The Listeners

When I read this, I knew where Carl Sagan had gotten the genesis for Contact -- his novel is in many ways a close retelling of this one, which is a very interesting story of the first SETI researchers and what happens when they actually identify signals from an alien culture. (But since Sagan blurbed this book for Gunn, I'm guessing that Gunn would have considered Contact an homage, rather than plagiarism.)

This is not so much a novel as a series of interrelated chapters narrated by various personalities, liberally peppered with relevant historical and literary quotations; it is definitely worth the read.