When this book first appeared, aliens were still reportedly creating crop circles in England and committing improper acts on mysteriously unmarked adults in America. (For this, Mack was awarded an Ig Nobel prize in 1993). They were so convinced of these things that John Mack, a Harvard professor of psychiatry who talked to 200 such deluded abductees, concluded that because they so strongly believed they had been abducted, then maybe they had. Little green creatures with cadaverous faces might whisk them up into spaceships, penetrate their torsos and collect their vital bodily fluids before returning them to their beds in perfect condition. This sense of being caught up in the receding past is simply explained: in the decade before the publication of The Demon-Haunted World, many Americans believed that they were at risk of alien abduction. Many of the chapters in this book were originally written for Parade, which is why, even though we need people like Sagan more than ever, it has an oddly dated feel. He also enjoyed addressing the marvels of the world and the things ordinary Americans wanted to marvel at: these were not necessarily identical. He enjoyed writing for the magazine Parade, which was syndicated to more than half of all US newspapers, because through it he had access to 80 million readers. He did not expect people to know the facts of science – and he was conscious of science’s own occasional complacencies – but he did want people to understand the substance of science: the notion that startling claims should be supported by evidence that can be tested and challenged. Sagan spent most of his life taking other people seriously: he considered their fears, anxieties and obsessions he understood the appeal of easy explanations and glib answers and he made it his business to present the reality of the cosmos to readers and listeners in language that they could enjoy.

The demon haunted world review