Date: November 3, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section
7; Page 12, Column 1; Book Review Desk Byline: By Gregory
Benford; Gregory Benford is a professor of Physics at the
University of California, Irvine. His most recent award is
''Artifact.''  Contact, By Carl Sagan. 432pp. New York: Simon &
Schuster. $18.95.  In the 1990's a radio telescope receives a
clear, powerful message from an alien civilization near the star
Vega. Scientific, political and religious reaction is extreme
and varied. The astronomer who led the search for such signals,
Eleanor Arrowway, finds herself cast from the familiar world of
scientific dispute into the big-stakes arena of power and
politics.  Such an opening plot could describe a fast-paced,
superheated international thriller, but to his credit, the
astronomer Carol Sagan, author of the best-selling science book
''Cosmos,'' keeps his tone clear, precise, unsensational. In
''Contact,'' his first novel, he gives us meticulous background
about the search for extraterrestrial