Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway is a gifted young girl with a strong aptitude for math and science. She follows her interests and earns a doctorate despite the lack of support from both family and her guides. She is director of a radio observatory when they start picking up obvious signs of intelligence, a signal transmitting a repeated sequence of prime numbers. Further analysis reveals a retransmission of Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth’s ionosphere.
Politicians from the world over get involved, including sworn enemies USA and USSR, and they all start examining the signal using several radio telescopes around the world. With their concentrated gaze, the transmission is discovered to hold a design for a machine described in a form of universal language. An international race ensues to build the machine described, but flaws in the Soviet design leave only the US design viable. The US machine is destroyed in a terrorist attack, and a third machine is revealed to have been privately built in Japan.
A group of five people, including Ellie, are chosen to enter the machine and activate it. The machine travels through a series of wormholes to a station near the galactic centre. There, they each meet an extra-terrestrial who takes on the form of a loved one. They travel back to Earth recording their progress throughout, but when they return, they realize that only seconds have elapsed on earth and all their recordings are wiped. The world dismisses their journey as a hoax, but Ellie finds proof in the digits of Pi, something the E.T. told her.
The premise and build-up is a excellent, and the tale is gripping. The political context is a little dated, but still relatable. The ending is a little dissatisfying, as much for the characters themselves as the reader. Still, this book is a must-read sci-fi classic. The movie gets a lot of the details off, and does not focus on Ellie’s growth as a scientist in the face of adversity at all, missing the point.