Take a photo of a barcode or cover
This is one of my all-time favorite movies, viewed dozens of times. I've always been reluctant to read this book, for fear that it would be disappointing. I dare say, it might even be slightly better than the movie. The story is essentially the same--brilliant female astronomer pooh-poohs the naysayers and "wastes" her promising career on scanning the cosmos for communications from extraterrestrial life, then shuts them all up by discovering an unmistakable message from an intelligent source. Many details are different from the movie--her family, her relationship with the religious leader Palmer Joss, the details of the Machine, the results of the voyage--but for good reasons. You could see how the storyline of the movie had to be changed to accommodate the general public by making it more accessible and sensational, but it was done in a good way (Sagan, as an advisor for the movie, wouldn't have had it any other way). The book is more subdued, matter-of-fact, more realistic. It focuses less on Ellie's personal experience, and more on the world's reaction to the Message from space--the opposition to and concerns about the machine; the financial and political struggle involved in shouldering such a massive project; how such an event would change people's worldviews. I also love Ellie's arguments about religion, and musings about how different another civilization would be from us if it were millions of years ahead of us. And the ending...digging so much deeper into the possibilities that would arise from communicating with another civilization, and giving Ellie a much more satisfying and concrete answer to her lifelong questions.
And to end, a bit of a spoiler, but a detail has been nagging me (don't read ahead if you don't want to be tantalized): they said the Five brought back no evidence, but what of the sand found in the dodec? Wouldn't an isotopic analysis show that it was not from Earth? I kept waiting for that to resolve all of their problems, but no.
And to end, a bit of a spoiler, but a detail has been nagging me (don't read ahead if you don't want to be tantalized): they said the Five brought back no evidence, but what of the sand found in the dodec? Wouldn't an isotopic analysis show that it was not from Earth? I kept waiting for that to resolve all of their problems, but no.