Contact wasn't really about alien contact at all, was it? (Spoilers within)

Cafe Society
1

I refer to the book “Contact” by Carl Sagan.

Well, I find it hard to believe that alien contact was his purpose at all, in writing the book. He spent 3/4 of the book rambling on about the political, ethical, social, moral, economical, philosophical, emotional, and worldly ramifications of alien contact before he even got to the point.

He wasted (I feel) a lot of time on religious dogma. I don’t mean religious people who are reasonable and are willing to learn but what we would call the negative sort of fundamentalists and televangelists. So in a way it could be considered a book on the traps both religion and science get our mind into sometimes and the way to escape these thoughts.

He spent a lot of time with Ellie and her emotions, and her thoughts. So it could be considered to be a book on Ellie.

But what it definitely wasn’t was a book on aliens, or on sci-fi! (Ok, the real spoilers are coming up now.)

When they finally meet the so-called aliens, they look just like us, they are people we know, they understand or at least accept emotion (Ellie cries all over her “father”) and they make the human visitors look like incompetent fools, insane, or worse yet, outright liars when they let the humans take no record back. Surprisingly, I actually understand that. Their goal it seems was to make the human race learn the secrets for themselves.

However - Ellie then goes and discovers the secret the aliens were looking for, in a year or less! When they’d been looking at it for quite a while! This struck me as rather silly and serving one’s own purpose - must end the book on a high note.

So, the book was really about humans, and maybe it was about the Contact we humans share with one another. OK, I agree that it’s made me think and all.

But frankly, I am quite disappointed. I nearly put the book down when he started getting really heavily into the religious dogma, particularly the whole section with Joss Palmer. I only continued because I looked it up online and read the plot synopsis - something I almost never do for books - and discovered that they did, indeed, travel to space.

Someone should have warned me that the book wasn’t really a sci-fi novel at all, but just a reflection of society. grumbles

Anyway, I know there are many brighter minds than mine out there, and probably people can poke holes in all my arguments…but the essential feeling the book left with me was not a particularly good one.

2

At least it was better than the movie. I liked the movie until I later read the book, then I didn’t really like the movie any more.

Contact is soft science fiction, rather than the hard science fiction that you might expect from a scientist like Carl Sagan. Though Carl Sagan was also very interested in science-and-society and science-and-religion issues- read The Demon Haunted World for more on that.

3

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh. Thanks, Anne…I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought. That other people were perfectly happy with what is called “soft sci-fi”? Not sure. But I know there were times I felt that I must be in the minority for not liking it!

Mystery cleared up. When I want a good yarn, I’m afraid I don’t really turn to human interest stories!

4

Contact was about the social standards of belief and analysis, and how religious and scientific premises are treated in that framework.

5

It’s hard not to be disappointed by a book when you start reading it expecting one thing, and end up getting something completely different. The same thing applies to food and drink.

6

I haven’t read the book. The film seemed to me principally to be about faith.

7

Well, yes, Contact is indeed like that. But the thing is, all literature is ultimately about humans and their interactions. It’s a question of idioms and tastes.

Sagan takes the opportunity to make a point regarding what he thinks about inter-human “contact” in the form of a novel – in part so he can add his own literary take on the nature of life and the universe that he’d feel would have no place in a straight-science book, aimed at a different audience than would read a straight philosophy-opinion work.

FWIW I thought it was fine, but just that. No big deal.

8

I’m convinced that Contact, ultimately, was about God. Not the standard Judeo-Christian God, but a sceptics God. The notions of faith and certainty and belief. The sheer incomprehesibility of a higher power and humanitys struggle to grapple with these concepts.

As an atheist, Contact remains to this day, the closest I’ve ever had to a religious experience.

9

All science fiction is about humans. Real aliens would be too unknowable to write about and would leave no emotional impact on the reader. All good science fiction writers recognize this. (In the same way, all science fiction is about the present, not the future.)

In a way, you can say that all good science fiction is “soft” science fiction, in that it’s about the people rather than the technology. The technology (or, infrequently, science) is there solely to illuminate the human condition in ways that highlight aspects of it by placing humans into unfamiliar surroundings to emphasize the resulting similarities.

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I remember at the end, Ellie telling the kids, “If there were no other people in the Universe, wouldn’t that be an awful waste of space?” Which is rather a theistic thing to say, so I guess she’s been converted to that extent.

Then again . . . Rain falling on the ocean is an awful waste of fresh water. Nevertheless, rain falls on the ocean.

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My recollection is that Ellie did not discover anything the aliens hadn’t already told her about, she merely confirmed that the anomaly exists. The aliens were trying to “solve the puzzle”, so to speak, while Ellie et al only managed to scratch the surface of one piece of the puzzle, something they would never have done without a big hint from the aliens.

Did I miss something or (more likely) choose to block it out?

