Music writer and astronomy enthusiast Jonathan Scott is surely the best qualified tour guide through this exceptional part of modern history in the United States of America and its space program. Voyager 1 had an ambitious flight plan and, possibly or probably, the chance to be discovered by other life forms in the galaxy. And if so, how to make the most of an opportunity to communicate with them.
From the idea to send a recording into space to the actual creation of the Golden Record is a massive story beginning in 1977 when the brilliant polymath Carl Sagan was chosen to the lead the group chosen to create it.
How to represent the planet Earth in music, photographs, languages and drawings while still navigating budget, bureaucracy, politics and the rest of the usual suspects that help, hinder, or derail such a project makes a fascinating, even suspenseful read while giving a sociological snapshot of the times. Find out the holdup over the controversy and censoring of a line drawing of a human male and female!
The Golden Record includes a message from then President Jimmy Carter, and a playlist that includes Beethoven, Chuck Berry, and even from a small community in the Solomon Islands. And it’s all still out there, somewhere.
Fascinating read for aficionados of the space program and pop culture history. Brilliantly written and documented.

Bloomsbury Sigma and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record. I was under no obligation to review this book and my opinion is freely given.

40 years ago, a group of scientists, artists, and writers gathered together to work on a special project for the cosmos. The result was the Voyager Golden Record, a playlist of audio recordings from around the world. Famed astronomer Carl Sagan and the rest of the team developed this mix-tape as a message of peace and a glimpse into the American psyche.

Author Jonathan Scott did not do this historical event justice in The Vinyl Frontier, choosing to inject too much of his own personal story, which had no relevance to the book as a whole. The long footnotes went off on tangents and the attempt at humor throughout the book fell on deaf ears. Had The Vinyl Frontier been just about the science, instead of the personal lives and choices of the participants, this would have been a much better book. The narrative did not hold my interest and I found myself wanting to skip over whole sections of the book. For these reasons, I would not recommend The Vinyl Frontier to other readers.

while not really presenting any new information about the golden record sent out into the cosmos on Voyager, Scott's work does give us the human stories that went about composing THE human story we sent out into the dark with the hope of finding someone/something new

Im a space geek so I love books about interesting subjects on space exploration and I felt this book covered the Golden Record with amazing detail and presented information in a fun and interesting way. I would recommend this book to all readers.

1977 seems like yesterday to me, but I'm not naive enough to think that everyone remembers the debate around what to include that reflected US to any sentient being that might encounter the Voyager space probe. Jonathan Scott relates the story of the proposal, collection and creation of the Golden Record. The Golden Record was created in part through input from Carl Sagan, and he and the players in this book are well represented. The thought that aliens might someday access the Golden Record and the conclusions they might draw from the music, art, and sounds contained is the stuff of dreams. I really appreciated Mr Scott's relaying of the backstory of each item included on the Golden Record, and I especially was impressed by the heretofore undisclosed revelations as well. I think this The Vinyl Frontier would make a fascinating book discussion selection. I definitely wanted to talk about it during and after my reading.
I received my copy through NetGalley under no obligation.

I was trying to think where I was in 1977. What songs were playing and what I was doing? During this time that wasn't important enough for me to remember, some of the greatest minds such as Carl Sagan and note worthy musicians were working on history. Imagine what it took for someone to come up with this idea and make it happen? NASA allowing this to be sent on the Voyager probe for future races including our own is amazing. Many of the musicians that were interviewed for this masterpiece of musical history are included as well as a variety of music from all over the world. Many things were placed as this the play list of the music, pictures and even a message of peace from President Jimmy Carter. Although some of the music may be considered outdated, it is still part of the world then. I cannot even imagine this being found after so many decades or centuries. Such a great book and there are many whom I will recommend this book. I received this book from Net Galley and the Publisher for a honest review. I voluntarily read this book.

A bit slow in spots, but still a cool read. Space and records? What's not to enjoy!
A good non-fiction read.

Fascinating!! Like apparently many Americans, I had no idea the golden record was sent into space. How sad is that? Especially since I was alive when it happened... I was born in 1973. Granted, I was very young in 1977, but I was still alive during major chunks of the space exploration., yet never heard a word about this. The concept of reaching out throughout time and space is fascinating, as is Carl Sagan himself, as were the discussions over what to include and how to send it.

