The Cosmic Connection

Carl Sagan: Cosmic Connection (with editing by Jerome Agel) (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Other Worlds (with editing by Jerome Agel) (Bantam, 1975)

2004 saw two me re-reading two books by Carl Sagan. I first encountered Sagan in high school, thanks to a friend.

The first book I re-read was Other Worlds. This is a very short book, hardly more than an extended essay. In fact, upon reading this and Cosmic Connection, I think that Other Worlds was made up of bits and pieces left over from Cosmic Connection, heck it feels like an extended introduction or overview of the longer work.

The better of the two works is definitely Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. I now see that it has an extended title (Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective). I picked up this new edition partly to replace my disintegrating paperback and partly to see what the additional material (contributions by Freeman Dyson, Ann Druyan and David Morrison) were like.

The book has lost none of its impact for me. It's amazing how wide-ranging Sagan is in the book, running from commentary on the military, to the possibility of other intelligences on our planet, to the mystery of our solar system, to speculations on intelligence around other suns. David Morrison's Epilog discusses some things that we've learned since the book was written, it's actually amazing to see how much has stood the test of time.

It's a shame, an absolute shame that Sagan died. I look at what we've done in space since his death—three rovers and several orbiters to Mars, a mission to Jupiter, a mission to Saturn, missions to comets and asteroids—he would have loved to have seen all of this. This one of those books that really cemented my interest in science in general and astronomy in particular. I owe Sagan a lot.

I can't recommend the book highly enough. If you're interested in science, get it. If you plan to write a science fiction novel or story, get it.

Counts as 43 essays in the 2004 Short Story Project.

Contents: Foreword (Freeman J. Dyson); Carl Sagan: A New Sense of the Sacred (Ann Druyan); Preface; A Transitional Animal; The Unicorn of Cetus; A Message from Earth; Experiments in Utopias; Chauvinism; Space Exploration as a Human Enterprise: The Scientific Interest; Space Exploration as a Human Enterprise: The Public Interest; Space Exploration as a Human Enterprise: The Historical Interest; On Teaching the First Grade; 'The Ancient and Legendary Gods of Old'; The Venus Detective Story; Venus Is Hell; Science and 'Intelligence'; The Moons of Barsoom; The Mountains of Mars: Observations from Earth; The Mountains of Mars: Observations from Space; The Canals of Mars; The Lost Pictures of Mars; The Ice Age and the Cauldron; Beginnings and Ends of the Earth; Terraforming the Planets; The Exploration and Utilization of the Solar System; Some of My Best Friends Are Dolphins; 'Hello, Central Casting? Send Me Twenty Extraterrestrials'; The Cosmic Connection; Extraterrestrial Life: An Idea Whose Time Has Come; Has the Earth Been Visited; A Search Strategy for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligence; If We Succeed...; Cables, Drums, and Seashells; The Night Freight to the Stars; Astroengineering; Twenty Questions: A Classification of Cosmic Civilizations; Galactic Cultural Exchanges; A Passage to Elsewhen; Starfolk I: A Fable; Starfolk II: A Future; Starfolk III: The Cosmic Cheshire Cats; Epilog to Carl Sagan's The Cosmic Connection (David Morrison).