Book Culture - Contact by Carl Sagan

I first read this book in the late 1980s and I remember being blown away by it. Reading it again nearly 40 years later I feel that my memory conned me into believing something I don't believe was true. Contact is a tough read; it's a Hard Science Fiction book - Hard as in it's 99% actual science and Hard in that it's written by an astrophysicist and not a novelist - action, adventure and descriptive nouns were probably not high on Sagan's skill set.

This is also an unbelievably tragic book and nothing at all like the Robert Zemeckis film of the late 1990s. There is no real happy ending; there isn't a kind of deus ex machina mic drop moment where the scientist is exonerated; it's almost a cosmic practical joke. In the movie it was just Jodie Foster's Ellie Arroway involved in the discovery of a message and eventual 'journey' that was focused on, the book in many ways is totally different from the film. There are some similarities, but Zemeckis took so many liberties with the adaptation and frankly he needed to because if he hadn't it would have been two hours of extreme boredom. I don't think I've struggled to finish a book as much as I did this (although despite three valiant efforts I've never finished The Lord of the Rings).

The movie takes the receiving of the message, building of the machine and apparent journey to a far away galaxy as something that happens within a relatively short time frame; the book takes place over 13 years - it's a little like The Three Body Problem in that it's actual science and actual science is not an immediate thing, nor is it exciting in an 'exciting' kind of way . There is a lot of dialogue - much of which you will struggle to understand unless you have a degree in physics - and very little 'action'. Even the sabotage of the United States version of the Machine is pretty much handled in one fleeting paragraph; if this had been written by a proper novelist that would have been an entire chapter with descriptions and counter views and it would have been exciting. In this it's almost treated as a throwaway device designed not to get in the way of the philosophical debate. There is no love affair with the President's preacher; there isn't a blind astronomer, the US government arsehole is reduced to a small part until the end when he's considerably more of an arsehole than James Wood portrayed him. It's a long slog with zero payoff.

It reminded me in many ways of the TV series For All Mankind because it now reads like an alternate history of the world from the mid-1980s. There is still a Soviet Union in the year 2000, but there are no mobile phones, nor is there an internet. Fax machines are still the norm, but there is a feeling that the world couldn't be further from destroying itself - peace is the new black, so to speak. There's been a woman president and there's a suggestion that Nigeria would become a superpower by the millennium. As a prophetic story it's anachronistically wrong in so much of its narrative, yet it's quite correct in other bits; if anything Sagan wasn't as ambitious as he could have been and he does introduce some very good ideas but his lack of creative imagination means they're nothing more than passing footnotes rather than what they should have been. The character John Hurt portrayed in the movie, Sol Hadden, is considerably more bonkers in the book, having bought a huge tract of land in New Jersey and transformed it into a modern day Babylon; but this features in one chapter and isn't really described just mentioned and there's a brief return to it when it is destroyed by rampaging hordes near to the millennium.

Ultimately this is a book that doesn't achieve anything but leave the reader bewildered, not just by the reams and reams of science, but also because it plays a practical joke on the participants of the book and the reader. After trillions of dollars, thirteen years of thousands of peoples lives and so much hand-wringing, the five (not one) people who travel across the galaxy to meet aliens are returned with zero proof they had ever left the strange dodecahedron they were placed in. It was their word against 6 billion people who didn't go on this 'supposed' journey. They were told very little, just that the universe and the other races in it are considerably older, wiser and technologically advanced and the people of earth are a long ways away from joining them and need to sort their own shit out first. Then there's this zinger at the end that basically makes you wonder what the hell Sagan was thinking - it's a twist that I guess no one saw coming and added nothing to the story; it just felt slightly wrong and unnecessary. 

I'm struggling to think why I liked this book so much when I was in my early 20s. I can't believe I had a better understanding of science then than I do now, because I've got 40 years of accruing loads of useless knowledge I didn't have then and I think the ending would have or at least should have angered me more than anything else. A 400 page book that doesn't achieve anything you would expect from a story about first contact with an alien race; yes it might actually be closer to what would actually happen (or at least less like Independence Day) but... it simply wasn't very good.