Contact
by Carl Sagan
1985, Gallery Books (Simon & Schuster), 374p

[I'm embarrassed to say that my memory is so shot that I didn't remember having already read and reviewed this 2017-08. While the book seemed familiar while I was reading it, it wasn't enough for me to realize or look up my previous review.]

I have been for many years a fan of the movie "Contact," and have meant for a long time to get around to reading the book. Having seen the movie several times, I spent my time while reading the book analyzing the differences between the book and the movie. Only to read in the "Author's Note" at the end that "This book has grown out of a treatment for a motion picture that Ann Druyan and I wrote in 1980-81." (My movie review shows I knew this once, but I'd forgotten it by the time I read the book.) So ... are the differences in the movie variances from Sagan and Druyan's original screenplay? Or did Sagan choose to make the changes when he turned the screenplay idea into a book? Their screenplay was from 1981, the book was published in 1985, and the movie hit theatres in 1997 (Sagan died in late 1996 - it's too bad he didn't get to see the final version, I think he would have liked it). Whoever wrote the final screenplay would obviously have had access to both the book and the original treatment ...

There are definitely noticeable differences between the movie and the book, but in the end the spirit, the ideas that drove the original writing, have been maintained. Our heroine is Ellie Arroway, an abrasive astronomer with an interest in SETI ("Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence"). As the SETI program's budget comes under siege, planet Earth is bombarded by an incredibly strong and undeniable extra-terrestrial signal coming from the star Vega (26 light-years from Earth). The novel works through Ellie's backstory - particularly her family, her education, and the sexism she faced in her chosen profession. Then we're on to the attempts to decode "The Message," and the politics around following the instructions within.

Wikipedia says "Sagan wrote frequently about religion and the relationship between religion and science ..." This book is about Faith and Belief, and how they apply to both religion and science. Another quote from him in Wikipedia is closely related to the subject of this book:

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

I've been influenced on both his ideas about faith (mostly from this movie) and his ideas about God - although not directly from him and have come to appreciate his stance on this.

The book is loaded with exposition about science, particularly physics and astronomy. And boy does he love the words "chiliast" and "chiiasm" ("the doctrine of Christ's expected return to reign on earth for 1000 years"). It's long-winded, but an appealing heroine and fascinating ideas got me through it. I think I prefer the movie (which I love), but it was a pleasure to read the book too.

SPOILER ALERT: I'll be discussing details of the book as compared to the movie: some of what follows qualifies as spoilers. The biggest change between the book and the movie is that in the book, five people rode in The Machine - while in the movie only one went (just Ellie). I suppose the screenplay authors decided it was easier to question the experience of one person than five who all had the same experience. Palmer Joss is (for a time, anyway) Ellie's lover in the movie - not in the book. Her mother and step-father are important in the book, but don't exist in the movie. Related to that, the truth about her father is a huge revelation at the end of the book ... and not in the movie at all. And one of my favourite characters in the movie, Kent (William Fichtner), doesn't exist in the book.