Carl Sagan · 1985 · global

Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, his only one. Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer who has listened to the sky since childhood, detects a message from the star Vega: prime numbers, an old broadcast of Adolf Hitler, and the blueprints for a Machine. Her search carries her from a Wisconsin childhood through Harvard, Caltech and the deserts of New Mexico to a consortium in Paris, a sabotaged Machine in Wyoming and a second in Japan, and at last through a wormhole to the centre of the galaxy and back, in search of contact and of meaning.

1. 1
   Madison, Wisconsin

   Eleanor 'Ellie' Arroway grows up in Wisconsin, a child who teaches herself to mend a radio and lies in the grass feeling the Earth turn. Her father Ted feeds her curiosity and her love of numbers; when he dies and her mother marries the cold John Staughton, Ellie pours everything into science.

2. 2
   Harvard

   A scholarship takes Ellie to Harvard, where she reads physics and mathematics and first grasps how strange and beautiful a number like pi really is.

3. 3
   Caltech

   At Caltech she earns her doctorate in radio astronomy under David Drumlin, and falls in with Peter Valerian, who plants the question that will shape her life: is anyone else out there?

4. 4
   Arecibo

   A posting to the great dish at Arecibo, in Puerto Rico, sets her properly on the trail of SETI, listening to the sky for a signal that never seems to come.

5. 5
   New Mexico

   As director of Project Argus, 131 radio telescopes in the New Mexico desert, Ellie finally catches it: a run of prime numbers from the star Vega, wrapped around an old broadcast of the 1936 Olympics, and beneath that the Message, the plans for a Machine.

6. 6
   Washington

   At the White House, with the President and her science adviser Ken der Heer, the discovery turns into politics. The world erupts; the preachers Palmer Joss and Billy Jo Rankin press Ellie on faith, and she defends her trust in evidence.

7. 7
   Paris

   At the World Message Consortium in Paris, Ellie and her Soviet friend Vaygay lay out what the Message describes: a great Machine with a chamber and five chairs, an invitation some delegates fear is a Trojan horse.

8. 8
   Wyoming

   The American Machine rises in Wyoming. Ellie loses her seat to Drumlin, and then, during a test, a saboteur's bomb tears the Machine apart and kills him. The project seems finished.

9. 9
   Hokkaido

   Then Hadden reveals a secret: a Machine quietly completed in Hokkaido from spare components. On the last day of 1999 five people from five nations, Ellie among them, climb into the dodecahedron and the spinning shells begin to turn.

10. 10
    Pensacola

    Through a network of wormholes the travellers reach a station near the centre of the galaxy and step onto a beach the Caretakers have shaped from their own memories. There a being wearing her father's face tells Ellie the universe is no accident, and where to find the proof. (In the novel the beach is unnamed and unimaginably far away; Pensacola, the beach of the 1997 film, stands in for it on this map.)

11. 11
    New Mexico

    Home again, the travellers find only minutes have passed and their recordings are blank, and officials cry hoax. But back at Argus Ellie sets a computer running on the digits of pi, and deep in base eleven it draws a perfect circle out of zeros and ones, a signature folded into the fabric of the cosmos.