Contact
by Carl Sagan
read by Jessa Crispin

I'm no longer sure that Carl Sagan's Contact should have made our list.

My sister was the only one of us to have read it, so I just shrugged and trusted her judgment. I had heard a lot about it, and everyone I knew who had read it really liked it. Then I read it and I knew we should have skipped it for something else.

It's not that it's a bad book. On the contrary, it was very smart and very easy to read. It was interesting to see how the movie slaughtered the book. It was also interesting to see how Carl Sagan thought the world would be like in 1999. That, to me, was the most entertaining part. The U.S.S.R. still stood, America had a woman president, there was still apartheid in South Africa. It makes the book feel a bit dated now, but not to its detriment.

It is an example of a very good speculative fiction novel, but once I finished the book, I barely thought of it again. When I do think of it, I just want to shrug. Eh. It was okay. The other books I've read for the 100 Books project have at least elicited a stronger response and left me either fuming or enraptured.

I'm glad I read it, if only to finally know that the movie was a joke. They took out the purpose of the book by killing the ending. The ending of the book actually surprised me after having seen the movie. I'm not sure who wrote the adaptation, but they should be ashamed. They should also be ashamed by casting Matthew Ma-whatshisname as Jasper and making him a love interest. Poor Carl Sagan.

As interesting as it was, though, I've read better speculative fiction. Is it too late to take this one off and put on Stanislaw Lem or Philip K. Dick or something else? Something more hardcore? This felt like more of a book for people who don't like SF than anything else.

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