12

I loved the movie–I thought Jodie did a great job. She made me wish I could have known Ellie and gone on that journey with her. The opening sequence is one of my all-time favorites.

I enjoyed listening to her commentary on the DVD. She seems to share that sense of wonder that Ellie (Sagan) had. IIRC, it was her birthday on the day they filmed the courthouse scene, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to her–a nice gesture from the cast and extras, and she sounded like she was really touched by it.

13

I read the book and saw the flick, I liked both. the one thing about the movie that always gets me though is how almost noone understands that its about faith. I mean after all the subtle hints about faith they bust out a fat ended bat with the word “FAITH” branded into it backwards and start kicking your ass with it.

and people are pissed about the aliens looking human (I would put some rolleyes here but cant figure it out cause irstoopid)

14

Far be it for me to say your tastes are wrong, Annamika.

Dum de dum de dum.

:wink:

But seriously folks, if you want to read some empty-headed space opera about blasting BEM’s, there’s plenty of it around. Like Exapno says, good science fiction is about humanity, not aliens.

I was fortunate enough to be in a small seminar with Professor Sagan about a year or two before he passed on, and he definitely wrote Contact as a story about how people deal with the unknown.

–Cliffy

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Name a book that isn’t.

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It’s interesting when a writer sets out to create a really alien alien, and succeeds. Joe Haldeman did this in one story, and didn’t like it, so he brought it around to humans prettty quick. Prederick Pohl has something like it in one of his short stories, where the resolution isn’t particularly satisfying to present-day humans, so he asks “Well, what would (hero) think of you and your life?”

My favorite, though, is Terry Carr’s “The Dance of the Changer and the Three”, where a human tries to understand alien mythology, and the myth seems to make no sense. And the point of the story is that yes, it makes no sense at all in human terms. I don’t think it made any sense to Carr. But it was supposed to make sense to the aliens.

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Are you talking about “Forever War” by Haldeman or something else? The most realistic aliens I read about were in “The Kraken Awakes” by John Wyndham - they were some horrifying unseen creatures that lived deep in the ocean and sent bio-tanks up to ravage human cities on the coasts. They also melted the polar ice-caps to expand their sphere of inluence, very resourceful guys.

I agree, books with realistic aliens are very rare; aliens in most sci-fi stories might as well be called familiars considering how human they are. I guess this is why the cthulhu mythos is so appealing to many people.

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I liked the movie, sort of. Then everyone told me to read the book, because “It’s so much better!” Well, I did and it wasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Sagan was a wonderful science writer. But a fiction writer? Not so much.

One of the first scenes in the book was Ellie being born. Seconds after she came out of her mother’s womb, she looked about the room thoughtfully. Sorry, newborns don’t look at anything, thoughtful or not.

One of the problems facing writers is how to move the story along in an organic way while conveying important information to the reader (or viewer). For instance, on an episode of Numb3rs, agents went into a building with guns drawn, and one said “You smell that?” and the other replied “Yeah, gun powder.” In real life they both would have smelled it and nothing would need to be said. But since smellovision hasn’t yet been invented, we need this bit of Hollywood verissimilitude to let us know what’s going on. We need to know that a gun was fired, and that’s how the writer chose to tell us. A little awkward, but most people would hardly notice.

Sagan handled such matters in the clumsiest ways. That’s the mark of a bad writer. For example, there was a part where he needed to accomplish two things:

  1. Have a scientist find out about the Vegans.
  2. Explain prime numbers to the reader.

Keep in mind that he does both in one swell foop in this dialog between one mathematician and another:

“The aliens are sending us a signal consisting of prime numbers…”

So far so good. But it goes on:

“…which, as you know, are numbers that can only be divided by one and themselves.”

It’s very silly and draws way too much attention to itself. And it’s a little insulting that Sagan assumes we don’t know what prime numbers are.

If you decide to reply to this message, please do so with your computer, which, as you know, is an electronic device that works via binary numbers.

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Nope – one of his short stories, but I can’t recall the title.

I liked Wyndham’s book, but IIRC, you never actually see the aliens, just the results of their actions. It’s not appropriate to say they’re the most realistic when they aren’t even depicted.

Hal Clement’s aliens are, physically, the most convincing. well-considered and very non-human. But they inevitably have very human psychology. This allows them to interact easily with humans in his stories, but strikes me as extremely unlikely. Nonhuman bodies would, I think, lead to great differences in psychology and all shorts of assumptions that we take for granted not being present in their cases. Alien bodies would, I suspect, have very alien minds. Not hostile or incomprehensible, please not. But different.

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I liked the Amnion in Donaldson’s Gap series quite a bit. I thought he struck the right balance: extremely strange and yet just barely comprehensible.

I would put Russell’s The Sparrow just slightly above it, but yeah, I think that’s a good description of what Sagan was trying to get at.