I loved Contact, the motion picture, so much that I had to read this book -- and I sort of like the movie more. But they were very different. The movie was updated for the post-Cold War times, and masterfully done, I think. The drama was made more concise and the movie was really tempered well for the silver screen, and gave a lot of meat for sci-fi fans. The book, in contrast, plays out in 1999, in a world still engulfed in a cold war. The cold war itself is marginalized when humans make radio contact with a signal of apparent extraterrestrials from Vega and realize that they're not alone in the universe. Unprecedented global cooperation ensues, which is mostly threatened by religious fanaticism, but also in part by paranoid military advisers who see this as a security risk. This is a real work of sci-fi, in which Sagan tries to paint a believable vision of what making contact with an advanced civilization would be like. A lot of the book deals with the very relevant debates between science and religion/faith... and actually makes a very strong ironic twist in the end where the protagonists encounter an intergalactic faster-than-light wormhole transit system, which was built by unknown architects, and find embedded messages in indeterminate mathematical ratios, such as pi, to suggest that the physical laws of the universe have the artist's signature in them, so to speak. Musings contrast the difference between these godlike creators with the God portrayed by religion... the difference being evidence. The moral being that science is not anti-god, its just a tool to test the veracity of the God hypothesis. All that God needs to be compatible with science is evidence. A pretty exciting story all together with a lot of social commentary on human nature, faith, science, love, and politics. Very interesting debates on the human's relationships with more advanced civilizations. Sagan challenges the boundaries of what we think might be possible, and opens up a universe full of unimagined wonders.
2020-12-09 23:44
