David Brin's Existence is an excellent 300-page novel hiding in a 500-page novel amid a couple of hundred pages of self-indulgent garbage. If you're good at skipping over junk (for starters, ignore the blog-post styled sections), it's a good read. At the end is a beautiful metaphor for the social mechanisms governing the scientific community. And the story revolves around remote aliens transmitting knowledge to humans.

https://www.amazon.com/Existence-David-Brin/dp/0765342626