Contact by Carl Sagan

read by Jodie Foster

This is such a fascinating period piece. It’s a novel—a vision of what our first contact with an alien civilization might be like. If you’ve seen the movie you’ve got the basic idea, but Mr. Sagan, though an incredible visionary and so far ahead of his time, is of course a man of his time as well. I won’t say more. A time capsule from 1985, written about a mythical 1999, which is a delight to open in the far-future year of 2018--which in many ways I’m glad Mr. Sagan, whose sensibilities, I gather, were firmly formed in the 1960s and ‘70s, didn’t live to see.