A Torrent of IdeasĮxploring the archive reveals that Sagan was constantly developing ideas for possible projects.

Collectively, the archive provides extensive access to traces of the Carl Sagan's extensive intellectual enterprise. For example, the essay the 'Gift of the Apollo' becomes part of Pale Blue Dot. Many of those essays would later become sections in his books. Building Toward BooksĬarl Sagan wrote a considerable amount of shorter pieces for magazines and periodicals.

A small number of examples documenting this process have been digitized for this online collection to provide a sense of the kinds of materials that exist around many of his writing projects. The result of this constellation of composition technologies and media is a stunning level of access into Sagan's writing and thinking process. You can find evidence of this process in the dates in the upper corner of some of these draft pages in Pale Blue Dot.If you scan through the different sections of the draft, you will notice that the dates change throughout. He would then mark up print outs of the transcripts and edit, revise and assemble them into drafts. When working on books in the 80s and 90s he would dictate sections, which were transcribed for him. Sagan's writing process involved a constellation of technologies and people. Contact chapter three: Dictated section of novel. You can see the next stage in his process in this draft of Contact he annotated and revised. This audio recording is part of the first draft of Carl Sagan's novel Contact. For example, listen to some of these digitized sections of an audio cassette that contains parts of Sagan's novel Contact and this dictated section of an exobiology grant proposal. These drafts, everything from grant proposals, correspondence, and his books and articles, were dictated to cassettes and transcribed.

You will notice these drafts are not hand written, but are covered with cross outs and handwritten revisions. Each of those 20 drafts is heavily annotated with edits, revisions and changes. Carl Sagan was an extensive reviser of his work, for example, this digitized draft of Pale Blue Dot is the second of twenty full drafts in the archive. You can read and review some of Carl Sagan's drafts and ideas online in this collection including The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, and his novel Contact. Early drafts are a way to understand how books developed in the minds of their creators. One of the most exciting things about collections of personal papers is the ability to review drafts and revisions of significant books and articles. Dictation, Transcription, Hand Edited Revision The Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan archive offers a rare opportunity to explore the writing and thinking process of one of the most prolific science writers of the 20th century.

Carl sagan novel contact