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) is a British science fiction author.

1 Biography
2 Writings
3 Controversy
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Hogan was born in London, England. He was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty and had three other subsequent marriages and six children.^[1]

Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run their sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.^[1]

[edit] Writings

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, it is theory that 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.

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.

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 (A Jupiter Novel)
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)
Echoes of an Alien Sky - February 2007
Moon Flower - April 2008

Short story collections include:

Minds, Machines & Evolution - 1988 (republished 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

Mind Matters - Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence - March 1997
Kicking the Sacred Cow - July 2004

[edit] Controversy

In recent years, Hogan's views have tended towards those widely considered "fringe" or pseudoscientific. He is a serious proponent of Immanuel Velikovsky's version of catastrophism,^[2] and of the theory that AIDS is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than HIV (see AIDS denialism).^[3] He has stated that he finds basic evidence of evolution being random to be lacking or to disprove the theory outright,^[4] though he doesn't propose theistic creationism as an alternative. Hogan is also skeptical of the scientific consensus on global warming and ozone depletion.^[5]

Hogan has also espoused the idea that the Holocaust didn't happen in the manner described by mainstream historians, 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."^[6] While such theories are seen by many to contradict his views on scientific rationality, he has repeatedly stated that these theories hold his attention due to the high quality of their presentation - a quality he believes established sources should attempt to emulate, but have instead resorted to attacking their originators.^{[citation needed]} As such, 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).