Former Star Trek writer Nick Sagan is about to launch his debut novel, Idlewild, with a book tour stopping off at various locations in the United States and Canada.

The tour will kick off at Dutton's Brentwood in Los Angeles on Monday, August 18, before proceeding to bookshops in Berkeley, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, San Diego and Toronto over the next week and a half. Sagan will be reading excerpts from Idlewild during each stop-off.

Idlewild centres around the Idlewild "Immersive Virtual Reality" Academy, an elite school for high-achieving students. The book opens with one of the attendees, known as "Halloween", waking up with almost complete amensia. He only knows one thing — someone is trying to kill him. "Halloween" must now try to recover his memory and stop whoever who is after him.

The novel has met with rave reviews from authors and critics alike. Hugo Award-winning writer Neil Gaiman described Idlewild as "a genuine page-turner [...] like a rollercoaster ride of fusion fiction", while Entertainment Weekly said Sagan "provides plenty of suspense and perfectly captures the angry adolescent solipsism that makes kids into hackers and superheroes".

Sagan, the son of the noted scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Carl Sagan, graduated summa cum laude from UCLA Film School. He penned the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes "Attached" and "Bloodlines" before joining Star Trek: Voyager as story editor in its fifth season. During his tenure in the Delta Quadrant, Sagan wrote or co-wrote episodes such as "In the Flesh", "Gravity", "Course: Oblivion" and "Relativity".

For the complete itinerary of Nick Sagan's book tour, head over to his official web site.

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