Nick Sagan (born September 16, 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the science fiction novels Idlewild, Edenborn, and Everfree, and his screen credits include episodes of The Next Generation and Voyager. He is the son of astronomer Carl Sagan and artist and writer Linda Salzman.
At age six, Nick Sagan's greeting, "Hello from the children of planet Earth," was recorded and placed aboard NASA’s Voyager Golden Record. Launched with a selection of terrestrial greetings, sights, sounds and music, the Voyager I and Voyager II spacecraft have since left the solar system and are now the most distant human-made objects in the universe. He went to The Mirman School as a child and received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Nick has been steadily writing for Hollywood since 1992, crafting screenplays, teleplays, animation episodes and computer games. He is a younger half-brother to Dorion Sagan and Jeremy Sagan. He has worked for a variety of studios and production companies, including Paramount, Warner Brothers, New Line, Universal, Disney, actor/producer Tom Cruise, and directors David Fincher and Martin Scorsese. Nick co-wrote the award-winning computer adventure game, Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands. His film credits include adaptations of novels by Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. LeGuin, Pierre Ouellette and Charles Pellegrino. His television credits include two episodes of The Next Generation and five episodes of Voyager, where he worked as a story editor. At the turn of the millennium, astronaut Sally Ride recruited him to work for SPACE.com as Executive Producer of Entertainment & Games. During his tenure there, the spark for a series of novels came to Nick, The Idlewild Trilogy, which he sold to Penguin Putnam in 2002.
Idlewild received a starred review from Kirkus, a Book Sense 76 pick, and selection from both Borders and Barnes & Noble as one of the best science fiction/fantasy novels of the year. Neil Gaiman called it "absolutely fun, like a roller-coaster ride of fusion fiction" and "the kind of book you simply don't want to stop reading."
Edenborn continues the story from Idlewild, but can also be read as a standalone. SFX Magazine gave Edenborn a perfect five star review, declaring it "one of the best post-apocalyptic novels you will ever read." SF Crowsnest hailed Nick as "an adrenaline shot straight into the heart of science fiction," while SF Site called the novel "elegant SF, dark and haunting, with characters who linger in memory long after the last page is turned."
Everfree is third in the series. Sci Fi Weekly praised it as "startlingly original" and "undeniably satisfying and triumphant." Kirkus: "Sagan's mind-blowing post-apocalyptic trilogy comes to a satisfying, terrifying conclusion." They go on to hail the book as "a powerful plea for sensible human cooperation delivered via a knockout story."
Nick taught screenwriting at Cornell University in the spring of 2007.[1]
