However, the unraveling tells us much about how scientists think and interact with tier own governments. The received message is a tangled puzzle whose decoding occupies the novel's sluggish middle third. In ''Contact,'' his first novel, he gives us meticulous background about the search for extraterrestrial radio signals, natural and otherwise, as James Gunn did in his successful novel ''The Listeners'' Such an opening plot could describe a fast-paced, superheated international thriller, but to his credit, the astronomer Carol Sagan, author of the best-selling science book ''Cosmos,'' keeps his tone clear, precise, unsensational. The astronomer who led the search for such signals, Eleanor Arrowway,įinds herself cast from the familiar world of scientific dispute into the big-stakes arena of power and politics. Scientific, political and religious reaction is extreme and varied. In the 1990's a radio telescope receives a clear, powerful message from an alien civilization near the star Vega. His most recent award is ''Artifact.''Ĭontact, By Carl Sagan. Section 7, Column 1 Book Review Deskīy Gregory Benford Gregory Benford is a professor of Physics at the University of California, Irvine. November 3, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
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