>>11854906>but I wonder how good Sagan really is as at storytelling and worldbuildingPretty good. Just power through the chapter where Sagan talks about Ellie's blossoming sexuality.
The movie does an okay job of adapting the book in that it keeps the core of the narrative but because of the constraints of adapting a full length novel to a screen play it cuts out a lot of stuff and compresses the time.
In the book its decades from the first time the signal is detected, to when they even start building the machine, and it's not a one-man craft.
It's also pretty genius the way they reveal the true intent of the whole contact protocol.
The book is different enough that you're not going to be completely spoiled by the movie.
Also check out Stephen Baxter's Manifold books. The first one is about the absence of ayy lmaos and the contact they make is with human descendants at the end of time in a universe where only humans exist. They create a vacuum collapse in out universe to spawn daughter universes where there is more life, which is what the second book is about. The third one is about the down stream humans sending the moon through different universes in the manifold to take samples of all of the alternative-reality humans to study. It's the weakest of the three by far, but a lady does jerk off a cro magnon man, so it's not all bad.
