Entertaining the Alien

12. Contact, Carl Sagan

This may truly be the first time that I've enjoyed a movie more than the book it came from. That isn't to say the book is bad. It's definitely not. It's the hardest sci-fi I've read in a long time--you can tell that for Sagan, the point of the book was the science. That makes sense, of course, he was a brilliant scientist. He also gets more than a few digs in at the expense of various world governments.

The biggest problem for me personally (and this is why I rarely read hard sci-fi) was that due to the focus on the science, the characters just weren't as warm and believable as they were in the movie. I get why changes were made. The moviemakers shifted the focus from the science to the characters, and made a few plot changes (not all of which I'm sure I agree with) to smooth things out.

All in all, I'm glad I read this, because if nothing else, it made me think. Frighteningly enough, between this book and Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries, I'm growing increasingly intrigued by theoretical physics, and that's just scary and wrong.