Contact, but why bother?

Press, 30 August 1986, Page 22

Contact, but why bother?

Contact: A Novel. By Carl Sagan. Century Hutchinson, 1986. 432 pp. $27.99. (Reviewed by Ray Crawford) Carl Sagan is well-known as a populariser of science, as the author of “Cosmos," and particularly for his association with attempts to search for and communicate with extraterrestrial civilisations. This novel is concerned with that third interest. A highly intelligent young woman, Eleanor Arroway, after probably fairly typical vicissitudes of growing up in America, manages to enter Harvard. After doing especially well in physics she goes on to Caltech to do graduate work in radioastronomy. Deciding to do a doctorate on the development of improvements in receivers, she becomes first a research associate and eventually director at the Earth’s largest radio telescope observatory on Puerto Rico. The story, scarcely original, continues as might be expected. Eleanor becomes interested in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. By now in New Mexico she discovers an anomalous source near Vega. This appears to be a message in the form of prime numbers. The source is twenty-six light-years away. It is here that some elements of humour creep in, not before time. First, the United States military wants to “classify” the message (that, of course, would certainly be attempted) although quite properly it had by then already been sent far and wide to colleagues. Soon the message is found to be three-dimensional. It would be quite funny were it a giant fist which could be directed without delay at any senior member of the Pentagon in the hope that some sense might perhaps be knocked into his skull. In fact, it

turns out to be the brief primitive television programme of 1936 in which Adolf Hitler welcomes the world to the opening of the Olympic Games in Berlin. Well, as the Duke of Wellington said to the gentleman who thought he was a Mr Smith, if you can believe that you can believe anything. Quite apart from the inverse square law. Inevitably the President of the United States is a married woman, showing all the signs of sanity. The story goes on with the Americans, Russians and Japanese accepting the need each to build under instruction and at colossal expense The Machine, a device of uncertain purpose. The American one is built in Wyoming, the Soviet in Uzbekistan (which Sagan, no geographer, seems to think is “just beyond the Caucasus”), and the Japanese, in Hokkaido. The book is nothing if not topical — the American one blows up. The latter half of the book bored me. I admit I am unsympathetic towards science fiction. As for the search for extra-terrestrial civilisations, that seems to me a daft way of spending big money. Why hot drill deep holes into the Earth, starting with the continents? I see no reason to doubt that such civilisations might exist, but why not let them alone? I am surprised, though, that Sagan (able, if tiresomely sure of himself) has written so pedestrian a novel, which like so many from America is far too long. But then, wasn’t he associated with sending out into space that curious device on which was engraved the outline picture of a human couple, in which the external vital organs of the woman were bowdlerised? Read "Gulliver’s Travels,” it is much more entertaining.