Astronomer Carl Sagan was
born on November 9, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from the
University of Chicago, where he studied planets and explored theories of
extraterrestrial intelligence. He was named director of Cornell’s
Laboratory for Planetary Studies in 1968 and worked with NASA on several
projects. An anti-nuclear activist, he was taken too soon, dying in
1996 at only 62 years of age. He was probably the most well-known
scientist of the 1970s and 1980s and became a household name when his 13
episode PBS mini-series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was released in 1980. I quickly went out and bought the first edition of the newly released hard copy companion piece Cosmos which
had also been published in 1980. Each of the book's 13 illustrated
chapters corresponds to one of the 13 episodes of the television series.
E1 · The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
E2 · One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue
E3 · Harmony of the Worlds
E4 · Heaven and Hell
E5 · Blues for a Red Planet
E6 · Travellers' Tales
E7 · The Backbone of Night
E8 · Journeys in Space and Time
E9 · The Lives of the Stars
E10 · The Edge of Forever
E11 · The Persistence of Memory
E12 · Encyclopaedia Galactica
E13 · Who Speaks for Earth?
The
TV Series was wonderful and so was the book which quickly became the
best-selling science book ever published in the English language and the
first science book to sell more than half a million copies. Though
spurred in part by the popularity of the television series, Cosmos
became a best-seller by its own regard, reaching hundreds of thousands
of readers.
Shortly after Cosmos was published, Sagan received a $2 million advance for the novel Contact, which also became a best seller and spawned the well known movie of the same name, starring Jodie Foster.
Cosmos
ushered in a dramatic increase in visibility for science books, opening
up new options and readership for the previously fledgling genre.
I was out and about recently and saw a copy of his Cosmos sequel Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
which was published in 1994, only 2 years before his death. It was
inspired by the famous 1990 Pale Blue Dot photograph, for which Sagan
provided a poignant description. In the book, Sagan mixed philosophy
about the human place in the universe with a description of the current
knowledge about the Solar System. He also detailed a human vision for
the future. In 2023, the audiobook of Pale Blue Dot, read by Sagan, was
selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United
States National Recording Registry as being "culturally, historically,
or aesthetically significant."
So these are two significant
scientific books and I'm now lucky enough to have First Editions of
both. Most of the significant exploration of the solar system had
already been done by that stage and it was a time when we confidently
looked towards the heavens and envisaged explorations even further
afield. What would he think of the world at this juncture in time, riven
by wars and differing ideologies, with the almost anti-science world
view taken by many of the right wing.
