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| Last updated 5.8.06 | The following Q & A sessions are currently available:  Sci Fi Weekly Interview by John Joseph Adams JJA: The book seems to say that humans are genetically predisposed toward violence. Is our only chance at world peace to do something as drastic as in the novel, or is it achievable by some other means? NS: Without a drastic change to human nature, I think it's reasonable to doubt that world peace will ever be anything more than a pipe dream. Thousands of years of recorded human history, and look at where we are today. Look at what we are. Genetically, we're not so far from chimpanzees. Are chimps capable of cooperation, compassion, tolerance and compromise? Yes, but they're far more likely to form tyrannical hierarchies and then persecute, rape and kill chimps from other groups. That's deeply ingrained primate behavior. It goes back millions of years. A few thousand years of human culture and philosophy have a hard time standing up to "might makes right." In the animal kingdom, might typically prevails, and our genes know this. They tell us to fight or flee, lead or obey, exploit or be exploited. We can talk about egalitarian utopias all we like, but the aggression lurks within us just the same.
Q & A excerpted from Sci Fi Weekly. Click here for the complete interview. SF Site Interview by Kilian Melloy KM: How do you stay in touch with that teenager part of yourself? Halloween, in Idlewild, and the various young humans and post-humans in the sequel, Edenborn, really do sound like teenagers, but I think a lot of people forget what it was like to be at that age -- certainly, there are plenty of parents who find it impossible to relate to their own teens. NS: I can't explain it except to say that that 15-year-old to 18-year-old part of myself is very, very strong. I think that within us, like a series of Russian dolls, are younger versions of ourselves, all buried away. Part of... I was going to say, part of the craft of writing, but also part of being human and being self-aware, is to find connections to those earlier parts of yourself, so you can chart how you've grown. KM: In Edenborn, your teenagers are trying to figure these things out. But because human society is now so miniscule, they things they do and the mistakes they make are so magnified that some of their actions -- directly, or through what you call in the book "the law of unintended consequences" -- turn out to be quite catastrophic. NS: When you have a planet of billions of people, it's sometimes hard to affect things. No matter how catastrophic a mistake you make, unless you're in a position of power, it's unlikely to affect a large enough number of people to really, really change the course of things. And there are, perhaps unfortunately, people in positions of power who can do that, but most people can't. If you're in a smaller group, if you're a bunch of survivors -- which is really what the books are about, people trying to come back from a terrible catastrophe and rebuild things -- then just a quirk of human nature here or there, if you have only twenty people in the world instead of six billion, you can do some tremendous damage one way or another, and dramatically it creates interesting scenarios that way. KM: Your books step away, at times, from that anthrocentric supposition that, "Of course these are the heroes -- they're human beings in a world now devoid of human life." And, "Of course they are going to succeed -- they are our heroes!" You impart to the reader a genuine sense of the possibility that they might not succeed -- that the next book might end up with everyone dying, and that's the end of humankind forever, and maybe that's not even such a huge tragedy after all. Do you have a temptation, as you contemplate the third book, to allow us to see humanity fail? NS: I haven't decided. I'm trying to figure it out -- I'm trying to figure out what speaks to me. I think that's really good, first of all, because I've read too many books and seen too many movies where you know that good will always triumph over evil, and the hero will survive the villain and wind up with the girl, and everything will work itself out. I think that's an important myth that needs to be retold, that's reassuring -- but it has no power if the hero always wins, and always gets the girl, and everything always works itself out. [If that's the case], then why do you care? If you've been given a glimpse of hell, but it never actually materializes, then you stop fearing it. Q & A excerpted from www.sfsite.com. Click here for the complete interview. Audiobook Cafe Interview by Lance Eaton LE: How did you conceive of Edenborn? NS: My first book, Idlewild, has children coming of age to inherit a depopulated world. I wanted to write about the future of those kids. When they become parents themselves, what do they teach their kids? How do they put their stamp on the world? Can they coexist? Edenborn is an exploration of those questions. LE: In Idlewild, the story is complete first hand through {the character} Halloween's eyes while the second book is first