David A. Harding
Tuesday, 29 May 2007
Contact by Carl Sagan out of 5 stars
Contact is a two decade old book about first contact originally written by the famous space exploration advocate Carl Sagan as a movie screenplay. The book, after Sagan died, was made into a movie. In the book, thinking about another book/movie combination, the main character thinks, ``The book was better than the movie.'' I think the same applies to Contact.
The book is set in the near future, but since the book was written in the near past, the near future is now. Sagan imagined we'd have a small permanent population in space, a radio array dedicated to SETI (80% SETI, 20% other radiotelescopy work), devices that filtered out commercials on TV, legalised cannabis consumption, and restrictive laws (and court judgements) about new technology. He also didn't imagine the fall of the Soviet Union, which plays a large part in this book.
In Contact, science, politics, and religion intermingle in the same way they do in real life. The feeling of realism is profound in the first half of the book. The second half of the book is more speculative and no less enjoyable. On instantaneous travel between stars, Sagan mentions causality as a problem, and Contact becomes the earliest science fiction book I know of to mention causality. Contact is also rare in science fiction (at least what I've read) in that neither aliens or humans exploit the other.
Sagan also wrote into Contact an occasionally thick religious dialouge. I think this is where the movie mangles the ideas of the book. Asking for a god that is more than an idol, Scientist Sagan lays down criteria for proving god exists and is great. And he does it profoundly, in a way that I will never forget.
I enjoyed Contact very much.