Hey all,
I have been reading Contact by Carl Sagan, and I'm really enjoying it. I was wondering if anyone else has read it, and if they'd want to talk about it.
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I'm a bit ashamed to admit I haven't read it. I watched the television series when I was a kid, and I have read The Dragons of Eden and The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Both by Sagan and both were really good!
I miss him so very much.
I recently reread Cosmos. Still a great read. Amazing how much more we have learned since.
Unfortunately I've only seen his show. I grew up with it. It would be a pleasure to read though. Thank you for posting this. Perhaps I'll follow up with you about it.
I loved it when I read it years ago. It is MUCH better than the movie
I haven't read it, I have listened to the audio the abridged audiobook, which I really enjoyed.
I loved the book . . . the movie sucked. This is despite the fact that I like both Jodie Foster and Matthew Mcconaghie as actors.
Yeah, read it in hard cover. Pretty good book. ($5 on remainder)
Taking the film on its own , I enjoyed it. Relatively few book adaption movies are much like the book. Often, the makers have paid for the right to use the name. The resulting film often has little to do with the book.
There ARE exceptions, such as many film versions of Shakespeare's play's. EG loved Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, Polanski's Macbeth , and the 1935 version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with very young Mickey Rooney as Puck .
Generally, I don't expect much from film versions of books, and just look at a film as a film .
Addendum: the only TV series called "Contact " I could find was 'aliens have been here before' nonsense. I'm also fond of the youtube crackpottery of "scientists can't explain" ---strawnman? Science has never claimed to explain everything, nor is there any reason it should. Unlike the lunatic fringe, science is quite happy to say "we don't know" ['yet' being implicit]
type nonsesne
Yes, liked it, too - it came to my mind only these days when I read 'The Death of the Universe: Rebirth' (Big Rip Book 3) by Brandon Q. Morris (in German, will appear in English in due time) - I had always wondered what Sagan had wanted to say exactly at the end of 'Contact' with the circle in base 11 arithmetics as proof for 'the intelligence that antedates the universe' - it seems there was kind of god in the bush ;)
In the book of Morris there's something similar - in a pulsing universe a most advanced intelligence manages to manipulate the 'big rip' so that in the background radiation of the 'next' universe there is enclosed a message, kind of computer program… (Don't want to spoil ;)
Because of films and books - very seldom there are movies of similar quality as the book - I think there of The Trial by Orson Welles after Kafka's book e.g.
I've found what Sagan himself thought, in his last (non-fiction) book 'Billions and billions' - and it's a good standpoint I think:
"I see the emergence in our consciousness of a Universe of magnificence, and an intricate, elegant order far beyond anything our ancestors imagined. And if much about he Universe can be understood in terms of a few simple laws of Nature, those wishing to believe in God can certainly ascribe those beautiful laws to a Reason underpinning all of Nature. My own view is that it is far better to understand the Universe as it really is than to pretend to a Universe as we might wish it to be."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WTupkOBpH8