Ann Druyan

From Philosopedia

Druyan, Ann (13 June 1949 - )

Druyan (pronounced "dreen"), third wife of the late Carl Sagan, is a novelist and the secretary of the Federation of American Scientists.

At Sagan’s memorial service, she told of his and her exuberance at their having included an interstellar message along with the music of Bach, Beethoven, and others in two NASA Voyager spacecraft now beyond the outer solar system. At a speed of 40,000 miles per hour, the recordings are traveling in space and have a projected “shelf life” of a billion years, she stated. Commenting about Sagan’s movie, “Contact,” which opened after his death, Druyan, who co-wrote the picture, said,

• This is really painful. But also, in a way, when you love somebody with all of your heart and they die, part of you is walking around thinking, “I want the whole world to remember this person and feel what I feel.” . . . Because I don’t believe in an actual afterlife, it means a lot to me that Carl’s ideas and what we stood for are given a kind of dramatic expression in this movie.

Druyan in 1997 was named “Freethought Heroine” by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which cited her having been vocal in protecting her late husband’s memory from the slur of “deathbed conversion” stories since he died of pneumonia.

(“Sagan’s Movie’s One in a Billion,” New York Post, 9 July 1997)