Just finished this the other night--first real science fiction book read in like four months. What can I say? I liked the book. I did, but that's the basic. There was a lot I was disappointed by too. I did see the movie before the book, and for the first time in my life, I think a movie was better than the book.

I always respected Carl Sagan, but the only reason he got this book published was because it was authored BY Carl Sagan. If I wrote this kind of charcter-fluff with almost zero happening, I'd be tossed in the rejection pile so fast the ink on the paper would still be wet. Maybe my style is just totally different and maybe that's why I'll probably never be published. Sixty pages into Contact, you have no idea what the point of the book is about; instead, we get pages and pages and pages of history and detail about characters who sometimes are completely trivial.

Granted, I think the idea behind Contact was great, the message, the machine, the science, the response to the "trip", but writing wise, the prose was awful. When something exciting did happen, like the machine blowing up, it's told to us in one sentence, then we get all the aftermath.

It was a great loss when you died Carl, but you should have stuck to science fact, and let some other deserving writer be published.