Nick Sagan (Carl's son) has a blog!
A few days ago, less than a week after reading Keay Davidson's biography of Carl Sagan, I was browsing through the library and randomly came across a science fiction novel by Carl's son Nick Sagan (the third of Sagan's five children). Although I had heard of Nick's career as a TV writer (including, appropriately, for Star Trek series The Next Generation and Voyager), I had no idea that he wrote science fiction books. In fact he has written two SF novels so far: Idlewild (2003) and Edenborn (2004). I can't opine on the novels, not having read them, but I'm pretty sure that Steven Baxter is right when he says that Nick "has a sense of wonder in his DNA." ;)
So I checked his site (see the pictures page for some photos of him with Carl!), and he has a brand-new blog that just debuted earlier this week! In fact, it debuted on Halloween and in his first post he weighs in on his favorite holiday (mine too; in fact, I found my own way to tie it in with SF).
(I'm trying to think of other personal websites by children of famous people; the only one that comes to mind is that of humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers's daughter Natalie Rogers.)
Welcome to the blogosphere, Nick!
categories: blogging :: carl sagan
So I checked his site (see the pictures page for some photos of him with Carl!), and he has a brand-new blog that just debuted earlier this week! In fact, it debuted on Halloween and in his first post he weighs in on his favorite holiday (mine too; in fact, I found my own way to tie it in with SF).
(I'm trying to think of other personal websites by children of famous people; the only one that comes to mind is that of humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers's daughter Natalie Rogers.)
Welcome to the blogosphere, Nick!
categories: blogging :: carl sagan
Comments
About trying to tie Halloween in with science fiction: We think along the same lines. I like the holiday so much, I made it my main character's nickname in Idlewild, Edenborn and the forthcoming Everfree.
By the way, I love that Méliès moon / jack 'o lantern! Did you create that? I literally laughed out loud.
Yes, I made that image. The funny thing is, that I had been thinking of posting about Verne and his translations for a while, and the idea for the image only occurred to me on Halloween. I started making it at about 9 or 10 PM and it was after 11 when I finally got it to look right ... but it just had to be done on that day! Glad you like it. I also like the way you riffed on the "pumpkin moon" theme on your own blog.
Although in many ways he's closer to fantasy than SF, a lot of Ray Bradbury's stories have a Halloween-ish feel to them, and of course he sometimes used Halloween themes explicitly, such as in his novel The Halloween Tree. Also, John W. Campbell's Unknown magazine comes to mind, given that most of the writers were science fiction writers from Campbell's Astounding and brought a science fictional approach to the magazine's traditional fantasy subject matter. The horror side of Halloween was well captured in such classics as Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife and "Smoke Ghost", Jack Williamson's Darker Than You Think, Theodore Sturgeon's "It", Alfred Bester's "Hell is Forever", P. Schulyer Miller's "Over the River", and Robert Heinlein's "They"; while the more humorous side was likewise shown in equally good stories like A. M. Phillips's The Mislaid Charm and L. Sprague de Camp's "Nothing in the Rules".