and dramatically enacted speculations into the mysteries of the universe, taken to the point where science and religion touch, make his story an exciting intellectual adventure and science fiction of a high order. First serial to Discover Magazine; BOMC selection. Foreign rights: S & S. October 1
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
``There's wonder and awe enough in the real world,'' is the credo of Ellie Arroway, a renowned radio astronomer. Since she's also a guiding light in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, that world expands into the realm of Sagan's scientific speculations. Ellie discovers a mathematically encoded message that proves to hold blueprints for a machine to convey us to Vega, its origin. How Sagan develops this scientific event, and its political/religious effectsas we learn our true place among the starsis the engrossing fun here. His novelistic attempt to express Ellie's philosophy, however, is too artless. Sagan intends a scientific mysticism that weds the cosmic and personal (Ellie's strained family relations), but can only manage to sound like pi in the sky in your own backyard. Still, the ideas are stimulating, and Contact makes for entertaining reading. BOMC main selection. Jeff Clark, SUNY Coll. at Old Westbury, Lib.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Sagan does it agan.
Like most of his work, Sagan puts across the sciences and professions of astronomy and astrophysics across for the lay reader with great ability and an obvious feeling for his subject and his readers. I enjoyed the humanness of his characters, the realities of their work world, and the science in which they were involved. I read the book before watching the video and felt, as I usually do, that the book was better. One can always create more side plots and develop to a greater extent the individual characters in a volume of so many pages, which the reader can set aside at will and return to as needed. The director must stick to a central theme and be constantly mindful of budgetary constraints. I also thought the relationship of the heroine with her father was more intense and surprising in the book than in the movie.

A flawless reading of an excellent book
The only science fiction novel by a prominent astronomer who was the late twentieth century's foremost popularizer of science was bound to be something special, and Carl Sagan's "Contact" certainly is. No other science fiction novel is quite like it in its thrilling realism; one can easily believe that a sequence of events similar to that in the book could begin taking place tomorrow. The book is filled with a plethora of wonderful plot twists, fascinating details of scientific fact and speculation, and unexpected bits of characterization that only Sagan could have thought to include. Sagan, who apparently considered himself a "spiritual agnostic," explored religious as well as scientific issues in this work, and the result is arguably heretical if seen from a traditional religious standpoint -- but not heretical in the specific way a reader might initially expect. Indeed, the story's climactic twist makes "Contact" into a twentieth-century equivalent of "Paradise Lost" -- a work which, while subtly heretical, is one of the most awe-inspiringly religious books ever written.

Jodie Foster's reading of "Contact" on this recording is absolutely superb. She differentiates between the voices of all the characters and her own voice as narrator -- even her voice for Ellie Arroway, the character she played in the movie of "Contact," is a subtly more energetic and characterful version of her normal voice. Foster also employs about seven different accents (counting her usual American accent) in the course of the recording, moving effortlessly from one to another when characters from several different countries have conversations. At one point, when Sagan's text describes a character as having an almost (but not quite) non-existent Russian accent, Foster even manages to produce exactly that! She also evokes all the varying moods of the story, conveying Sagan's sense of awe and wonder at the beauty and majesty of the universe. Foster's performance on this recording is probably the best reading of a book which I have ever heard.

I listened to this recording over several nights, and was in suspense from one night to the next, wondering what would happen next. This superb example of the intelligence and artistry of Carl Sagan and Jodie Foster is highly recommended. Six out of five stars.

Incredible
I read this book shortly after I saw the movie, just after completing my sophomore year in high school. The book went much more in depth than the movie; something that usually makes books better than the movies that are based on them; which is true in this case.

If you can understand the complex math and science that is interwoven into the chapters (I didn't, but I read it anyway :) you'll probably enjoy it that much more. Otherwise I would have rated it five stars. A must for for the obsessive sci-fi reader (such as myself :).