The Listeners

The Listeners is a 1972 science fiction novel by American author James Gunn. It centers on the search for interstellar communication and the effect that receipt of a message has. Although the search and the message are the unifying background of the novel, the chapters explore the personal effect of these events have on the lives of the characters. Style The Listeners is a modernist novel with a nonlinear narrative. Linear narrative and dialogue are often interspersed with quotations from real authors and their works, fragments of fictional news reports, and snippets of thought and dialogue from named and unnamed sources (including a supercomputer). Italic type is often used. Among the more notable individuals quoted in the novel are scientist Giuseppe Cocconi, poet Kirby Congdon, Walter de la Mare, scientist Freeman Dyson, futurist and economist Herman Kahn, poet Alice Meynell, scientist and author Carl Sagan, and poet William Butler Yeats. Many quotations and some of the text are in Spanish (as the first Robert MacDonald's wife is Hispanic, and both characters speak the language). Each of the "Computer" chapters represents material the supercomputer collects in its attempts to better translate and understand the alien message it is receiving. These chapters use a historiographic approach which combines elements of futurology, literature, and science, and strongly resemble similar segments and elements in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and A. E. van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The final chapter, "Translations," translates many of the foreign language quotations into English for readers.