On Dec. 23rd Carl Sagan will come back from the dead via satellite messages.

I hope.

My initial reaction to Contact was of disappointment. Sagan's writing style seemed unpolished, unprofessional, and quite frankly, reminded me of my own writing (much to my dismay). Ellie Arroway came off as (and I am convinced still is) Sagan's ideal...and the way that he was poring over her in the first chapters to me was unpleasant. But as the story broke away from Ellie and refocused onto the actual "contact", I have to say I more than warmed up to it.

To me, Sagan's intellect is displayed not in the scientific content in this novel as much as in his understanding of cultural and human patterns and thinking. The reactions of the public to the idea of extraterrestrial life were (I think) beautifully thought through, believable in a way that reflects a deep understanding of our world. His undertaking of what we might find in the event of finding a higher being too, was mature and thrilling, and I'm glad that he characterized it in a quiet way.

I must say Carl Sagan is no novelist - though his writing style did seemingly improve as he worked through the novel, it was still riddled with specks that needed improvement. Sometimes one sentence too far, it seemed like he struggled against using elegant and beautiful words against over-explaining. This is most obvious at the closing of the novel - he shouldn't have added the italicized prologue...one can never say what we will find, and it would have been a better route to leave that mystery open, and to confess to the fact that even he cannot provide the answers to that question. Sagan was a master of many things, but not of suspense, it seems. It's okay considering who he was - he wanted to understand as much as possible, and wanted to share those discoveries.

As an added note, I happened to be provided with the possibility of watching the movie on the day after I finished reading the book. All of the intricacies of the original novel had been stripped away in the film production, and it had been altered into the usual drama of a blockbuster film. I did not finish watching the movie in its entirety, but I though, how sad to rework something so much to turn something rich into something so bald and lifeless.