Sagan Contact
Chieko Boteler
Contact is a 1985 hard science fiction novel by American scientist Carl Sagan. 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 only full work of fiction published by Sagan, the novel originated as a screenplay by Sagan and Ann Druyan (whom he later married) 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.
As a child, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway displays a strong aptitude for science and mathematics. Dissatisfied with a school lesson, she goes to the library to convince herself that pi is transcendental. In sixth grade, her father Theodore ("Ted") dies. John Staughton, her new stepfather, does not show as much support for her interests. Ellie refuses to accept him as a family member and believes her mother only remarried out of weakness.
After graduating from Harvard University, Ellie receives a doctorate from Caltech supervised by David Drumlin, a well-known radio astronomer. She becomes the director of "Project Argus", a radio telescope array in New Mexico dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). This puts her at odds with most of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who tries to have the funding to SETI cut off. The project eventually discovers a signal containing a series of prime numbers coming from the Vega system, 26 light years away.[a][b] Further analysis reveals information in the polarization modulation of the signal: a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the first television signal powerful enough to escape Earth's ionosphere.[1]
The President of the United States meets with Ellie to discuss the implications of the first confirmed communication from extraterrestrial beings. Ellie begins a relationship with Presidential Science Advisor Ken der Heer. With the help of her Soviet colleague Vaygay Lunacharsky, Ellie manages to set up redundant monitoring of the signal so that a telescope remains pointed at Vega at all times. A third message is discovered describing plans for an advanced machine. With no way of decoding the 30,000 pages, SETI scientists surmise that there must be a primer that they have missed.
At the President's insistence, Ellie agrees to meet with two religious leaders, Billy Jo Rankin and Palmer Joss. A lifelong religious skeptic, Ellie tries to convince Joss of her faith in science by standing near a heavy Foucault pendulum and trusting that its amplitude will not increase. Although dismissing Rankin's outbursts, Ellie is intrigued by Joss's worldview. Shortly after, Ellie travels to Paris to discuss the Machine with a newly formed consortium. The participants agree that the Machine is a dodecahedron-shaped vehicle with five seats. At the conference, Ellie meets Devi Sukhavati, a doctor who left India to marry the man she loved, only to lose him to illness a year later. The final piece of the message is discovered when S. R. Hadden, a billionaire in high-tech industries with an obsessive interest in the concept of immortality, suggests that Ellie check for phase modulation. This reveals the primer, thus allowing construction of the Machine to begin.
The American and Soviet governments enter a race to construct identical copies of the Machine. As errors in the Soviet project are discovered, the American Machine becomes the only option. Ellie applies to be one of the five passengers, but her spot is given to David Drumlin instead. Despite heavy security, a group of extremists manages to get a bomb into one of the fabrication plants in Wyoming. During a test of the machine, the bomb explodes, killing Drumlin and postponing completion of the Machine indefinitely. Ellie's family also suffers when her mother has a stroke, causing paralysis. John Staughton accuses Ellie of ignoring her own mother for years.
Ellie learns that S. R. Hadden has taken up residence aboard a private space station. While on board, he reveals that his company has been covertly building a third copy of the Machine in Hokkaido, Japan. The activation date is set for December 31, 1999, and Ellie, Vaygay and Devi are given three of the seats. The other two are given to Abonnema Eda, a Nigerian physicist credited with discovering the theory of everything, and Xi Qiaomu, a Chinese archaeologist and expert on the Qin dynasty. While in Japan, Ellie receives a medallion from Joss, which she carries aboard the Machine as it is activated.
Upon returning, the passengers discover that what seemed like more than a day took no time at all from Earth's perspective. All of their video footage and photos have been erased, presumably by magnetic fields in the wormholes. After seeing that Hadden is apparently dead and the transmission has somehow been stopped without a 26-year delay, government officials accuse the travellers of an international conspiracy. They blackmail Ellie and her fellow travellers into silence until more evidence can be found. Palmer Joss becomes one of the few people willing to believe her story, which she can only justify on faith. Hadden is revealed by the novel to have faked his death, instead launching himself out of the solar system on a single-man-mission with the use of advanced cryogenics, though this information is not revealed to any characters.
