| Contact | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Carl Sagan |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date | September 1985 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 432 pp |
| ISBN | 0-671-43400-4 |
| OCLC Number | 12344811 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 19 |
| LC Classification | PS3569.A287 C6 1985 |
Contact is a science fiction novel written by Carl Sagan and published in 1985. It deals with the theme of contact between humanity and a more technologically advanced, extraterrestrial life form. It ranked No. 7 on the 1985 U.S. bestseller list.
The novel originated as a screenplay in 1979; when development of the film stalled, Sagan decided to convert the stalled film into a novel. The film concept was subsequently revived and eventually released in 1997 as the film Contact starring Jodie Foster.
Contents |
Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway is the director of "Project Argus," in which scores of radio telescopes in New Mexico have been dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
Before long, the project does, indeed, discover the first confirmed communication from extraterrestrial beings, a repeating series of the first 261 prime numbers (a sequence of prime numbers is a commonly predicted first message from alien intelligence, since mathematics is considered a "universal language," and it is conjectured that algorithms that produce successive prime numbers are sufficiently complicated so as to require intelligence to implement them). Further analysis reveals that a second message is contained in polarization modulation of the signal. The second message is a retransmission of Earth's first television signal broadcast powerful enough to escape the ionosphere and be received in interstellar space; in this case, Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.[1] A third message is discovered containing over 30,000 pages describing plans for a machine that appears to be a kind of highly advanced vehicle, with seats for five human beings. But they cannot understand the third message until they find the fourth message, a primer hidden in phase modulation.[2] The primer allows them to translate the alien language to human language.
Ultimately, a machine is successfully built and activated, transporting five passengers – including Ellie – through a series of wormholes to a place near the center of the Milky Way galaxy, where they meet the senders in the guise of persons significant in the lives of the travelers, whether living or dead. Some of the travelers' questions are answered by the senders, with the senders suggesting a message is contained within one of the transcendental numbers. Upon returning to Earth, the passengers discover that what seemed like many hours to them passed by in only 20 minutes on Earth, and that all their video footage has been erased, presumably by the time changing magnetic fields they were exposed to inside of the wormholes. They are left with no proof of their stories and are accused of fabrication.
Thus, though Ellie has traveled across the galaxy and actually encountered extraterrestrial beings, she cannot prove it. The government officials deduce an international conspiracy, blaming the world's richest man in an attempt to perpetuate himself, embarrass the government and get lucrative deals from the machine consortium's multi-trillion-dollar project.
The message is claimed to be a fabrication from a secret artificial man-made satellite(s) that cannot be traced, because the message stopped once the machine was activated, a feat that is impossible unless one considers time travel feasible, and Ellie and other scientists are implicated.
Ellie, a lifelong religious skeptic, finds herself asking the world to take a leap of faith and believe what she and the others say happened to them. She finds only one person willing to take that leap: Palmer Joss, a minister introduced early in the book.
In a kind of postscript chapter, Ellie, acting upon a suggestion by the senders of the message, works on a program which computes the digits of pi to record lengths in different bases. Very far from the decimal point (1020) and in base 11, it finds that a special pattern does exist when the numbers stop varying randomly and start producing 1s and 0s in a very long string. The string's length is the product of 11 prime numbers. The 1s and 0s when organized as a square of specific dimensions form a rasterized circle.
The extraterrestrials suggest that this is a signature incorporated into the Universe itself. Yet the extraterrestrials are just as ignorant to its meaning as Ellie, as it could be still some sort of a statistical anomaly. They also make reference to older artifacts built from space time itself (namely the wormhole transit system) abandoned by a prior civilization. A line in the book suggests that the image is a foretaste of deeper marvels hidden even further within pi. This new pursuit becomes analogous to SETI; it is another search for meaningful signals in apparent noise.
Some plot points and characters were omitted from the film version, while others were added.
In 1981, Simon & Schuster gave Sagan a $2 million advance on the novel. At the time, "the advance was the largest ever made for a book that had not yet been written."[3]
The first printing was 265,000 copies. In the first two years it sold 1,700,000 copies. It was a main selection of Book-of-the-Month-Club.[4]
Sagan named the novel's protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, after two people: Eleanor Roosevelt, a "personal hero" of Sagan's wife, and Voltaire, whose last name was Arouet.[3]
The novel won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 1986.
As the novel progresses into the future, relative to the time of writing, Sagan mentions various fictitious events. In particular, a Mars Rover mission was mentioned where one of two rovers "become mired in a drifting dune".[5] This unintended prediction became reality when NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit became stuck on May 1, 2009.
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