ick Sagan grew up asking the same questions every curious kid does, questions like "Why is the sky blue?" and "How does gravity work?" In his case, however, his father was actually able to answer them in scientific detail. Imagine growing up in a household where Isaac Asimov was a frequent dinner guest and Rod Serling was your neighbor.
That's the kind of bizarre childhood you have when you're the son of a famous astronomer and a Hollywood screenwriter. But Nick Sagan has made a name for himself in his own right. After graduating summa cum laude from UCLA film school, he went on to write a number of episodes for both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. Currently, he's working on a sequel to his first novel, the futuristic thriller Idlewild.
Sagan recently spoke with Science Fiction Weekly about Idlewild, which hit bookstores in August of this year, and the double-edged sword of growing up with such a brilliant and well-respected father.
Where did the idea for Idlewild come from?
Sagan: I think part of the inspiration for this book comes out of my experiences in school and thinking about, what is the future of education? What are the highs and lows of it? And at the same time, I've always had a lifelong interest in mythology and Greek, Norse and Egyptian myth. And I was very interested in pantheons and thinking about, what is the intersection between the kind of kids I went to school with and these various gods? So you look at a jock in school. What if a jock was the god of war? You can look at a brain as the god of wisdom or a goth as the god of death. So out of that I found my characters and started telling a story about kids, actual high-school kids, who have weird powers in a strange place and discovering various truths about the world.
What made you sit down and write this story?
Sagan: 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 conscious 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 hypnogogia 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.
Do you write the kind of stories you like to read?
Sagan: 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.
What writers have influenced you?
Sagan: There's so many. I would say back in school I was exposed to a lot of great science-fiction writers through my dad. Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov. And I also read a lot of great fantasy, Tolkien, Susan Cooper, who wrote the Dark Is Rising books, the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. So that's the stuff that was very influential as kid, which I'm sure did a lot of good toward my writing.
In terms of becoming a writer professionally, it was actually a British television show from the late '60s [The Prisoner], which I'd never heard of until I went to Videotech out in L.A. and wound up renting a few episodes. It's a wonderful show. I took it home, closed my door, watched it in my room, opened the door and came out and there was a nimbus of light around me. Like, "I know what I want to do!' Everything clicked for me for the first time. Here was The Prisoner, where Patrick McGoohan had executive produced it and starred in it and wrote and directed half the episodes and whistled the theme music. He was so involved in it, and it was this wonderful series that operated not only as entertainment, but it functioned on a social level, an ethical level, even a religious level. And I looked at it and I thought the deeper you look, the more you see. And I said, "That's what I want to do. I want to create pure entertainment, but the closer you examine it, the more you find." And that's what led me to becoming a writer.
You've written mostly screenplays until now. Why did you decide to make this a novel?
Sagan: 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.
How is writing a book different from writing a screenplay?
Sagan: 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.
Has there been any interest in turning the book into a movie?
Sagan: It's funny. Everyone who reads this says, "I can see this as a movie." And I look at it now and go, "Yeah, of course." But I didn't know exactly how to tell it as a movie back then. I had to go through it as a novel to find that path. It may be a while, because I've seen a number of wonderful science-fiction books take a long time to be made into movies. I had the privilege of being able to work on Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, for example. That hasn't been made into a movie yet, but I hope that it is soon. I saw my dad's book Contact take 10 years to get made. So I'm taking a long view. I'll be very happy just writing the sequel to the book and hopefully be able to balance myself between books.
So you're writing a sequel now?
Sagan: 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.
What influence has your father had on your career path?
Sagan: 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. Even 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.
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