Our book club book pick this month is Contact by Carl Sagan.
When radio astronomer Ellie Arroway receives a message from the stars with the blueprint for a mysterious machine, humanity must decide how to proceed. Scientists are eager to learn more about the alien senders who must be significantly more advanced than us, while religious leaders are convinced it’s a message from the devil.
Ultimately, the world comes together in a rare display of unity (dubbed machindo) to build the machine, which takes Ellie and four other scientists on an intergalactic tour to visit the caretakers, an advanced race of beings that monitor and subtly encourage the development of life on other worlds.
The only problem? When they return, there’s no proof of their contact with alien life. Their recording devices didn’t work, what felt like days to the scientists happened in a mere twenty earth minutes, and all they have are their accounts of what they saw.
The circumstances flip the nature of truth on its head. Can there be truth without evidence? Suddenly Ellie, formerly a skeptic, finds herself in the same position as the religious leaders she once challenged.
About the Author
Carl Sagan’s bright and optimistic story (of what was, for him, the future), suggests that wonder and awe might be the unifying force that has the power to connect the skeptics and the faithful, and that our deep commonality as humans can outweigh our perceived differences.
Sagan was a planetary astronomer and professor at Cornell University. He authored or co-authored two dozen books and over a hundred scientific papers, but Contact was his only work of fiction. It began as a screenplay co-authored with Ann Druyan, who Sagan would later marry.
Questions for Your Book Club
If you want to read Contact with your book club, (or just want some questions to think about after reading it), here are some questions to get you started:
-
The idea of "truth" is a prevailing theme in the novel. Can there be truth without evidence? Is that the same thing as “faith?”
-
If you learned that there was an alien species much more advanced than us, would you feel threatened or comforted?
-
Many sci-fi books include representations of extraterrestrials. What did you think of the representation of alien life in Contact?
-
How are the lines between science and religion blurred throughout the story, particularly when Ellie discovers the relationship between the caretakers and the tunnel builders? How does the idea of wonder or the numinous come into play?
-
Let's talk about Michael Kitz' character in the story. What parts of humanity does he represent?
-
How did you feel about the balance between Ellie's personal story and the larger scientific story? Did you feel close to Ellie or far away from her?
-
Contact came out in 1985. Let's talk about Carl Sagan's imagined millennium (which, to us reading in 2026, is a form of retrofuturism) and how it differed from the culture and technologies of the actual time period.
Our book club had a fantastic discussion of Contact, and we highly recommend it! For other book club pick recommendations and resources, visit the Genre blog here.
0 comments