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Take note, aspiring science fiction writers: even Carl Sagan had to check with the experts.
Naturally, being one of the best-known scientists in the world when Sagan decided to write a science fiction novel, he wasn't going to simply make up the science. For the scientific background, he consulted people who knew more than even he did about the subtleties of astrophysics.
Sagan called an old friend, American physicist Kip Thorne, who later recounted how he played a part in the author's quest for scientific plausibility. Sagan said to him, "I'm just finishing a novel about the human race's first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, and I'm worried. I want the science to be as accurate as possible. . . ."
Sagan's manuscript had his astronomer heroine, Eleanor ("Ellie") Arroway, entering a black hole near Earth and traveling through hyperspace to emerge near Vega, a star 26 light-years from Earth. Because he is one of the world's foremost experts on black holes, Thorne realized that Arroway would need a different sort of highway: "Carl's novel had to be changed."
When "Contact" appeared in 1985, Sagan had followed Thorne's advice. Arroway traveled by wormhole, a hypothetical shortcut through space that the laws of physics allows but which has not yet been proven to exist.
It is this sort of attention to scientific detail that helps make "Contact" so convincing. An alien civilization contacts Earth by sending us carefully polarized messages, layered like a palimpsest across each other. The messages include some of our own television broadcasts that the aliens have picked up from Earth -- including the first large-scale broadcast, Hitler's address to the legions at Nuremburg.
They also include blueprints for a "vehicle" that can travel through wormholes. Arroway and others decipher the coded message, and she's off on her big adventure.
In the novel, as in his nonfiction writings, Sagan conveys a sense of wonder while remaining grounded (mostly) in reasonable speculation. However, by addressing the human condition through the lives of believable characters, he also does well what many science fiction writers do not. They get lost in the space ships and forget the human beings that populate them. Sagan didn't forget the human beings.
Nonetheless, the book's transformation from paper to film has been a long and rocky road. For 12 years "Contact" has been trying to find a loving home in Hollywood. Numerous directors have considered the project. One along the way was Francis Ford Coppola. Less than one week after Sagan died in December 1996, Coppola filed a hefty suit against the author's heirs, claiming breach-of-contract.
Finally, directed by Robert Zemeckis, the film is scheduled to open this month. It is safe to assume that Hollywood's commitment to scientific verisimilitude will not equal Sagan's. Zemeckis's "Back to the Future" films must technically be defined as science fiction, but they're not in the same league as Sagan's book. Fans of the novel can only hope that the movie won't turn out to be as tedious as the director's "Forrest Gump."
Whatever its virtues, the movie is likely to make a lot of money. Of course, success is relative. Filmmakers use only those numbers that are followed by many zeroes. "Contact" was made for a budget of $90 million. In May, "Newsweek" predicted that the film might earn only $100 million at the box office. Its rivals for our spare time and disposable income include the latest Batman installment, more Spielbergian dinosaurs, further evidence of Disney's decline, and, God help us, a sequel to "Speed."
In the new film version of "Contact," Sagan's heroine is played by Jodie Foster. She contends that the film may be opening in the summer but it is not merely a summer movie. "I have a lot of respect for that star thing, where they 'open' movies and all that stuff," Foster said vaguely but diplomatically. "But I think people go to see my movies because they're interesting films -- not because I have good calves." Opposite Foster will be Matthew McConaughey, portraying a religious leader inspired by Ellie's close encounter. The film will not emphasize his calves, either.
Although it may (we can only hope) have more intelligence than most, the film has all the big-budget paraphernalia of the usual summer blockbuster. Zemeckis told "Entertainment Weekly," "This is by far the biggest and most technical movie I've ever worked on," and added, "and probably ever seen." As he did in "Gump," Zemeckis makes use of state-of-the-art computer effects -- in this case, for everything from crowd scenes to the view inside a wormhole.
Producer Steve Starkey summed up the filmmakers' ambitious and atypical goals: "We want people leaving the theater asking who they are, why they're here, and what our destination as human beings really is."
Michael Sims is a writer in Nashville.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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