''Contact'' is a 1985

hard science fiction Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell's ''Islands of Space'' in the Novemb ...

novel by

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

scientist A scientist is a person who Scientific method, researches to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engag ...

Carl Sagan Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including e ...

. It deals with the theme of

contact Contact may refer to: Interaction Physical interaction * Contact (geology), a common geological feature * Contact lens or contact, a lens placed on the eye * Contact sport, a sport in which players make contact with other players or objects * C ...

between humanity and a more technologically advanced extraterrestrial life form. It ranked No. 7 on ''

Publishers Weekly ''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of ...

s 1985 bestseller list. The only full work of fiction published by Sagan, the novel originated as a screenplay by Sagan and

Ann Druyan Ann Druyan ( ; born June 13, 1949) is an American documentary producer and director specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series ''Cosmos'', hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She i ...

(whom he later married) in 1979; when development of the film stalled, Sagan decided to convert the stalled film into a novel. The film concept was subsequently revived and eventually released in 1997 as the film ''

Contact Contact may refer to: Interaction Physical interaction * Contact (geology), a common geological feature * Contact lens or contact, a lens placed on the eye * Contact sport, a sport in which players make contact with other players or objects * C ...

'' starring

Jodie Foster Alicia Christian "Jodie" Foster (born November 19, 1962) is an American actress and filmmaker. Foster started her career as a child actor before establishing herself as leading actress in film. She has received List of awards and nominations re ...

Plot

As a child, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway shows a strong aptitude for science and mathematics. Dissatisfied with a school lesson, she confirms in a library that pi is transcendental. In sixth grade, her father, Theodore ("Ted"), dies. Her new stepfather, John Staughton, does not support her interests. Ellie resents him and believes her mother remarried out of weakness. After graduating from

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...

, Ellie earns a doctorate from

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private university, private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small g ...

under radio astronomer David Drumlin. She becomes director of "Project Argus," a New Mexico

radio telescope A radio telescope is a specialized antenna (radio), antenna and radio receiver used to detect radio waves from astronomical radio sources in the sky. Radio telescopes are the main observing instrument used in radio astronomy, which studies the r ...

array searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). This puts her at odds with much of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who pushes to defund SETI. Eventually, the project detects a

signal A signal is both the process and the result of transmission of data over some media accomplished by embedding some variation. Signals are important in multiple subject fields including signal processing, information theory and biology. In ...

from

Vega Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It has the Bayer designation α Lyrae, which is Latinised to Alpha Lyrae and abbreviated Alpha Lyr or α Lyr. This star is relatively close at only from the Sun, and ...

, 26

light-years A light-year, alternatively spelled light year (ly or lyr), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equal to exactly , which is approximately 9.46 trillion km or 5.88 trillion mi. As defined by the International Astro ...

away, transmitting

prime number A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a Product (mathematics), product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime ...

s. Further analysis reveals a retransmission of

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...

's 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth's

ionosphere The ionosphere () is the ionized part of the upper atmosphere of Earth, from about to above sea level, a region that includes the thermosphere and parts of the mesosphere and exosphere. The ionosphere is ionized by solar radiation. It plays ...

. President Helen Lasker meets with Ellie to discuss first contact. Ellie begins a relationship with Presidential Science Advisor Ken der Heer. With Soviet colleague Vaygay Lunacharsky, she ensures continuous monitoring of the signal. A third message contains plans for an advanced machine, but decoding its 30,000 pages proves impossible without a missing

primer Primer may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''Primer'' (film), a 2004 feature film written and directed by Shane Carruth * ''Primer'' (video), a documentary about the funk band Living Colour Literature * Primer (textbook), a te ...

. At the President's insistence, Ellie meets religious leaders Billy Jo Rankin and Palmer Joss. A

skeptic Skepticism ( US) or scepticism ( UK) is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the p ...

, she demonstrates her faith in science by trusting a

Foucault pendulum The Foucault pendulum or Foucault's pendulum is a simple device named after French physicist Léon Foucault, conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the Earth's rotation. If a long and heavy pendulum suspended from the high roof above a circu ...

. Dismissing Rankin's views, she finds Joss's perspective intriguing. In Paris, experts confirm the Machine is a five-seat

dodecahedron In geometry, a dodecahedron (; ) or duodecahedron is any polyhedron with twelve flat faces. The most familiar dodecahedron is the regular dodecahedron with regular pentagons as faces, which is a Platonic solid. There are also three Kepler–Po ...

. There, Ellie meets Devi Sukhavati, a doctor who lost her husband after leaving India for love. The final message piece is found when billionaire S. R. Hadden suggests checking for

phase modulation Phase modulation (PM) is a signal modulation method for conditioning communication signals for transmission. It encodes a message signal as variations in the instantaneous phase of a carrier wave. Phase modulation is one of the two principal f ...

, revealing the primer. A U.S.–Soviet race to build the Machine ensues, but Soviet design flaws leave the American version as the only option. Ellie applies as a passenger but loses her spot to Drumlin. Extremists plant a bomb in the Wyoming facility, which detonates during testing, killing Drumlin and delaying the project indefinitely. Meanwhile, Ellie's mother suffers a stroke, leaving her paralyzed. Staughton accuses Ellie of neglecting her family. Ellie later learns Hadden has moved to a private space station. There, he reveals his company has secretly built a third Machine in

Hokkaido is the list of islands of Japan by area, second-largest island of Japan and comprises the largest and northernmost prefectures of Japan, prefecture, making up its own list of regions of Japan, region. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaidō fr ...

