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Feb. 20th, 2018 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI read Carl Sagan's Contact for the first time last month, for book club. The entire time I was reading it, I was convinced I had also seen part of the movie version of Contact and it didn't much match up, except that it turned out during actual book club that both aamcnamara and I had IN FACT seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind and convinced ourselves they were the same movie, which they are not at all.
ANYWAY. Contact is a very good, thoughtful, Big Idea kind of science fiction novel -- a slow and careful exploration of a simple premise (Messages From More Advanced Aliens: How Would It Even Work) that along the way develops a flawed but optimistic vision of what the world could, with the right motivation, become. Carl Sagan's idea of how the world might look by the year 2000 is honestly a little depressing because we are so very much not there, but it's also not so distant that it doesn't feel like we could never get there, and that's something.
It's not really a character book, with the exception of our heroine, Ellie Arroway, the scientist who spearheads much of the work done in the novel. Ellie does feel like a real person and it feels important that, in 1985, Carl Sagan chose to write her as his protagonist -- and a couple people at book club said, and I agree, that you can tell that he's angry on behalf of his female colleagues and the way they are often treated in the field, which we all appreciated. Which is not to say there were absolutely no missteps: none of us appreciated Ellie, on her way to achieving her life's goal and leaving the Earth to meet aliens for the first time, suddenly regretting never having had a child. We agreed this would only be acceptable if the robot supercomputer that she builds to hunt down secret messages from super-advanced-aliens-and/or-God develops into her robot child in the sequel that Carl Sagan never wrote.
But this is a relative quibble in a book that, overall, is extremely thoughtful and worth reading; I generally prefer Character Fiction to Idea Fiction, but I was very glad to have read this book.
(Although I still want Carl Sagan to give me more information about the video standard used to re-encode television from 1930s Germany and bounce it back to scientists in 1985 in such a way that they could decode and understand it. Was the signal interlaced or progressive? Did the aliens actually take the original signal and effectively digitize it to transform it into a series of easily-read pixels?? I think it's very unfair that the one thing he decided not to explain in excruciating detail is the one thing I know enough to try and nitpick!)
aamcnamara and I had IN FACT seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind and convinced ourselves they were the same movie, which they are not at all. ANYWAY. Contact is a very good, thoughtful, Big Idea kind of science fiction novel -- a slow and careful exploration of a simple premise (Messages From More Advanced Aliens: How Would It Even Work) that along the way develops a flawed but optimistic vision of what the world could, with the right motivation, become. Carl Sagan's idea of how the world might look by the year 2000 is honestly a little depressing because we are so very much not there, but it's also not so distant that it doesn't feel like we could never get there, and that's something.
It's not really a character book, with the exception of our heroine, Ellie Arroway, the scientist who spearheads much of the work done in the novel. Ellie does feel like a real person and it feels important that, in 1985, Carl Sagan chose to write her as his protagonist -- and a couple people at book club said, and I agree, that you can tell that he's angry on behalf of his female colleagues and the way they are often treated in the field, which we all appreciated. Which is not to say there were absolutely no missteps: none of us appreciated Ellie, on her way to achieving her life's goal and leaving the Earth to meet aliens for the first time, suddenly regretting never having had a child. We agreed this would only be acceptable if the robot supercomputer that she builds to hunt down secret messages from super-advanced-aliens-and/or-God develops into her robot child in the sequel that Carl Sagan never wrote.
But this is a relative quibble in a book that, overall, is extremely thoughtful and worth reading; I generally prefer Character Fiction to Idea Fiction, but I was very glad to have read this book.
(Although I still want Carl Sagan to give me more information about the video standard used to re-encode television from 1930s Germany and bounce it back to scientists in 1985 in such a way that they could decode and understand it. Was the signal interlaced or progressive? Did the aliens actually take the original signal and effectively digitize it to transform it into a series of easily-read pixels?? I think it's very unfair that the one thing he decided not to explain in excruciating detail is the one thing I know enough to try and nitpick!)
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Date: 2018-02-21 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 02:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 03:05 am (UTC)Supposedly this is their screenplay but I don't know how true that is
https://web.archive.org/web/20090127054113/http://www.imsdb.com:80/scripts/Contact.html
altho they did write this letter about how they thought an early script sucked
https://io9.gizmodo.com/5931333/read-carl-sagans-letter-politely-telling-warner-bros-their-script-sucked
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Date: 2018-02-21 04:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 04:51 am (UTC)....LOL, the comments. "Hollywood sucks!" "Don't you proofread your articles?" "If you want proofreading go somewhere else, this place is free." "Kinja sucks." "You can try reading your article backwards!" "The ending sucks!" "I love this film with all my heart."
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Date: 2018-02-21 09:11 am (UTC)I'm glad to hear this. I have read the book and seen the movie, but both so long ago that I wasn't sure how either would hold up.
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Date: 2018-02-21 10:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 07:55 pm (UTC)I find it just charmingly naive that in Sagan's version of history, the influential mega-billionaire character made his fortune from (television) ad-blockers.
I was at some point generally wondering about Contact/Three Body Problem cross-over fanfiction: they're drawing from the same bag of tropes, and have female radio astronomer lead characters of about the same age, but the worldviews are so very different.