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Aug 07, 2013danielestes rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I first saw the Robert Zemeckis film starring Jodie Foster years ago though it wasn't until my fifth or tenth re-watching that I realized how special it was to me. Visually the cinematography is quite striking, but more importantly there's this sense of divine wonder, this agnostic spiritualism, that permeates even though the film is implicitly not religious. Nowadays I cite Contact as one of my all-time favorite movies. And now that I've read Contact, the novel, I can say it's one of my all-time favorites too. Carl Sagan is a Pulitzer-prize winning author from a scientific standpoint, and with Contact he's writing more as a scientist than a novelist. You can see where he opts for the technical explanation over sentence economy. This strains the prose a bit, but Sagan isn't trying to win you over with dramatic flair. He wants to persuade you of his ideas, of his vision for the future. If you're a fan of Sagan's miniseries Cosmos, then you're aware of the breathtaking awe he brings to the study of cosmology. And it's not just about what's out there in space, but that we're a part of it too. He advocates for a positive view of mankind where our desire to build a better world is a future reality and not merely a glimmer of hope.