Contact

Contact Review

Contact is Carl Sagan’s only novel, and it reads like a valediction from one of the twentieth century’s great scientific popularizers: everything he cared about — the beauty of the cosmos, the importance of evidence, the smallness of human tribalism against the scale of the universe, the possibility of transcendent experience grounded in material reality — given the concentrated form of storytelling rather than the discursive form of science writing.

Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway is a SETI researcher who has devoted her career to scanning the skies for non-terrestrial signals. When one arrives — a transmission from the star Vega containing a video of Hitler’s 1936 Olympics broadcast bounced back at us, followed by what decodes as construction plans for a mysterious machine — the political, religious, and scientific implications tear the world apart before the machine is even built. Sagan understood, writing in the early 1980s, that the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would be far less about the aliens than about us: our existing conflicts, our impulse to control, our fear of what we might learn about our own significance.

The novel’s ending has divided readers since its publication, and the film adaptation famously altered it. But in its original form it is the right ending — the only one that honors both the scientific and spiritual questions the book has been asking. Sagan was deeply interested in the relationship between religious and scientific wonder, and Contact represents his most sustained attempt to find a common ground between them: an argument that the universe itself, fully grasped, provides everything the human spirit has ever sought from faith.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Contact apart: The science is real and the politics are prescient — Sagan imagined the international tensions of a first contact message with remarkable accuracy; Ellie Arroway is one of SF’s great female scientist protagonists — her conviction and her scepticism are equally convincing; and The ending is one of the few genuinely transcendent moments in hard science fiction — scientifically rigorous and emotionally devastating simultaneously. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Contact give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Science and wonder are not enemies — Sagan argues throughout that empirical rigor opens more doors to awe than mysticism does. A civilization’s response to external contact reveals more about its own values and contradictions than about the aliens. The search for meaning — whether in religious faith or scientific investigation — is the defining human activity. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Reading Experience

Contact is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes Contact from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

The political subplots involving US-Soviet cooperation occasionally slow the narrative momentum. Some readers find the religious themes — Sagan’s attempt to reconcile science and spiritual experience — unresolved or unsatisfying. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Publication, the Film Adaptation, and Sagan’s Scientific Career

Contact was published in September 1985 — Carl Sagan’s only novel. The project began as a screenplay idea Sagan developed with producer Linda Obst in the late 1970s; after years of attempts to mount a film production failed, Sagan converted the material into a novel. The film was eventually made in 1997, directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway, Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss, and John Hurt as S.R. Hadden; it grossed $171 million worldwide.

The novel’s central mathematical conceit — that a message from an advanced civilization is hidden within the digits of pi, implying that intelligence is embedded in the mathematical structure of the universe itself — reflects Sagan’s genuine scientific engagement with the philosophy of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Sagan was co-founder, with Frank Drake, of the SETI Institute, and the novel drew on decades of his thinking about the cultural and political dimensions of first contact.

Contact won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 1986. The novel’s portrayal of the conflict between scientific rationalism and religious faith — embodied in the relationship between Ellie Arroway and Palmer Joss — was praised for its unusual willingness to present both positions with genuine sympathy rather than dismissing one as obviously wrong. Sagan died in December 1996, seven months before the film’s release.

Sagan died in December 1996, months before the July 1997 film release; the film grossed $171 million worldwide and earned Jodie Foster a Golden Globe nomination. It marked one of the few science fiction films of the era in which a female scientist is the central character and the scientific investigation is the story’s primary interest.

The Message

The signal from Vega that initiates the novel’s action is a series of prime numbers, followed by what turns out to be Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics broadcast — the first powerful enough signal to reach Vega and return. The novel’s central question — what would a genuine first contact look like from the human side, politically and personally — is Sagan’s most sustained speculative argument, and the film’s version of it is faithful to his core concerns even where it departs from his plot.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Everything Sagan brought to Cosmos — scientific rigour, humanist wonder, political intelligence — channelled into a first contact story that remains the most emotionally satisfying treatment of the scenario in science fiction.