SAGAN, Carl

(1934-)

   US astronomer, planetary scientist and author, professor of astronomy and space sciences and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. CS playedan active role in the MARS experiments carried out by Mariner 9 (1971), worked also on the Viking and Voyager projects, and was responsible for placing a message to alien life aboard the interstellar spaceship Pioneer 10 (Jupiter flyby 1973). He is co-founder and president of the PlanetarySociety, a very large space-interest group. For 12 years he was editor-in-chief of Icarus, a journal devoted to planetary research. From the mid-1970s, through books and pre-eminently through his 13-part PBS tv documentary series Cosmos (1980), which he wrote and presented, CS became perhaps the best known of all US scientific popularizers.His relevance to sf had been evident much earlier than that, however, through his speculations about LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; he is one of the comparatively few scientists to have given serious thought to this question. His first book was an updating of a translated 1963 book by the Russian astronomer I.S. Shklovskii; the collaboration, published under both their names, wasIntelligent Life in the Universe (1966). CS's next books in this area were The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (1973), "produced" by Jerome Agel, and Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (anth 1973), which he edited. He wrote on EVOLUTION (see also ORIGIN OF MAN) inDragons of Eden: A Speculative Essay on the Origin of Human Intelligence (1977) - it won a Pulitzer Prize - and published a collection of speculative essays (some on PSEUDO-SCIENCE) in Broca's Brain (coll 1979), including "Science Fiction: A Personal View". There followed the HUGO-winning book of the tv series, Cosmos *(1980) - it was on thebest-seller lists for over a year - and a book about comets, particularly Halley's comet, Comet (1985) with Ann Druyan (his wife).Collaboration withDruyan became the subject of much speculation in the case of CS's sf novel, Contact (1985), for which he had received a $2 million advance in 1981 when it was still unwritten. It was alleged that this novel was acollaboration with Druyan, rather than by CS alone; they countered that only the (unproduced) screenplay based on the book had been collaborative. The book itself is unexceptionable and unsensational. It invests sciencewith high glamour in its NEAR FUTURE story of a successful SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project; a rather good BLACK-HOLE mechanism for interstellar travel is part of the flatly characterized story, which grips in other respects, especially in its portrayal of the way SCIENTISTS think. The plot elements about a COMMUNICATION from space giving instructions for building a machine are reminiscent of the UK tv serial A FOR ANDROMEDA (1961). The book has a strong religious focus.

   PN

   Other works: UFOs: A Scientific Debate (anth 1973) ed with Thornton Page; Other Worlds (1975) Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (1978) with Ann Druyan; many others.

   See also: ALIENS; ASTRONOMY; MATHEMATICS; POETRY; TERRAFORMING; XENOBIOLOGY.