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

Or for a longer read, David Brin gives it an excellent and lengthy treatment in Existence [1]. He even works in an exhaustive analysis of the possible answers to the Fermi Paradox, as well as possible events constituting The Great Filter. I won't give spoilers but it's definitely worth reading.

  [1] http://www.amazon.com/Existence-David-Brin/dp/0765342626/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1428283635&sr=8-3&keywords=existence