Sagan named the novel's protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, after two people: Eleanor Roosevelt, a "personal hero" of Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, and Voltaire, whose last name was Arouet.[3] The character is based on the real-life SETI researcher Jill Tarter.[6]
Approaching the book with these interests, I was surprised by its literary quality. It has nuanced characters, a meticulously organized plot structure, and an imaginative sensitivity to details, such as human psychology and conversation. Most books about aliens are essentially about combat and warfare (Alien, Independence Day, War of the Worlds, etc.). Contact is about a peaceful interaction with benevolent aliens, which to my mind is much more interesting because it allows you to say more about human beings in terms of how they respond. So the plot necessarily involves geopolitical, religious, and cultural dynamics, and Sagan narrates all this with realism and subtlety. It was interesting, for instance, to note the impact of contact from another civilization on prejudice and identity:
She had spent her career attempting to make contact with the most remote and alien of strangers, while in her own life she had made contact with hardly anyone at all. She had been fierce in debunking the creation myths of others, and oblivious to the lie at the core of her own. She had studied the universe all her life but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love (430).
So: I go to a leading scientific figure to learn about how scientific people look at the world. And what do I find? An astonishingly religious appeal: a story in which the hard skeptic finds the need for faith, alien life suggests a supernatural antecedent, and faraway regions of the galaxy are easier to penetrate than the human heart. Amazing!
thanks for the great comment. Yes, your emphasis on Ellie feeling a need to wait for the evidence is certainly an important point to consider. It is a great observation which I had not thought about (does Sagan say this makes her a hero, or portray her as superior to Joss in this regard? I cannot remember.)
SETI scientist Ellie Arroway, after years of searching, detects a signal from Vega that, once decoded, gives instructions for building a Machine. To do what? Travel to Vega? After a first Machine is destroyed by saboteurs, Ellie and four others become passengers on a second Machine, which takes them through wormholes to contact extraterrestrials who take the forms of people they love, and provide Ellie with a crucial clue about the nature of the universe.
This is a novel rich in ideas, including many off-hand speculations (as if Sagan were getting everything he could into this one work) that are incidental to the main story, but nonetheless fascinating.
Ellie Arroway is the director of Project Argus, a radio telescope array inthe New Mexico desert whose primary mission is SETI: the search forextra-terrestrial intelligence by scanning the skies for unexpected radiosignals. Its assignment to SETI is controversial; there are radioastronomy projects waiting, and although 25% of the telescope time isassigned to non-SETI projects, some astronomers think the SETI missionshould be scrapped and Argus fully diverted to more useful research. Thatchanges overnight when Argus picks up a signal from Vega, binary pulsesrepresenting the sequence of prime numbers.
The signal of course doesn't stop when the Earth rotates, so Ellie and herteam quickly notify every radio observatory they can get hold of tofollow the signal as it passes out of their line of sight. Before long,nearly every country with a radio telescope is involved, and Russian helpis particularly vital since they have ship-mounted equipment. The USmilitary and intelligence establishment isn't happy about this and make afew attempts to shove the genie back into the bottle and keep any furtherdiscoveries secret, without a lot of success. (Sagan did not anticipatethe end of the Cold War, and yet ironically relations with the Russians inhis version of the 1990s are warmer by far than they are today. Not thatthis makes the military types any happier.) For better or worse, makingsense of the alien signal becomes a global project.
You may be familiar with this book through its 1997 movie adaptationstarring Jodie Foster. What I didn't know before reading this book isthat it started life as a movie treatment, co-written with Ann Druyan, in1979. When the movie stalled, Sagan expanded it into a novel. (Given thethanks to Druyan in the author's note, it may not be far wrong to name heras a co-author.) If you've seen the movie, you will have a good idea ofwhat will happen, but the book gives the project a more realisticinternational scope. Ellie has colleagues carefully selected from allover the world, including for the climactic moment of the story.
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