Contact by Carl Sagan
November 23rd 2006 09:09
Probably, Carl Sagan was himself a bit doubtful whether what he wrote counts as a novel, so he's added A Novel to Contact, to remind people that his book is supposed to be a novel. Sagan had that popular glamour some science boys seem to acquire and this rubs off on the novel. Otherwise there is plenty little to recommend.
A female astronomer recognizes a signal coming from Vega, the closest star system to earth. This could be the extra-terrestrial signal they were all looking for and it takes ages to decode it but once done, it appears that the aliens want us to build a machine to go visit them and they have sent us the instructions.
The novel details the global hullabaloo that rises over this news and the long painful process of constructing the machine. The woman has male rivals of course and she will be bypassed at every step of the way. But once the offending rival is cleared out of the way by a religious maniac, it is our heroine’s chance to plunge in.
Sagan can’t plot and there are probably as much twists and turns in this novel as there are in a pitchfork. It is at best a quasi-realist speculation on what might happen in the world if we received anything as like SETI. But, once the plunge is made and the heroine steps onto the machine, the novel even ceases to be that. It becomes an elaborate and rather silly epistemological trap for faith issues just as the whole SETI thing might be an elaborate aand rather silly hoax.
I read this novel after I saw the movie and one can only wonder at the pruning job the scriptwriters did. Strictly avoidable.
Contact by Carl Sagan
A female astronomer recognizes a signal coming from Vega, the closest star system to earth. This could be the extra-terrestrial signal they were all looking for and it takes ages to decode it but once done, it appears that the aliens want us to build a machine to go visit them and they have sent us the instructions.
The novel details the global hullabaloo that rises over this news and the long painful process of constructing the machine. The woman has male rivals of course and she will be bypassed at every step of the way. But once the offending rival is cleared out of the way by a religious maniac, it is our heroine’s chance to plunge in.
Sagan can’t plot and there are probably as much twists and turns in this novel as there are in a pitchfork. It is at best a quasi-realist speculation on what might happen in the world if we received anything as like SETI. But, once the plunge is made and the heroine steps onto the machine, the novel even ceases to be that. It becomes an elaborate and rather silly epistemological trap for faith issues just as the whole SETI thing might be an elaborate aand rather silly hoax.
I read this novel after I saw the movie and one can only wonder at the pruning job the scriptwriters did. Strictly avoidable.
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