Sarah Scoles
Sarah Scoles's new book is Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: Why did you decide to write this book about astronomer Jill Tarter?--Marshal Zeringue
A: If I’m being totally honest, I set out to write a novel, and found I wasn’t great with plot, so I decided to think about a nonfiction topic I could bring storytelling to, without having to come up with the events myself.
I had watched [the movie] Contact when I was a young teenager, and was fascinated by the topic. I worked at a telescope in West Virginia and in Puerto Rico, and was mulling it over, doing research on SETI and Jill. She was the basis for the main character in Contact.
She had done a lot of interviews, but the books written about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence were 20 years old, and no one had told the full story of Jill’s life.
Q: So what happened when you approached her?
A: It took her a few months to return my email. She asked me to send an outline. We met in person at a conference, and I...[read on]
