First contact with aliens made today

As Don stood, looking at Sarah, the moment came back to him, and he shook his head in amazement. It had been front-page news, back when there were front pages, all over the world. On March first, 2009, a radio message had been received from a planet orbiting the star Sigma Draconis.

So says Chapter 2 of my 2007 Tor novel Rollback, which was a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Aurora Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, received starred reviews in Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, was a main selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, was serialized in Analog, made the American Library Association's list of the top 10 SF novels of the year, and will be read later this year in 25 installments on CBC Radio's Between the Covers.

Rollback tells the story of Sarah Halifax, the University of Toronto astronomer who decodes the message received today, and an attempt to prolong her life so that she can live long enough to engage in a decades-long dialog with the beings from Sigma Draconis.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site