Contact

Contact is a hard science fiction novel by the American scientist Carl Sagan, published in 1985. It is the only full work of fiction Sagan published. It originated as a screenplay written with Ann Druyan in 1979, and when the film stalled Sagan converted the script into a novel; it was adapted as a film in 1997 starring Jodie Foster.

The story turns on first contact between humanity and a form of extraterrestrial life far more advanced, technologically, than our own. Ellie Arroway loses her father young and grows up into an astronomer who spends her career listening for a signal that may never come. When the telescope she is running finally picks something up, the message is a sequence of prime numbers repeated from a star twenty-six light years away.

Confirming it has to survive politics, committees and a government that would rather the news belonged to it, and the novel spends as much time on those negotiations as on the signal itself. The message turns out to hold instructions, and building what they describe becomes an international project with five seats aboard and no agreement about who fills them. Arroway's argument with the officials and the religious advisers around her runs through the whole book.

Sagan wrote the novel as a scientist, so the astronomy is explained in detail and the procedural politics are treated as part of the story. It is a standalone novel.