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A review by pavanayi
Contact by Carl Sagan
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Growing up in the nineties, I had no idea about the TV show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Most of my time staring at the idiot box was spent watching old science fiction shows such as either Star Trek or Lost in Space, originally aired in the US in the late sixties. Come to think of it, cable TV landed in my hometown in 1995, just two years before the fictional world of 1997 in which the story of Lost in Space was set.
The first time I came across Carl Sagan’s work was in my final year of postgraduation when I chanced upon the famous excerpt from his book, the Pale Blue Dot in the form of a YouTube video. The video in question is still there on YouTube and has rightfully garnered about eight million views. It still gives me goosebumps. Anyways, at the time, I had no idea that the passage was from a book. In fact, at that time, I had never heard of Carl Sagan as well.
So, here is the premise of the novel.
The protagonist, Ellie and her team conducting SETI research detect a mysterious radio signal coming from the star Vega, about 25 light-years from Earth. Upon decoding it, they discover it contains a sequence of prime numbers — a clear indication of an intelligent origin. However, when decoded, they realize that it is a retransmission of Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Olympic speech. Their best guess is that it is the first TV signal strong enough to escape the earth’s ionosphere. Later, though, they realize that the second round of messages includes instructions for building a complex machine.
This discovery sparks a global scientific, political, and philosophical upheaval. Nations debate whether to build the machine, religious groups protest, and world governments scramble for control. However, eventually, a multinational effort constructs the device.
Unlike the movie, in which Jodie Foster who plays Ellie is the sole traveller in the machine, in the book, Ellie is one of the five who eventually travel on the machine. Out of the five, one is a female scientist from India, a microbiologist named Devi Sukhavati, whose late husband is of the oppressed caste. Sagan uses her fellow travellers, Devi, the Nigerian Physicist Abonnema Eda and the Chinese archaeologist Xi Qiaomu to sprinkle a bit of religious philosophy of the world’s major religions.
I watched the movie almost two decades ago and so I am not sure if my memory is playing games with me, but I think, some of the main characters such as, the billionaire Bill Hadden, who help them build the machine in Hokkaido and decode part of the message, Ken der Heer, the US Presidential Science Advisor with whom Ellie is in a relationship and Ellie’s Russian colleague, Vaygay Lunacharsky, who helps her monitor the signal and is her fellow traveller in the machine are not there in the movie.
I digress! I am always worried when I read/watch a fictional piece with speculative science. Often, it is reduced to science vs. religion and ends up with the lame old, one-doesn’t-know-so-how-can-one-tell-for-sure if god exists. Contact thankfully partially steers away from this and instead devotes a good portion of the book in doing what it promised, i.e. speculative-Sciencing, in dealing with how humans cope with loss and the philosophical reflections of our place in the cosmos when confronted with an intelligent life form!
Originally published https://medium.com/@pavanayi/014-contact-by-carl-sagan-books-i-read-in-2025-70838c17b1bd
The first time I came across Carl Sagan’s work was in my final year of postgraduation when I chanced upon the famous excerpt from his book, the Pale Blue Dot in the form of a YouTube video. The video in question is still there on YouTube and has rightfully garnered about eight million views. It still gives me goosebumps. Anyways, at the time, I had no idea that the passage was from a book. In fact, at that time, I had never heard of Carl Sagan as well.
So, here is the premise of the novel.
The protagonist, Ellie and her team conducting SETI research detect a mysterious radio signal coming from the star Vega, about 25 light-years from Earth. Upon decoding it, they discover it contains a sequence of prime numbers — a clear indication of an intelligent origin. However, when decoded, they realize that it is a retransmission of Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Olympic speech. Their best guess is that it is the first TV signal strong enough to escape the earth’s ionosphere. Later, though, they realize that the second round of messages includes instructions for building a complex machine.
This discovery sparks a global scientific, political, and philosophical upheaval. Nations debate whether to build the machine, religious groups protest, and world governments scramble for control. However, eventually, a multinational effort constructs the device.
Unlike the movie, in which Jodie Foster who plays Ellie is the sole traveller in the machine, in the book, Ellie is one of the five who eventually travel on the machine. Out of the five, one is a female scientist from India, a microbiologist named Devi Sukhavati, whose late husband is of the oppressed caste. Sagan uses her fellow travellers, Devi, the Nigerian Physicist Abonnema Eda and the Chinese archaeologist Xi Qiaomu to sprinkle a bit of religious philosophy of the world’s major religions.
I watched the movie almost two decades ago and so I am not sure if my memory is playing games with me, but I think, some of the main characters such as, the billionaire Bill Hadden, who help them build the machine in Hokkaido and decode part of the message, Ken der Heer, the US Presidential Science Advisor with whom Ellie is in a relationship and Ellie’s Russian colleague, Vaygay Lunacharsky, who helps her monitor the signal and is her fellow traveller in the machine are not there in the movie.
I digress! I am always worried when I read/watch a fictional piece with speculative science. Often, it is reduced to science vs. religion and ends up with the lame old, one-doesn’t-know-so-how-can-one-tell-for-sure if god exists. Contact thankfully partially steers away from this and instead devotes a good portion of the book in doing what it promised, i.e. speculative-Sciencing, in dealing with how humans cope with loss and the philosophical reflections of our place in the cosmos when confronted with an intelligent life form!
Originally published https://medium.com/@pavanayi/014-contact-by-carl-sagan-books-i-read-in-2025-70838c17b1bd