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The future is here...in an adventure of cosmic dimension.
In December, 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history. Who -- or what -- is out there? In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he predicts its future -- and our own.
I've read several of Sagan's non-fiction books prior to this novel, and I strangely found him to be much less engaging here. The first half of Contact reads more like non-fiction than a story, but it's lacking the voice that made his non-fiction so good. The second half of the book, though, once the Machine gets built, suddenly has a lot more heart to it than I was expecting. Now that I'm done with it, I'm finding myself appreciating the whole thing a lot more than I thought I was going to in the beginning.
The main character, Ellie Arroway, is basically a voice for Sagan. She has his same sense of wonder balanced by a skeptic's strict requirement for evidence. I liked the vision that Sagan had of a world whose international conflicts died down once we learned we weren't alone in the universe.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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31 July, 2011:
Finished reading
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31 July, 2011:
Reviewed