Carl Sagan is a scientist of quality who is also a writer of quality. He has often shown that he can write better than most science writers, and he proves it again with The Cosmic Connection, a book that is very nearly perfect.

If The Cosmic Connection has a fault, it is that it derives a good deal from Sagan's previous books…. This new book could be described as a carefully watered-down summary of the previous writings, arranged for a general audience.

But that description would be unfair. What Sagan has done is to leave out the mathematics, insert a good deal of philosophy and let himself roam freely. For a lesser writer, that could be a disastrous combination. But since Sagan is a man of great intelligence, wit and insight, it is a success on every level.

To illustrate this with specific quotes is difficult because of Sagan's style. He builds to his effects with care; his paragraphs, not his sentences, are the basic unit. A reviewer must paraphrase instead of quoting.

Sagan starts by describing his theme—the possibility of communicating with other intelligent civilizations in the universe. He defends the necessity of space exploration in the most convincing terms that I have encountered….

[His real point is that] space exploration is psychologically important for the human race, now that the earth has become a small, well-trodden enclave.

From earth, Sagan moves on to the planets. He has played an important role in the exploration of Mars. Although he is full enough of his subject as to give Mars more room than it might deserve—and emphasizes his own theories about its history—he manages to be consistently interesting.

Then to life elsewhere. Sagan first describes, more poetically than scientifically, the process by which life arose and flourished on earth, and proposes that the same process is almost certainly going on, and has gone on for millennia, elsewhere in the galaxy and the universe. There are almost certainly millions of civilizations like ours out there, he believes, and we have not heard from any of them partly because we haven't been listening, partly because the distances are great, and perhaps because their methods of communication are far beyond our understanding.

Does this sound like heavy going? Well, consider the way Sagan argues against the possibility of UFOs as visitors from other civilizations. First he proves mathematically that there is no Santa Claus by pointing out that, given only one second per stocking, it would take Santa three years, not a single night, to fill all the stockings. Then he makes a rough estimate of the number of civilizations in the galaxy and goes on to calculate that there just is not enough metal in the galaxy to make all the spacecraft that would be needed for a true UFO visit. The demonstration is a marvelous combination of wit and science.

Writing a review that contains hardly a word of complaint is an uncomfortable and unfamiliar exercise. But aside from expressing envy that Sagan does so well as a sideline what others do with great labor as their life's work, there is nothing to say about The Cosmic Connection.