# The Ballot *Carl Sagan and the Price of Being Understood* — Legendary Biographies No. 283 - **Subject:** Carl Edward Sagan - **Written by:** Ailsa Rennie - **Shelf:** Science / Science - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 226 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-563-3) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · 7h 49m · read by Miles Ashby (ISBN 979-8-90623-672-2) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/283-the-ballot.html ## About this book Was there a research record to vote against? In 1992 the National Academy of Sciences declined to elect Carl Sagan. He was blackballed in the first round, which forced a debate and a vote of the whole membership, and he finished at roughly fifty percent against a two-thirds threshold. Members who described the session afterward reported that Cosmos was dismissed in the room as fluff. One, unnamed, said that if he had not done television he probably would be in the Academy. Two years later the same Academy awarded him its Public Welfare Medal. The book takes the Academy on its own terms. It votes on research, so the research comes first: fourteen of the twenty-two chapters end before Cosmos airs in 1980. Venus, argued at twenty-six in 1961, is not a swamp but an oven, cooked past the melting point of lead by a runaway greenhouse, with Mariner 2 flying past in December 1962 to find it. Mars through the 1960s: the seasonal wave of darkening explained as wind-blown dust rather than vegetation, settled when Mariner 9 arrived in November 1971 into the largest dust storm ever observed. Tholins on Titan. The Pioneer plaque, the Voyager record, a seat on the Viking imaging team. The answer is yes. That is not a defence of everything. The one serious procedural charge — that in 1983 the nuclear winter finding reached a Parade cover of tens of millions before the peer-reviewed paper appeared in Science — goes unadjudicated, and the book says plainly that this is where it is least able to defend him. It records what followed: the model corrected, the numbers moderated in 1990, and three-dimensional work from about 2007 returning conclusions as severe as the original. On the vote itself it fills no gaps. No tally is public, the proceedings are confidential, and no living Academy member is named as having voted against him. He died in Seattle on 20 December 1996, at sixty-two. The profession that voted him down now creates professorships in the thing it voted against. ## Contents 1. Bensonhurst 2. Rahway 3. Kuiper 4. A119 5. Nine Hundred Degrees 6. Cambridge, Denied 7. Ithaca 8. A Science With No Specimens 9. The Planet That Was Not There 10. The Plaque 11. Carson 12. Chryse Planitia 13. The Record 14. The Prize And The Problem 15. Thirteen Hours 16. Lobbyist 17. TTAPS 18. Nuclear Autumn 19. Crossing The Line 20. Wrong, In Public 21. The Ballot 22. Seattle ## Questions **Who is The Ballot about?** Carl Edward Sagan. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Ballot — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,063 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 70,000 words, 22 chapters, 226 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 7h 49m, measured from the finished masters. ## The writer Ailsa Rennie writes biography out of Edinburgh, with a focus on women in twentieth-century science, art, and letters whose work was historically credited to the men in the rooms beside them.