person through several people and we barely see much of Halloween until the last third of the book. Why the switch? Was this planned or was it something that happened as you wrote the second part? NS: For the most part it was planned. The first book was seen through Halloween's eyes, and I wanted to open the next book up a bit. If you look at Idlewild as a story of Halloween ultimately turning his back on his peers, Edenborn has to follow other characters, Pandora especially, in an attempt to pull him back into the fold. From the get go I knew I wanted to follow Pandora and Halloween, and early on I had the notion that showing what life is like for the younger generation might be better than just hearing what it's like through their parents. That decision led to the other voices in the book. LE: While writing these first person entries in Edenborn, did you find yourself enjoying writing some characters over others or becoming fond of a particular character? Did you start disliking certain characters? NS: I find that if I don't like a character on some level I can't write about him at all. But I'm fortunate that, creatively speaking, I can usually find something I like in the most despicable sort. (If only it worked out that way in the real world.) To me, the best villains are always sympathetic. Knowing why they do what they do adds a certain layer of poignancy, and I love the complexities that arise when I'm rooting for and against the villain at the same time. LE: In Penelope, you start off with a sweet, if somewhat misled child and you effectively transition her into a villain. How did you work and develop her character? NS: As a screenwriter, I adapted two coming-of-age SFF classics: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Like the Harry Potter books, each novel is about a kid who's taken out of his element to a place where he has to compete and prove himself. The story starts out with the kid not fitting in, getting bullied, and desperately wanting to go home, but the conceit is that he's really the best. He's special. Pretty soon he starts to prove himself and not only earns the respect of his peers but also their jealousy and fear--so in many ways these are stories about how hard it is to be special--how it's lonely at the top. And it's a potent fantasy because so many kids grow up feeling like they don't fit in with their peer group. It's very comforting to think you don't fit because everyone's jealous of you, because deep down they know you're really the best. But not everyone can be Harry Potter. We can't all be special--by definition only one person can be the best. So what happens when you discover the truth? What happens when your dream dies? That's the question I wanted to answer with Penny. I'm very proud of how she turned out, and I just love what Jenna Lamia brought to the role for the audiobook. LE: How do you think your post-apocalyptic novels are different from the others that are out there? NS: Compared to other novels in this genre, I think mine might be more focused on character than most; more focused on our responsibilities to one another. The majority of post-apocalyptic fiction spends a lot of time detailing the end of the world, following the struggles of the survivors up to the point where it looks like they're going to be okay. I don't think the story has to stop there. "How do we rebuild the world?" and "Who inherits the world?" are as intriguing questions to me as "Does anyone survive?" In that respect, I like to think of this trilogy as post-post-apocalyptic. Q & A excerpted from www.audiobookcafe.com. Click here for the complete interview. Sci Fi Weekly Interview by Cindy White CW: What made you sit down and write Idlewild? NS: It's interesting because there's the reasons why people think they write books and then there's the reasons why they actually write books. And I think the unconscious mind does the heavy lifting work. The conscious mind dots the i's and crosses the t's and takes credit for it. I was a kid who was very confused about his identity. I think every teenager is to some degree, but I was especially because my father was famous and I was very conscious of who exactly he was. At the same time, I used to have this weird sleep condition called hypnagogia which is this sleep paralysis where you think you're actually awake but you're just dreaming that you're awake. So you try to move but you can't because you're still asleep. It's very frightening. So after I wrote this I looked back and I realized that here I have this kid who doesn't know who he is and starts out not being able to move. So I'm sure I'm channeling the teen angst that I felt myself. CW: Do you write the kind of stories you like to read? NS: Yeah, absolutely. I think first and foremost as a writer you've got to make yourself happy. So I think I'm trying to entertain myself and find the kid that I was back then, an underachiever with lots of potential who didn't know exactly who he was or what he wanted to do. This is a book that I think I would have at that time seized upon and might have even begun writing. In a way, it's my way of giving back to