Customer Reviews

THE LISTENERS

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I can't tell you if James Gunn's `The Listeners' is better than `Contact' simply because I haven't read Carl Sagan's book. But I have read Gunn's, and I can say that Sagan would have to have moved several planets in order to come close to the quality of `The Listeners.'

Scientist Robert MacDonald is the director of "The Project," a study of sounds coming from the stars. MacDonald firmly believes that life is out there and that intelligent beings will eventually communicate with humans. He and others like him have been listening for over 50 years, but they've heard only silence. Until now.

A cryptic message arrives, but what does it mean? With the threat of the project being shut down, MacDonald desperately seeks to keep his vision alive, but the cost is high.

`The Listeners' is much more than just a "first contact" story. The writing is excellent and the drama is far above what you would expect. The more we learn about communicating with other beings, the more we find we don't know about communicating with each other. An excellent read.

240 pages

On a desperate hunt one summer day for that science-fiction rarity -- a sci-fi story that followed actual scientific laws and did not try my intelligence and patience, I accidentally discovered two books at a used book store. One of these books was The Listeners.

I was in heaven that late summer. This was real science fiction. This book was fantastic! There were no "starships" or "Deathstars." There were only well-drawn, complex, and brilliant characters using their scientific and technical gifts.Obviously, as one reviewer had already observed, this "first contact" novel was the inspiration for Carl Sagan's work "Contact." In my opinion, "The Listeners" is the better-written book, even though I will always remain a huge fan of the late - and forever great - Carl Sagan.

After seeing the reviews of this book I was really looking forward to it. In general I love the hard science fiction stories and prefer them overall. I had to struggle to finish this book and did not devour it like I do most novels I read. The reason for this and the reason I rate it so low are all the quotes in the book. You can't go a page without seeing some quote from another source. I really do like that stuff in my stories but my god every other thought in this story they go off and have to have some verse that has some deep inner meaning and importance. If I wanted to read Dante I would read Dante. If you took out all the extra quotes from other books and stories you would have a book half the size.

Again I usually love little tidbits of thought in my stories but moderation is the key, here it goes way overboard to the point I feel like the story itself wasn't fully developed to the level it could have been.

The core story - scientists on earth intercept an alien message, send a reply and get a surprising reply back from the aliens - is intriguing. However, around this story is wrapped layers and layers of needless (and repetitive) fluff. All the "human interest" elements just drag along, frustrating the reader and making him yearn for the plot to move forward. Even the human interest side stories are repetitive - each one involves somebody or something threatening the scientists' project, then in the final few pages, everything is resolved and the project plods along. The first message is received only halfway in the book, and lots of needless drama takes place before message contents are revealed. However, I must give credit to a very surprising ending, so try to skim over all the fluff and get to the end.

This book stands on its own in the crowded works of first contact stories. It begins in the year 2025, when the first radio signals from another world are discovered. The nature of the signals is slowly revealed, as a sort of mystery is investigated. The message contained in the signals is subject to some interpretation, and the sorting out of it all is enjoyable to read. The eventual answers are surprisingly moving. Earth resolves to send a response, but the distances involved will take decades to arrive, and any return response decades more. Will humans still be interested then? Will the Project, as the SETI-like organization is called, still exist?

The emphasis of this book is not on the aliens. It is firmly on the people of the Project. They are scientists and dreamers, who so firmly believe in their cause that they are willing to concede that their own mortalities will never allow them to know the success or failure of their endeavors. Yet they persist. The director we meet at the beginning is Robert MacDonald, who is mostly unaware of his influential nature with others. He is a genuine character. As the story is told, years pass and involvement passes from Robert to several grandchildren, who follow in his footsteps. Political and religious issues are briefly introduced, and add to the story. Characters do not receive a lot of individual attention, due to the short length of the book. But their natures and passions are apparent, and despite brevity, Gunn still manages to develop them sufficiently to elicit interest and empathy from the reader. Gunn's writing is superb. He chooses the right moments to display poetic writing, but still manages an effective conciseness as an overall tone.

There are plentiful quotations from various people and sources, some interesting, some not. There are excerpts of fictional news accounts of the time, which again work with varying degrees of success. Interestingly, for a book published in 1972, an african-american President has reached office for the first time in 2025. Racism still persists, however. That aspect of the story is brief, but memorable. Memorable is the right word for the book. It is well worth the read. It is a thoughtful and genuine study of the human need for companionship, and the lengths that some are willing to go to find it.

I too ran across this in a used book store. I had not heard of Gunn before but this book is an excellent surprise discovery. I have read dozens of good stories with a theme of "first contact" that do well until the end when they just taper off weakly or remain open ended. But this plot is based on a reasonable progression of events that actually finishes with a satisfying ending.

Secondary to the main plot the story also explores some hypothetical reactions to mankind's first encounter with other life. In the this respect I think the book is rather more optimistic than I myself would predict but irregardless of your take on this it does not detract from the core plot. And I agree with another reviewer that there are far too many quotations -- but they are clearly differentiated by font or page layout and can be easily skipped over if they get to be a bit much.

In summary, I highly recommend the book for the creative and satisfying core plot, but you may find yourself skipping some of the padding.

Over 90% of this book is boring filler. So instead of wasting your time, just read the plot summary on Wikipedia. I recommend the plot summary instead of completely skipping the book, because there is one interesting idea in the book about the origin and propagation of the messages.

If you want a book with lots of original ideas about a message from the stars read His Master's Voice. Lem's book predates this one by 4 years...

The book centers on the life of Robert MacDonald, an engineer who has spent his life on the Project-a giant listening post in Puerto Rico that scans the heavens for signs of life out there. Just as the project is threatened with demise, a signal is received from the planet Capella. Religious fanatics are convinced that it's a message from God. MacDonald deciphers the message which is a basic primer to their counting system and what appears to be a note that their sun is expanding and killing off their planet. MacDonald gets permission to reply. The catch is that it takes forty five years to reach Capella and then their reply would take forty five more years to get back. At the end of the book, MacDonald's grandson is running the Project to hear the Reply. On that day, ninety years after receiving the message, the Reply comes and the World is listening.

I read the Listeners when I was in college in the 80s. The edition I read had a forward written by Carl Sagan. The book was truly visionary and insightful. Some years later Contact came out and I was amazed at how Sagan had comletely stolen Mr. Gunn's plot. What really purturbed me was that nowhere in the credits did Mr. Sagan even mention James Gunn. It just seemed to me that Sagan just stood by and took credit for the entire story. To Mr. Gunn: The Listeners is a much better story than Contact! Thanks.

This is a story about the success of SETI. That's a grand thing to imagine, but I don't feel that Gunn constructed a compelling human story around the technological one. The project grinds along for generations, so the narrative is told from the point of view of a succession of characters. I didn't feel that the characters had much that was interesting for them to do while the radio waves were crisscrossing interstellar space for decades.

A secondary issue is that the book feels extremely dated. "Girls bustled down the halls with coffee pots, and men stood near the water fountain, talking earnestly." Quite a bit of the book deals with computers, and those parts are pretty laughable from today's perspective.