The personalities, the science, and the humanity behind it all were incredibly interesting. The writing is a delightful blend of fact and snarky little side notes and fun facts. Reading it was like talking to your best friend from grade school. You know the one - his glasses might have never stayed on his nose, but he always knew everything about everything... I found the footnotes distracting only because of the translation of the document to my Kindle, otherwise the information they provided helped clarify a lot of things for me.

I thoroughly enjoyed exploring this pocket of space and time. And how cool would it be if in the remainder of my lifetime somebody actually responded?? :-)

NB - I don't know if it was my digital copy or what, but it seemed as though the continuity was off in a number of sections, skipping between references to the audio and visual portions of the record. They didn't jive with the chapter headings and felt like abrupt skips back and forth rather than intentional transitions. If this was just my digital copy somehow, no big deal. But if the book does in fact skip back and forth in such a fashion, it is a little confusing to go from a chronological description of the pictures to suddenly read about music to suddenly read about pictures again...

In 1977, NASA approved a team led by Carl Sagan to create a message representing Earth and humanity that would travel into deep space on the Voyager probe.  The message would contain a playlist of music, sounds, and pictures; essentially it would be a mixtape introduction to Earth for any extraterrestrials that may discover the probe at some point in time.

"When a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in Ithaca, New York, to begin work on the Voyager Golden Record, they were attempting to capture the soul of humanity in 90 minutes of music." *

One of the first decisions to be made was how the message would be delivered as it needed to be preserved for a long period of time in the harsh elements of space.  A record would allow a great deal of information to be preserved in a compact space and the groove could carry not just sound but also encoded photographs.

Next, there needed to be some basic criteria for selecting music and images.  An important early decision was to avoid politics and religion (which would confuse extraterrestrials) and to skip artwork entirely; the music would be the art and the photographs would be the facts.  Concerned that images of war and violence could be seen as a threat, the group decided to leave this part of history out of an introduction to extraterrestrials and instead promote Earth as seen "on a good day".

The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record is a fascinating look at the group who created the record with insight into the music and photographs that were selected.  The author conducted interviews with those directly involved in selecting the content on the Golden Record and compiled many facts from the testimony of the Voyager team found in Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record, written in 1978, just months after the probe launch.

There is some "info-dumping" with scientific explanations that are at times overwhelming and/or confusing for readers with little-to-no background in the field (*ahem* that would be me!), Scott does an excellent job of discussing the facts in an entertaining and conversational way.

While The Vinyl Frontier focuses primarily on the music, it also gives readers a brief look into NASA's opinion of the record and its message (and the one thing they didn't want to send to ETs that could offend the American people... *spoiler alert: it was the female anatomy*) and what the U.S. government added at the last minute (*spoiler alert: it was a list of names of officials ...because ETs will totally understand and appreciate four pages of names!*)

The Voyagers 1 and 2 both contain a copy of the Golden Record; a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk with an aluminum cover electroplated in uranium-238, which has a half life of almost 4.5 billions years.  
I like to imagine extraterrestials finding the record sometime in the next billion years, understanding the mathematical instructions to play it, and hearing Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode for the first time in deep space.

Both Voyagers served us well, gathering data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Nepture throughout the 1980's.  Now, they're cruising in deep space, carrying a message that may someday be heard by intelligent life we cannot even begin to fathom.

"Both spacecraft are still beaming back information about their surrounding through the Deep Space Network. We are still receiving readings from these amazing machines, almost half a century after their launch, with instruments aboard enabling technicians and astronomers on Earth to study magnetic fields, investigate low-energy charged particles, cosmic rays, plasma, and plasmas waves. Both Voyagers are expected to keep at least one of their functioning instruments going into the mid-2020s." *

Thanks to Bloomsbury Sigma and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review. The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record is scheduled for release on May 21, 2019.

*Quotes included are from a digital advance reader's copy and are subject to change upon final publication.

Stars: ✦✦✦.5✧

+1 | The idea is different and fascinating to me, but definitely not something for everyone.

+1 | A well done blend of facts with also the authors voice and stories mixed in.

+1 | The order was well thought out, it made sense as a whole.

+/-0.5 | Content. It covered so man genres of content. Not all interested me and sometimes slowed it down, but there's something for anyone vaguely interested.

-1 | Not everything included was needed.

The unknown and untold story behind the Voyager golden record. Jonathan Scott has done a superb job at recounting a phase of U.S. space history few know about.