Contact

Sagan, Carl. Contact. 1985. New York: Pocket Books ("a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.").

Very serious First Contact story dealing, as we would expect from Sagan, quite carefully with questions of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life (SETI) and Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life (CETI), and with issues in religion and the social sciences. Relevant here, the machine that the aliens instruct the humans how to build comes to be called just "the Machine" (254) and that it eventually becomes the device through which five human beings achieve Faster than Light travel and contact: a protective enclosure during a marvelous journey and a kind of portal to the world of adventure. Rev. extensively, including Gregory Benford, FR, #85 (Nov. 1985): 24. Cf. and emphatically contrast the device built as an IQ test in This Island Earth (1955). (RDE, 28/08/97)