Contact
Carl Sagan's only novel, written from inside a lifetime of work as an actual planetary scientist, takes the question that organized his career, what would happen if we received a confirmed signal from an alien civilization, and answers it with the rigor of a scientist and the patience of a storyteller. Eleanor Arroway, called Ellie, is the brilliant, agnostic head of the Argus radio telescope project in New Mexico when a clean repeating prime-number sequence comes in from Vega. Sagan walks the discovery through the channels it would actually pass, the team verification, presidential briefings, religious panic, international politics, the construction of an enigmatic alien-designed Machine, and finally a journey whose evidence cannot be shared. Adapted into the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film with Jodie Foster, but the novel goes further and lingers longer on God, science, and certainty.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Contact
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
SETI radio astronomer Ellie Arroway picks up a repeating signal from the star Vega. Hidden in it are blueprints for a machine. The novel follows the global politics, science, and faith of building the thing.
Yes. Robert Zemeckis directed a 1997 film adaptation starring Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway. The film is widely considered one of the most thoughtful science-fiction adaptations of the 1990s and was nominated for several awards.
Carl Sagan was a working astronomer and astrophysicist, and Contact is grounded in real principles of radio astronomy, search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (SETI) research, and theoretical physics. The wormhole concept was developed with Kip Thorne specifically for the novel.
Contact was written by Carl Sagan, published in 1985 by GZH.
Contact is 432 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Contact takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Contact is a standalone novel by Carl Sagan, not part of a series.
Contact is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.