On Sagan.
If you wish to talk about what Carl Sagan means to science fiction, you must first invent the universe.
It’s a universe filled with science. That doesn’t mean a universe in which science is the order of the day — that’s unavoidable and ever-present. Carl Sagan’s particular cosmos is a universe in which the existence and interaction of natural forces according to the rules of science is, in fact, a recipe for endless and amazing things with which the sky is just bursting – a fourteen-billion-year-old box of secrets waiting to be examined and marveled over, a series of marvelous stories the universe just couldn’t wait to tell.
When I was a kid, Contact was the gateway book that brought me over from fantasy to the world of science fiction. It was a woman-led space opera mostly concerned with women’s opportunities in science and the tangles of earthly politics, one that ends with first contact and never even touches another planet, but I didn’t have the genre vocabulary yet to classify it. I only knew… Read more »