, Japan, set for launch on December 31, 1999. Ellie, Vaygay, and Devi secure seats, joined by Nigerian physicist Abonnema Eda and Chinese archaeologist Xi Qiaomu. Before departure, Joss gives Ellie a medallion, which she takes aboard. The activated Machine transports the group through

wormhole A wormhole is a hypothetical structure that connects disparate points in spacetime. It can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime (i.e., different locations, different points in time, or both). Wormholes are base ...

s to a station near the

Milky Way The Milky Way or Milky Way Galaxy is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the #Appearance, galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars in other arms of the galax ...

's center, where each meets an extraterrestrial in the form of a loved one. Ellie's visitor, appearing as Ted, explains their species' motives and a project to alter the universe's properties using mass in

Cygnus A Cygnus A ( 3C 405) is a radio galaxy, one of the strongest radio sources in the sky. Discovery and Identification A concentrated radio source in Cygnus was discovered by Grote Reber in 1939. In 1946 Stanley Hey and his colleague James Phillip ...

. The wormhole network was built by unknown precursors, and hidden messages exist in transcendental numbers like pi. Reunited, the travelers record evidence before the dodecahedron returns them to Earth. Back home, their journey—seeming more than a day—took no time at all on Earth. Their video recordings are erased, likely by wormhole magnetic fields. With Hadden seemingly dead and the transmission halted, officials suspect a hoax. Pressured, the travelers stay silent, though Joss believes Ellie, who now relies on faith. The novel later reveals Hadden faked his death, secretly launching himself into space using

cryogenics In physics, cryogenics is the production and behaviour of materials at very low temperatures. The 13th International Institute of Refrigeration's (IIR) International Congress of Refrigeration (held in Washington, DC in 1971) endorsed a universa ...

, but this remains unknown to the characters. Following "Ted's" suggestion, Ellie runs a program computing pi to unprecedented lengths. Before results emerge, her mother dies, leaving a final letter revealing Staughton—not Ted—is Ellie's biological father. When Ellie examines the program's output, she finds a circle formed from 0s and 1s after 10²⁰ digits in pi's base-11 representation—evidence of her journey.

Publication history

Reading science fiction and fantasy as a child inspired Sagan to become an astronomer. As an adult, he preferred realistic stories that helped readers understand real science and history, like

Robert Heinlein Robert Anson Heinlein ( ; July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific acc ...

's " —And He Built a Crooked House—" and

L. Sprague de Camp Lyon Sprague de Camp (; November 27, 1907 – November 6, 2000) was an American author of science fiction, Fantasy literature, fantasy and non-fiction literature. In a career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, both novels and works of ...

's ''

Lest Darkness Fall ''Lest Darkness Fall'' is a 1939 alternate history science fiction novel by the American author L. Sprague de Camp. ''Lest Darkness Fall'' is similar in concept to Mark Twain's '' A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'', but the treatme ...

''. In 1978, Sagan predicted that because of science fiction, "I know many young people who would, of course, be interested, but in no way astounded, were we to receive a message tomorrow from an extraterrestrial civilization". In 1981,

Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster LLC (, ) is an American publishing house owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts since 2023. It was founded in New York City in 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group US ...

gave Sagan a $2 million advance on the novel. At the time, "the advance was the largest ever made for a book that had not yet been written."Davidson 1999. The first printing was 265,000 copies. In the first two years it sold 1,700,000 copies. It was a main selection of Book-of-the-Month-Club. Sagan's friend, physicist

Kip Thorne Kip Stephen Thorne (born June 1, 1940) is an American theoretical physicist and writer known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. Along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Pri ...

, gave Sagan ideas on the nature of wormholes when Sagan was developing the outline of the novel. Sagan named the novel's protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, after two people:

Eleanor Roosevelt Anna Eleanor Roosevelt ( ; October 11, 1884November 7, 1962) was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the longest-serving First Lady of the United States, first lady of the United States, during her husband Franklin D ...

, a "personal hero" of Sagan's wife,

, and

Voltaire François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778), known by his ''Pen name, nom de plume'' Voltaire (, ; ), was a French Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment writer, philosopher (''philosophe''), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit ...

, whose last name was Arouet. The character is based on the real-life SETI researcher

Jill Tarter Jill Cornell Tarter (born January 16, 1944) is an American astronomer best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Tarter is the former director of the Center for SETI Research, holding the Bernard M. Oliver Ch ...

. The novel won the

Locus Award for Best First Novel The Locus Award for Best First Novel is one of the annual Locus Awards presented by the science fiction and fantasy magazine '' Locus''. Awards presented in a given year are for works published in the previous calendar year. The award for Best Fir ...

in 1986.

Notes

References

Sources

* Davidson, Keay. ''Carl Sagan: A Life''. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. * Sagan, Carl. ''Contact''. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. *

External links