James P. Hogan (writer)

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At the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, August 2005

James Patrick Hogan (born June 27, 1941, London) is a science fiction author.

Hogan's style of science fiction is sometimes considered hard science fiction; in his earlier work he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, he postulates that theory should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded and replaced. The series shows both the strength and weakness of early Hogan, since the resolution of the mystery is impossible on astrophysical grounds.

In recent years, however, Hogan's preferred theories have tended towards those widely considered "fringe" or pseudoscientific. He is a serious proponent of Immanuel Velikovsky's version of catastrophism,^[1] of Intelligent Design over Darwinism,^[2] and of the theory that AIDS is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than HIV (see AIDS reappraisal).^[3] While such theories may seem to contradict his views on scientific rationality, they are consistent with the view that scientific theories should not be accepted simply because they are widely held (see, for instance, argument from authority). Hogan has also espoused the idea that the Holocaust didn't happen, writing that he finds the work of Arthur Butz and Mark Weber to be "more scholarly, scientific, and convincing than what the history written by the victors says."^[4]

Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete (e.g. the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free). This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story, And Then There Were None), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.

[edit] Writings

His novels include:

Inherit the Stars - May 1977 (1st book in Giants series)
The Genesis Machine - April 1978
The Gentle Giants of Ganymede - May 1978 (2nd book in Giants series)
The Two Faces of Tomorrow - June 1979
Thrice Upon a Time - March 1980
Giants' Star - July 1981 (3rd book in Giants series)
Voyage from Yesteryear - July 1982
The Minervan Experiment - November 1982 (omnibus edition of the first three books of the "Giants" series)
Code of the Lifemaker - June 1983 (exploring ideas of a Clanking replicator robotic system)
The Proteus Operation - October 1985
Endgame Enigma - August 1987
The Mirror Maze - March 1989
The Infinity Gambit - March 1991
Entoverse - October 1991 (4th book in Giants series)
The Multiplex Man - December 1992
Out of Time 1993 (novella)
The Immortality Option - February 1995 (sequel to "Code of the Lifemaker")
Realtime Interrupt - March 1995
Paths to Otherwhere - February 1996
Bug Park - April 1997
Star Child - June 1998
Outward Bound - March 1999
Cradle of Saturn - June 1999
The Legend that was Earth - October 2000
Martian Knightlife - October 2001
The Anguished Dawn - June 2003 (sequel to "Cradle of Saturn")
Mission to Minerva - May 2005 (5th Book in the Giants series)

Short story collections include:

Minds, Machines & Evolution - 1988 (re-published by Baen, Dec. 1999)
Rockets, Redheads & Revolution - April 1999 (short stories and essays)
Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions (title as published; was to be Catastrophes, Creation & Convolutions) - December 2005 (short stories and essays)

Non-fiction science writings