“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
First published back in 1985, Contact by Carl Sagan is an all-time sci-fi classic, exploring one of humanity’s most enduring questions: what would happen if we learned we weren’t alone in the universe? Following radio astronomer Ellie Arroway after she detects a mysterious signal from deep space, the novel blends hard science with philosophical questions about faith, evidence, and humanity’s place in the universe. Sagan fills this story with fascinating scientific detail and a genuine sense of wonder. At the same time, Contact sometimes feels less like a traditional fictional work and more like a vehicle for big ideas, for better and for worse. Join us today at What We Reading for our Contact book review to find out if Sagan’s only fictional work still deserves its place amongst the classics.
Date Published: 1985
Author: Carl Sagan
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 456
Goodreads Rating: 4.15/5
Contact Summary
Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and acclaimed astronomer Carl Sagan imagines the greatest adventure of all – the discovery of an advanced civilisation in the depths of space.
In December of 1999, a multinational team of scientists discovers a signal being beamed from across the cosmos. Receiving instructions from this entity on how to build an incredible piece of machinery needed to venture out across the stars, this team embark on the most awesome encounter in human history. Who – or what – is out there? In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he attempts to predict its future – and our own.
What Worked
One of the biggest strengths of Contact as a book is its ability to capture the sheer wonder of the universe without ever losing sight of its scientific realities. Carl Sagan is world-renowned as an astronomer, and his expertise shines through throughout the novel, from its detailed discussions of radio astronomy and signal processing to its treatment of relativity and space exploration.
Yet, despite the heavy technical subject matter, the book remains remarkably accessible, delivering its complex ideas in a way that never feels “locked out” to us readers without a quantum physics background.
Beyond the science itself, Contact is excellent at portraying the political and social consequences of first contact. The international tensions, competing interests, and global reactions on a macro and more day-to-day level feel believable and often uncannily realistic, lending the book an almost alternate-history quality as humanity wrestles with this unprecedented discovery.
What surprised me most, however, was the book’s philosophical depth. Rather than presenting science and religion as opposing forces, Sagan wades into the relationship between faith, evidence, and human understanding with a remarkable level of nuance.
The end result with Contact is a book that isn’t just intellectually stimulating but also profoundly optimistic, inviting readers to meditate on humanity’s place in a vast and mysterious universe.
What Didn’t
Whilst Contact is undeniably impressive in its scientific scope, it also reveals some of Carl Sagan’s limitations as an author who has predominantly worked in the non-fiction space. A lot of the novel’s appeal stems from its epic ideas, but the prose itself can often feel functional rather than evocative.
Dialogue mostly exists as a way of communicating information, and the descriptive writing lacks some of the energy and atmosphere some might expect from a science fiction book.
Those characters are also quite painfully uneven. Ellie Arroway is a compelling enough protagonist, though not my personal favourite. Nearly everyone else feels like less-than-realised individuals who are little more than mouthpieces for particular viewpoints.
Whether it’s discussing science, religion, politics, or culture, characters are mostly vehicles rather than people with their own distinct voices, personalities, and trajectories.
The novel’s pacing is also seriously demanding. Sagan’s commitment to scientific realism is admirable, but Contact is a long and often dense read that never lets up on its technical and philosophical discussions. Sections devoted to building the Machine and some of the more extended philosophical digressions can feel overlong, making the journey rewarding but occasionally a bit of a slog.
Verdict
Contact isn’t the perfect novel for me. Its pacing can be slow, its characters painfully secondary to the ideas they’re discussing, and there were certainly plenty of moments where I wished Sagan had trusted the story a bit more than the science.
But by the final page, most of those criticisms felt outweighed by the sense of wonder the book conveyed. Few novels manage to make the universe feel so vast yet so tantalisingly plausibly reachable.
If nothing else, Contact left me with a good few meditations on humanity’s standing in the cosmos and the ways in which faith, evidence, and discovery converge. For all its flaws, that’s an achievement that’s hard to ignore.
Our Rating: 3.5/5
Check Out Our Guide To Hard Science Fiction Books
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
