You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real.
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan was a rare genius, the kind they don’t make anymore, a true “Renaissance man” knowledgeable across many fields. Mostly recognized for advancing science education, Sagan was also well-versed in history, philosophy, and literature. So when the guy ventured into my field—storytelling—I was immediately intrigued.
Sagan’s Contact is the story of humanity’s first contact with an alien civilization, and in a genre where this idea has been done to death, he brings a much-needed perspective that only an astronomer of his expertise could. Like the movie adaptation starring Jodie Foster, the book often gets bogged down by scientific jargon, reading more like a research paper than fiction. There are times when it’ll just stop to give an astronomy or physics lesson. Sagan also tends to casually throw around his immense intellectual weight (not to brag, I am certain, it’s just who he is). As I told my friend, Heather, “Reading Sagan is like swimming through molasses, except the molasses is made up of SAT words.” Here are some examples where the writing is overly prosaic: Vaygay and she had interdigitated their presentations. […] As they finished, there was a sustained thunder of applause. The Soviets and Eastern European delegations applauded in unison, with a frequency of about two or three handclaps per heartbeat. […] The women followed behind their husbands, one of them holding the hand of a toddler new to the human art of walking. None of this should come as a surprise, since Sagan is far more accustomed to writing science journals than science fiction. But even for a Renaissance man of his caliber, there are times when he feels out of his element; storytelling is its own skill that he never quite mastered. But I wouldn’t have it any other way, because there are far too many Sci-Fi authors these days who lack even a fundamental understanding of astrophysics. Contact is a book that the genre desperately needed. When it comes to alien contact, this isn’t just how it might happen; it’s how I genuinely believe it will happen.
Her romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of delights. Advocate and practitioner of romance, she was off to see the Wizard.
Yet the book, like the movie, falls short in the end. The first 3/4ths of the story builds towards a climactic meeting with an alien civilization thousands of years more advanced than our own. Only here, Sagan isn’t able to rely on his experience in the scientific field, and his lack of imagination and creativity shows where it’s needed most.
Ultimately, Contact is a story about, well, contact — our very human need for connection across races, planets, and family —and the obstacles that prevent us from making those connections. This theme extends to matters of faith and theology (going even further than the movie did), which surprised me quite a bit, given Sagan’s outspoken advocacy for skepticism of God, religion, and other superstitious claims. But you’ll have to listen to the podcast (below) to know more about the surprising religious claims he makes in the book!
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.
Overall, I recommend Contact, but only if you’re the type of reader who enjoys reading actual science as much as Sci-Fi.
The Art of Storytelling 
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