the creative fire that finally broke me out of my doldrums and underachiever status and become the writer that I became. CW: You've written mostly screenplays until now. Why did you decide to make this a novel? NS: It's a good question. It was because it was more personal to me than anything I had written before. When you write for Hollywood you have to write for a certain audience, for producers and studio executives to a certain degree, because they hold the purse strings. If you want them to commit millions of dollars to it you have to be able to give them what they want. But this is an idea that was appealing to me personally. I didn't know how to write it as a screenplay. It didn't occur to me to write it as a screenplay. For a long time, I had a little file on my computer where I would put lines into it every now and then, and then I got to the point where, as much as I love Hollywood and writing for movies and TV, I thought this is an idea that I need to explore. It can't wait anymore. I have to give myself over to it. So I wrote it and the way it came was a book. CW: How is writing a book different from writing a screenplay? NS: Screenplays and teleplays are all about structure. You pace it according to where the commercial breaks are going to be or an adherence to a three-act structure. But a book is just totally open. There's just pages and pages, and you can do what you want with it. If you want to write about a sunset for 10 or 20 pages, you can do it. It's not necessarily a good idea, but the opportunity is yours to do what you want with it. So it was this terrifying but liberating experience where I could do what I wanted to do, and I did it, and I thought maybe it will just appeal to me. But so far it's been extremely well received. CW: So you're writing a sequel now? NS: It's apparently a trilogy. I didn't realize it when I wrote the first book. I went to my agent and he said, "Where do you see the story going from here?" And I said, "Well, I have some thoughts on it." And he said, "Why don't you write me a page on the next book and a page on the book after that?" And I did, and lo and behold, the result was a trilogy. Right now I'm working on the sequel. CW: What influence has your father had on your career path? NS: There's a couple ways of answering that. First of all, it kind of makes sense that I'm a science-fiction writer because here's my dad, a scientist, and my mother's a writer, a screenwriter. So of course, I'm a science-fiction writer. There's this kind of path that you take based on what your parents did. But at the same time in terms of the way my dad has affected me, I have to look at it first and foremost the way he affected me personally. He opened my eyes to the universe and taught me so many things. It was wonderful. I had so many teachers that were just focused on getting students to just spit back facts and figures, but my dad was about actually learning and about waking people up to the possibilities of the universe and sharing this tremendous love he had for the way the universe works. So I've been the tremendous beneficiary of all that wonder, and I can't help but think that affected my life to some degree. At the same time, it's a big responsibility trying to live up to his legacy. My attitude is that I'm certainly not going to be the next Carl Sagan. I'm the first Nick Sagan. All I can do is be the best Nick Sagan I can be, and hopefully inspire and move people through fiction and encourage people to go and do wonderful things. And if it allows them to pass the time entertained, that makes me very, very happy. That's they best way I can think of giving back to my dad's legacy, and also my mother's legacy for that matter. Since she taught me so much, too. Q & A excerpted from Sci Fi Weekly. Click here for the complete interview. Trek Nation Interview by Caillan Davenport CD: How did you start out, writing for film or television? NS: I started out writing for film first. When I was in college and I'd written my first screenplay, the head of the writing program, Richard Walter, said, "Do you mind if I show this to an agent?" And I didn't say, "How dare you!" (laughs) I said, "Yeah!" It was a very fortuitous situation. That agent called me up the next day and said he wanted to represent me and it kind of went on from there. CD: A lot of people say, "Never go into the film industry because you'll never find a job". To get an agent so quickly is quite amazing. NS: The thing about the industry is that it can turn on a dime. You can have terrible luck, and things can suddenly go your way because of one event. I really consider a screenplay akin to buying a lottery ticket. You've got no idea what's going to be successful and what producers and studio executives want at that particular moment in time. Sometimes the scripts that you think are the best are the ones that are going to cause them to shrug and the ones that you write the quickest and have the least invested in are the ones that are perceived the best. CD: There were about four or five years between when you were writing for Next Generation and Voyager. What were you doing that time? I