At age six, Nick Sagan's greeting, "Hello from the children of planet Earth," was recorded and placed aboard NASA's Voyager spacecraft. Launched with a selection of terrestrial greetings, sights, sounds and music, Voyager has since left the solar system; it is now the most distant human-made object in the universe.
The son of astronomer Carl Sagan and artist/writer Linda Salzman, Nick was born in Boston, but grew up in Ithaca and Los Angeles. Frustrated with his junior high and high school experience, he spent his teenage years operating The Freehold, an electronic bulletin board system dedicated to role-playing games. By the mid-eighties, The Freehold had become the largest game-related BBS in Los Angeles, though this success came at the expense of Nick's grades--the time he could have spent studying, he wrote online fantasy and science fiction instead. Inspired to become a filmmaker by Patrick McGoohan's subversive and surreal television series, "The Prisoner," Nick dropped out, took his high school proficiency exam, and enrolled in Santa Monica College. Finally able to study the subjects that interested him, his grades improved dramatically, allowing him to transfer to UCLA's school of Film and Television. Before graduating summa cum laude, Nick wrote a script that the screenwriting chairman, Richard Walter, liked enough to send on to an agent. Within days, a production company optioned that screenplay and hired Nick to adapt Orson Scott Card's classic science fiction novel, Ender's Game.
Since then Nick Sagan has been steadily writing for Hollywood, crafting screenplays, teleplays, animation episodes and computer games. 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, a story of alchemy, obsession and revenge. His film credits include adaptations of Ursula K. LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, Pierre Ouelette's The Deus Machine, and Charles Pellegrino's Dust. His television credits include two episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and five episodes of "Star Trek: Voyager," where he worked as a story editor in 1999. 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 Idlewild came to Nick--but unsure whether to write it as a screenplay, a television series or a computer game, he chose instead to write it as a novel, and sold it to Penguin Putnam in 2002.
Idlewild went on to win a starred review from Kirkus, endorsements from acclaimed writers Neil Gaiman and Stephen Baxter, 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. His second book, Edenborn, hailed by SFX Magazine as "one of the best post-apocalyptic novels you will ever read," is now available in stores. The third book in the series, Everfree, will hit stands on May 18th, 2006.
Nick is married to his high school sweetheart, and spends most of his time in upstate New York.
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