Contact (Melissa Thornton)

Title: Contact
Author: Carl Sagan
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 432
Where I found this book: My mom's bookshelf

Brief Summary: The book is basically the story of a girl's life. The main character, Ellie, has been interested in electronics her entire life. She takes apart radios as a child and learns to rebuild them. She eventually goes to college, gets a job, and invents a new radio telescope to search for signals from extraterrestrial beings. Soon after, the project detects a signal. They realize that it is a sequence of prime numbers. The second signal they get is an instruction manual on how to read the next messages. The third message is a blueprint for a vehicle that can transport five humans all over space. The machine is built and five people, including Ellie, travel deep into the Milky Way Galaxy to meet the senders. The senders were people (living or dead) from the five humans' lives. When they return to Earth, they realize that they had passed through a time warp, where their hours and hours in space was only minutes on Earth. They also realize their video of the senders was erased, so people believed that the travelers were lying. The government tries to cover up the travel to space with a conspiracy. They claimed that the message was a hoax, saying that the richest man in the world funded the creation of the machine to make a name for himself. Disappointed, Ellie begins to work on a program that calculates the digits of pi. Ellie finds a statistical anomaly thousands of digits into pi and sees a pattern. The pattern creates a circle somehow, which thus creates what the exraterrestrials call an "intellegent artifact". Finally, Ellie's work is put back on track when she is forced to give up on the signal and search for other signals in noise from the radio telescopes.

Audience: I think the audience of this book is young adults who are into science fiction. The book describes new technology and ideas about extraterrestrial beings. This would be a perfect book for science fiction fans with good vocabularies. A lot of words are difficult. This also made me believe it was for an older audience than teens.

Author's Writing Style: Carl Sagan writes with lots of similes and metaphors. He uses good imagery and there is some symbolism.
"He had coaxed an exquisite blue caterpillar to climb aboard a twig. It briskly padded along, its iridescent body rippling with the motion of fourteen pairs of feet" (Sagan 152). I chose this passage because it shows how Sagan uses imagery to add dimention to his writing.

3 Passages:
"Sometimes, she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, 'Gentlemen, let's proceed,' and sensing Ellie's frown would add, 'Sorry, Miss Arroway,but I think of you as one of the boys,'" (Sagan 32). This passage struck me because it showed a hint of sexism. Ellie was considered 'one of the boys' because science was not a popular field for women at the time..
"Years before, he had invented a module that, when a television commercial appeared, automatically muted the sound. It wasn't at first a context-recognition device. Instead, it simply monitored the amplitude of the carrier wave" (Sagan 228). I chose this passage because it shows that new technology did have influence on the book. This quote demonstrates some of the new technology.
"She had spent her career attempting make contact with the most remote and alien of strangers, while in her own life she had made contact with hardly anyone at all. She had been fierce in debunking the creation myths of others, and oblivious to the lie at the core of her own" (429). I chose this quote because it shows Ellie's career struggles to make contact with extraterrestrials but neglected her own inside and core. She sets aside all of her feelings to devote her mind to her work.

How I interacted: I didn't love this book, but I thought it was interesting. The author uses advanced vocabulary. This made a lot of it hard to read. It also had some similarities to what my mom does for work. She works in a lab writing computer programs that track data from satellite orbits. I had a connection there because it made me think about my mom. I also connected to the novel because it speaks a lot about new technology and today we are a technologically advanced nation.