noticed you wrote for a couple of other series like Space Precinct... NS: Yeah (laughs). I spent most of that time writing screenplays. I found a nice niche where I was hired to adapt novels like Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. CD: As soon as I read that, I thought, "Well, they have to make a film out of this". But it's such a hard book to adapt. NS: (laughs) Well, it's especially tricky because the kids are all about six years old. There's always a battle because the studio executives, of course, would love the kids to be like 17 or more, like the kids in Starship Troopers, but the whole point of the book is that they're kids. I remember fighting very hard to keep them as young as possible. It was a very well-received script and we got to the point where we had Oliver Stone championing it and we took it to Disney, but Disney wanted it to be more of a traditional Disney movie, and I couldn't do that. So unfortunately, like so many projects in Hollywood, it got stuck in development hell. Since then, it's reverted back to Orson Scott Card, who I hope is able to make it on the big screen. It's just like my dad's book, Contact — a lot of books take a long time. I adapted some other science fiction books into movies, one was called The Deus Machine by Pierre Ouellette, and also A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin. So I was having a nice time doing that, and I sold a script to Martin Scorsese. CD: How did you come back to the Star Trek fold then? NS: Brannon came to me; he remembered me from Next Generation. It was his first year, all by himself, since Jeri Taylor had retired the previous year so he had the option of bringing in people. He brought in me and he brought in Mike Taylor. No one had ever asked me to do this before, and I had an interesting connection with the Voyager space program. So I thought, "How cool would it be to go from Voyager to Voyager?" CD: There was a lot of talk at the time of season five about it being a season of renewal. With Brannon Braga at the helm for the first time he was really trying to push the envelope a lot. Was there a sense of that when you joined the writing staff? NS: We really were trying to find new ground. There are some noble failures, but I think that there are a lot of successful episodes that told stories that hadn't been told, at least not in that particular way before. It's not an easy task, when you look at how much Star Trek there'd been before. One of my least favorite things about being on staff was having to say no to a lot of really good freelance pitches, because there would be situations where pitches would really have a compelling premise, but they'd be a little too similar to something we had in the pipeline, or something we'd already done, or there'd been a moratorium on certain episodes. So there was a challenge, even if it was familiar ground, to have a new way of telling it. Sometimes there'd be a particular phrase that we'd kick around. The genesis of "Gravity" was the phrase, "emotion creates its own logic". We just chucked that around, saying, "What does that mean? What could that be?" And out of it came that episode. It was a really wonderful experience to push new ground. It was such a wonderful mythology to play with. It's just unfortunate that television is such a hungry beast, and that you have to feed it a new episode every couple of weeks, and you can't have actors on sets standing around costing you thousands of dollars. The greatest luxury is time, and I think we did a pretty good job considering the time constraints. CD: "In the Flesh" was a very interesting episode, because it saw the return of one of my favorite alien species, Species 8472. When they were introduced in "Scorpion", I thought "Wow!" They were really different from traditional Trek forehead aliens... NS: No funny ears and that sort of thing... CD: Exactly. We saw them in season four and then in "In The Flesh" as well, where we had the sort of peace treaty between Voyager and 8472. How did this come about, the peace treaty, détente idea? NS: It's interesting. There's so much I could say about this. The original idea was something quite different. It was an idea that they found a picture in some database of an 8472 in an ancient Earth culture, and it was that some of our legends of demons and devils were from 8472. That was sort of the initial way we got into it. It was kind of tricky, having Voyager on the opposite side of the galaxy from home. What are those guys doing with Earth? How does that fit together? We went at it hammer and tongs for a while and we couldn't find anything that we all liked, so I was able to try and reinvent it. So here 8472 are, and they're clearly very threatened by and obsessed with us — we certainly dealt them a great blow — and here they are trying to have revenge on us. So I took the idea of paranoia, and that these things don't understand what it is to be human, and I took the idea of Cold War fears, especially the way my dad tried to play a role in détente. Q & A excerpted from Trek Today. Click on the first, second and third link for the complete interview.
