a ramble on the mechanics of SETI and some unspeakably paranoid-moronic politics (Contact - Carl Sagan)

Name: jdkane

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Product:	Contact - Carl Sagan
Date:	19/03/01 (115 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Science; done by others for him, accurate but deserving of no credit for that; A-

Disadvantages: Imagination; sadly short of true spark, extremely dry; D+

I bought a copy of this recently, and I have to say that it was a major disappointment.
Clarke is at least partially wrong. You can read everything, at least everything of sufficient quality to be worth reading - provided you do apply fairly rigorous standards and freely available semiotic technique to evaluate the story. Which, oops, means reading it, or having some damnfool journalist do it for you. This is not among that number. Clarke is particularly important here, because Contact can be summarised in one number; 2001. It is a clone, pure and simple, and what is left over when you subtract everything that Clarke said with greater fluency and efficiency, and far greater storytelling talent, is a ramble on the mechanics of SETI and some unspeakably paranoid-moronic politics that deserves to be conspired against.

Well, that was a short review. I have to go into more detail. Unfortunately.

The novel opens with the heroine, Ellie Arroway, in a brief sketch of childhood. Part of the point of the book is to display that science is as much a matter of humans interacting with the universe as it is humans measuring the universe. Now it may - determinism ahoy - be absolutely true that what your intellect finds itself drawn to is a matter of character and upbringing, and that we are all less flexible and intellectually wide-ranging than we like; but there are ways and ways of pointing it out, primarily the polar opposite of coming totally from the inside of the character - a fully novelistic approach - or from the inside of the psychology textbook and the sociological study. Sagan's approach is neither fish nor fowl, and not particularly well executed; this actually reads like at least very good talent, if not quite great, shying off from the mark. There is too much of the Whiffle Ball American here; it does not reach the soul searing depths of something like, say, Yury Dombrovsky's The Faculty of Useless Knowledge. That is not science fict
ion, but a historical novel; a team of archaeologists trying to survive and work under Stalin's Russia. It affected me very powerfully, for it's sheer humanity more than the descriptions of science and humanity interacting; also as a reminder to science fictioneers that there is much of the human character that is still alien to us.

Unfair perhaps to compare Contact to a masterwork of that order, but why? Another part of the problem is that Arroway has entirely too much of Sagan in her for him to be entirely clear headed. Past, no, but their characters and careers are rather similar; you never, ever, unless you are very good, use yourself as a character in your own novel. What you have to go through to hold your character clearly up before your own eyes is more than I would wish on anybody. I think you need the shellshock or the five marriages and three failed suicides to write well about yourself. Sagan has none of that.

The actual plot starts when an American SETI scheme, project Argus - a real scheme aborted for want of money - detects a long, complicated signal coming in from Vega. Instantly there are problems. I do not quite share Sagan's view of politics. I vary between liberal and nihilist; always conscious of human failure, ready to forgive or not depending on my mood. Sagan has the deep dissatisfaction and ill regard for politicians usually found in someone who has singularly failed to get what he wants from the political process. If it really is this bad- and no historian of the modern political process has yet managed to convince me that it is- why are we all still here?

The portrayal of the characters is deeply depressing, also. I'm sure there are people like the religious fanatics he describes as enemies of the project out there, and I'm equally sure that a species, a civilisation, cannot long survive dragging such dead weight behind it. Their xenophobia is logically inexplicable- these are entities who
do not in most circumstances get on well with their friends, even. How are these bible beltists supposed to understand the stars? More to the point, what are we supposed to do with them? As corrupt as they are, they are of no social value.

The plot has much mystical humming and hawing, even by the aliens - who adopt a convenient device, which I have to admit I have never seen the logic behind - that of appearing to the human visitors in their own guise. Clarke did it with the hotel room, more to the point it happened with a vengeance - a whole imaginary girlfriend - in Stanislas Lem's Solaris. I'm sorry, but from a noted exobiologist I expect more than rubber suits inside white coats. The aliens have no identity of their own. Even Clarke's highly abstract aliens are made very memorable indeed by chapter 35 of 2001. '... And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.'

Sagan's aliens are in that sense are a complete failure. What's a first contact story supposed to do? Show how we react to the unknown. Which doesn't really need science fiction at all. There has to be something out there. Something for us to interact with, not these mirrored masks.

The most interesting thing about Contact, when all's said and done, is the research Sagan talked his colleague and very big shot physicist Kip Thorne into doing as to the possible practicality of wormhole transit. It happened something like this; Sagan, actually having finished the novel but worried about it's accuracy, took the manuscript to Thorne and asked him to check to see if it was possible. As it was the end of the academic year, and to help a colleague, Thorne agreed. It quickly turned out that the original proposal - direct insertion into a full blooded black hole - is most definitely not possible. In fact, passing though a black hole in anything resembling an intact state is as close to a perfect example of a physically impossible proposition
that you're ever likely to be able to find. Tidal pull, spaghettification, infalling debris, radically blue shifted light - hell, being trapped at the bottom of a torn off bubble universe - any number of mechanisms that can and invariably will kill you. An alternative was clearly necessary. You hear a lot of people waffle about wormholes; this is where it happened first, and best. Thorne was the first man to thoroughly investigate the mechanics of nonlinearly macroconnected space. (He admits that Ulvi Yurtsever and others came to his basic conclusions before he did, but very quietly, and basically only as an oddity.) I recommend Black Holes and Time Warps for more info.

At the last, then, it is a disappointment, of infinitely less value than The Demon-Haunted World also authored by him - or almost any of his other works, or for that matter anybody's. A competent effort, but derivative, not followed nearly close enough to the bitter end, and with a falling action that defies sense.

Imagination; sadly short of true spark, extremely dry; D+
Science; done by others for him, accurate but deserving of no credit for that; A-
Scene-setting; numerous political- industrial impossibilities, personal overwrought unlikeliness; C-
Characterisation; some grade A whackos, sham 'depth', ersatz crises; C+

Overall; a wasted opportunity; C-

Summary: