Rich (1/5): Contact by Carl Sagan

I was in the back seat that day, being driven to piano lessons. My mom told me that the cold weather was to blame and that the astronauts didn't feel a thing. The nation's most famous scientists were dead.

Contact centers around another crew of scientists who are famous, not for their untimely deaths, but for their discovery of a message from outer space. Throughout the book, I imagined Jodie Foster, with her hair pinned back, working diligently on solving the key equations to unlock the code. Those visual memories pushed the story to a rolling start, but before long, the book generated its own momentum based on man's response to the unexpected revelation that we share universe with someone else. No five-legged beasts with green scales show up, and no underwater creatures that communicate with pulses of light and feed on surface-dwellers terrorize the planet. Instead, the humans act unabashedly human. The politicians are suspicious that the message is a blueprint for a trojan horse bomb. The scientists are eager to learn new technologies from the instructions, while the religious leaders claim that their god has sent them the directions to heaven.

Contact lets the spotlight stay on its astronomers and avoids letting the story overtake these characters. Bad news comes filtered through their words, and aliens never steal the show from the entangled struggle between personal glory and group survival, between what is seen and what is understood, and what is genuine and what is only temporary. Inside this story of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Sagan hides his own message of the spirit of human imagination.