Popular Science Interview by Elizabeth Svoboda 10.20.03 ES: First, the inevitable question: What was your relationship
with your father like growing up, and did it have any influence on your writing
career? ES: Science fiction author Stephen Baxter called your book "the essential
read for the Matrix generation." Do you see your
book as part of a literary tradition inspired by the movie, or are people who
make those comparisons missing the point? NS: When I saw The Matrix, I thought it was wonderful, but I'm not sure
if it's the most convincing vision of what virtual reality will be used for in
the future -- that we're all being harvested by computers for precious energy,
and to fight them, we use kung-fu. ES: As you were writing Idlewild, did you do background
research so you could base your story on real science, or did you make things up
as you went along? NS: A little bit of both. I'm not a scientist. I don't have the same science
background that my father had, probably not even the same background that a lot
of science fiction writers have. So it behooves me to get as much research done
as I possibly can, to go to people who have a better sense of "how does
this work?" Fortunately, though, Idlewild doesn't depend on science
that's extremely far out of the range of possibility. Look at what's happening
now in virtual reality; every day we get a little bit closer to artificial
intelligence. But for the sections of the book that deal with genetics and
epidemiology, I had to step back and say, "That's pretty much beyond my
ken." I was very fortunate to have a group of knowledgeable people I could
use as resources. NS: I think there's a paranoid belief people hold on to that everything is not
real. There's a feeling you have when you're a kid that the world revolves
around you. As you grow older you start to realize that's probably not the case,
but there's still that feeling that you're being fed a show of your life, and
that's all that exists -- there's nothing outside of that. Out of this very
human tendency, I think we find a fascination with stories that bring up issues
of what's real and what's not. Q & A excerpted from Popular Science. Click here for the
complete interview.
Penguin Q & A Interview with Nick Sagan Q: What was it like growing up as the son of Carl Sagan? NS: He was the kind of father who loved to teach you about things he knew, but he also loved to learn. And there were some things we bonded over that had nothing to do with either—basketball, for example. Mainly, I feel incredibly lucky. As one of the leading astronomers of our time, he had an amazing ability to make complicated things understandable, and as a kid you have all these questions about how the universe works. I learned so much from him. On the other hand, there were times when his fame lent my childhood a surreal quality. Q: How so? NS: My school would show episodes of Cosmos, and so I’d be in science class watching my dad on television. Or we’d go out somewhere together and fans would come over wanting autographs, telling him he’d changed their lives. That would be cool, but it would also cut into our time together. I didn’t live with him growing up, so we tried to make every moment count. Q: Your mother’s Linda Salzman Sagan—isn’t she a writer too? NS: Yes, we moved out to L.A. from Ithaca, New York when I was ten. She got into screenwriting and wound up writing for several television shows, so I grew up with a crash course in TV writing. She’s also a terrific artist. She drew the controversial Pioneer plaque that went out as a greeting to potential extraterrestrials. That’s the one that shows a man and a woman standing next to a line silhouette of a spacecraft, but the couple is naked and some people objected to NASA sending “dirty pictures” into space. Q: Speaking of greetings to extraterrestrials… NS: Right, the Golden Record. NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, and aboard that ship there’s a record with great music and sounds and “greetings to the universe” in fifty-five different languages. Among those greetings you can hear my voice, which my parents recorded when I was six years old. “Hello from the children of Planet Earth.” Q: Voyager is now the most distant human-made object in the universe—how does it feel that your voice is billions of miles away from Earth, always moving farther away? NS: Well, when I was six, it was just, “Here, say something into the microphone”—I had no idea how much it meant. Now I feel there’s something beautiful about it, in a wistful, lonely way. There’s a sense of loss, even though I haven’t really lost anything. It’s a little hard to explain…. I think it’s like how some people feel a photograph can capture a piece of one’s soul. Maybe there’s a piece of my soul on that record – my early childhood, my innocence – that’s hurtling through the blackness of space, never to return. Q: Do you ever imagine alien intelligence finding Voyager and playing the record? NS: It’s