Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan, 1980

Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934-December 20, 1996) was an astronomer, planetary scientist, and science communicator, spending much of his professional career at Cornell University. Vonnegut wrote a review of the book Intelligent Life in the Universe, a collaboration between Sagan and the Russian astrophysicist Iosef Shklovski, for Life magazine in 1966.

According to a New York Times article by John Leonard, Sagan was encouraging science fiction writers to witness the landing the Viking 1 probe on Mars from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Originally scheduled for July 4, 1976—the American bicentennial—the landing was delayed until the 20th, the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Among those invited was Vonnegut, who had planned to attended but ultimately stayed at his home in the Hamptons, noting this turned out to be wise, since "who would want to wait around for two weeks in Pasadena?" At first saying he was relieved that only scientific instruments were sent to Mars, he admitted to wanting to know more about its atmosphere, saying it was better than visiting the Moon, about which we could easily conjecture, and that Ray Bradbury had said there would be colonies there in twenty years. Leonard further stated than Vonnegut's then-upcoming novel, Slapstick, due out that fall was a return "to formal science-fiction". Also invited was Isaac Asimov, who said Sagan had asked him "a dozen times", but who did not attend since he did not fly.

Sagan sent Vonnegut a copy of his 1977 work The Dragons of Eden, which would eventually win the Pulitzer Prize. He replied that he was glad to receive the "shapely companion for The Cosmic Connection", an earlier work by Sagan, and mentioned plans for new book of his own involving a message to Earth from Tralfamadore. Sagan responded that he "always argued that decoding an interstellar message will be the easiest part" but understanding the message would be more difficult. He mentioned looking forward to reading Vonnegut's book when it's done and asked if he'd ever considered visiting his "old Alma Mater—say, to give a university-wide lecture?" First calling the Mars landings, in which Sagan participated, "the greatest poems of all time", Vonnegut states that he might visit the campus to look around and maybe steal and burn his transcripts, but that lecturing makes him "feel seasick" now. He would eventually return to the Cornell campus on May 3, 1980 for that year's annual banquet for The Cornell Sun.

In a 1978 article published in the New York Times Magazine on science fiction, Sagan praised The Sirens of Titan, which he called a "superb epistemological novel". Its conception of Titan as possessing a pleasant environment gained some interest among planetary scientists since it had been shown that the moon has "a dense atmosphere and perhaps higher temperatures than expected". He pointed out that Vonnegut was a physics major at Cornell and "naturally knowledgeable about the latest findings in astronomy". In 1944 this included the discovery of methane on Titan, the first satellite known to have an atmosphere. He argued it should not be surprising that in science fiction "art imitates life" since many of the best writers in the genre have science or engineering backgrounds, citing specifically Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. Sagan's widow Ann Druyan issued a comment that he and Vonnegut "knew each other and liked each other very much". When she edited the 2006 book The Varieties of Scientific Experience, complied from Sagan's 1985 lectures on religion and science, she saw to it that Vonnegut received an advanced reading copy. He subsequently contributed a blurb when the book went to print: "Find here a major fraction of this stunningly valuable legacy left to all of us by a great human being. I miss him so".