unlikely, what with so much emptiness in outer space and no proof that extraterrestrial life exists. But it’s possible. It makes for good daydreaming. Q: Let’s talk about what got you writing. What did you read as a kid? NS: As early as I can remember, I was obsessed with mythology—Greek, Norse, Egyptian—I read as many of those books as I could get my hands on. My dad turned me on to the SF greats: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein. And of course, Edgar Rice Burroughs—the John Carter books that got him so excited about Mars as a kid. I remember digging Chessmen of Mars and Synthetic Men of Mars, and I remember thinking green four-armed Martian warriors were incredibly cool. My mom read me some of the best fantasy fiction—J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander and Roald Dahl. I dearly loved the Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper – those books struck me as especially magical. Q: When did you know you wanted to write professionally? NS: I was sixteen. I was at the local video store and my mother pointed out a television show from the 60s she thought I’d like: Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. I rented a few episodes, watched them, and I knew. The writing was so good, so satisfying, and not only had McGoohan created a tremendously entertaining series, it was more than that; he’d threaded it through with his social satire; it worked on an ethical level, a religious level. For some reason, I’d never realized that could be done before, and it made me want to do it too. But knowing what you want to do and actually doing it are very different things. Q: That’s true. How did you go about it? NS: The first thing I did? I dropped out of high school. Q: How did your parents feel about that? NS: They weren’t too thrilled. But they knew I wasn’t happy there. My mother came around pretty quickly and my father did too, as soon as he saw what I was doing. I passed my high school proficiency exam, enrolled at Santa Monica College and transferred to UCLA Film School. I graduated UCLA summa cum laude, which was great because I finally got to shed the “underachiever” label that had followed me through high school. But even better than that, a script I wrote got the attention of Richard Walter, UCLA Screenwriting Chairman. He asked me if I’d mind if he sent my script to an agent. My good luck continued; the agent called me the day after he read it, asking if he could represent me. That script got optioned and ultimately led to a feature assignment; and so on. Q: What inspired you to write Idlewild? NS: I’d been thinking about the nature of education in the future. And I’d been daydreaming about mythology, drawing up a new pantheon of gods. Somewhere along the way, I started making connections between the concerns of gods and those of the cliques from back in high school. A jock and a god of war? A “brain” and a goddess of wisdom? A goth and a god of death? Out of that fusion came my characters. Before I knew it, I was writing. Q: What do you like to read? Any favorite genres or authors? NS: I like anything that surprises me-fiction or nonfiction. Favorite authors include Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Jim Thompson and Vladimir Nabokov. Some fiction I like: Emporium by Adam Johnson, Acts of Revision by Martyn Bedford, Under the Skin by Michel Faber, Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg, Black Butterflies by John Shirley, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware. Some nonfiction I like: Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett, Demonic Males by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer, and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Q: How would you compare Idlewild to your father’s novel, Contact? NS: I’d say they’re both stories about the human condition: who we are, why we’re here, where we’re going. Contact might be a more optimistic book; it ends with Ellie discovering a mathematical message from the creator of the universe. That suggests a certain order to the cosmos. Conversely, the discoveries in Idlewild are more chaotic in nature. Q: Are those aspects of the book a direct response to Contact? Do you think of it ever as a kind of ongoing dialogue with your father? NS: A response? Not consciously. But I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a subconscious influence. As for a dialogue with him, sure, I can see it that way. That’s really the only kind of dialogue we can have these days. Q: If he were alive today, do you think he’d enjoy Idlewild? NS: He’d be very proud. I think we might not see eye to eye about certain fantastic elements of the book. But my stepmother, Ann Druyan, disagrees. She thinks he’d love the whole thing. Either way, I know we’d have some great debates about the future. I wish he could read it. If you have your own questions for Nick, simply submit a note using the contact form. 
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