James Patrick Hogan (born 27 June 1941) is a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
science fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction. It differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically-established or scientifically-postulated laws of nature...
authorAn author is defined both as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created...
.
Biography
Hogan was born in
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
,
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. He was raised in the
Portobello RoadPortobello Road is a street in the Notting Hill district of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in west London, England. It runs almost the length of Notting Hill from south to north, roughly parallel with Ladbroke Grove...
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 EstablishmentThe Royal Aircraft Establishment England, was a British research establishment latterly under the UK Ministry of Defence .The first site was at Farnborough Airfield in Hampshire to which was added a second site RAE Bedford in 1946.The Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment was incorporated...
at
FarnboroughFarnborough Airport or TAG London Farnborough Airport is an airport situated in Farnborough, Hampshire, England....
covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
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
HoneywellHoneywell is a major conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments....
. In the 1970s he joined the
Digital Equipment CorporationDigital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC...
's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston,
MassachusettsThe Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. Most of its population of...
to run its 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
OrlandoOrlando is a major city in the central region of the U.S. state of Florida. It is the county seat of Orange County and the center of the Greater Orlando metropolitan region...
,
FloridaFlorida is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States, bordering Alabama to the northwest and Georgia to the north. It was the 27th state admitted to the United States...
, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to
SonoraSonora is the county seat of Tuolumne County, California. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 4,423. Sonora is the only incorporated community in Tuolumne County. Located in the Sierra Nevada foothills, in the heart of California’s “Gold Country,” Sonora was named after the miners from...
,
CaliforniaCalifornia is the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
.
Writings
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually
hard science fictionHard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands of Space in Astounding Science...
. In his earlier works 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 researchEmpirical research is research that bases its findings on direct or indirect observation as its test of reality. Such research may also be conducted according to hypothetico-deductive procedures, such as those developed from the work of R. A. Fisher....
, 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-
authoritarianAuthoritarianism describes a form of government characterized by an emphasis on the authority of state in a republic or union. It is a political system controlled by typically non-elected rulers who usually permit some degree of individual freedom....
social views. Many of his novels have strong
anarchistAnarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state ....
or
libertarianLibertarianism is a term adopted by a broad spectrum of political philosophies which advocate the maximization of individual liberty and the minimization or even abolition of the state...
themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled
nuclear fusionFusion power is the power generated by nuclear fusion reactions. In this kind of reaction, two light atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus and in doing so, release a large amount of energy...
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 YesteryearVoyage from Yesteryear is a 1982 science fiction novel by the author James P. Hogan. It explores themes of anarchism and the appropriateness of certain social values in the context of high-technology....
(strongly influenced by
Eric Frank RussellEric Frank Russell was a British author best known for his science fiction novels and short stories. Much of his work was first published in the United States, in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction and other pulp magazines. Russell also wrote horror fiction for Weird Tales, and...
's famous story "
And Then There Were NoneThe Great Explosion is a satirical science fiction novel by Eric Frank Russell, first published in 1962. The story is divided into three sections...
"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the
Alpha CentauriAlpha Centauri ; is the brightest star in the southern constellation of Centaurus and an established binary star system, Alpha Centauri AB...
system, with a starship sent from Earth by a
dictatorial governmentA dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator, without hereditary ascension. It has three possible meanings:...
. The story uses many elements of
civil disobedienceCivil disobedience is the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of a government, or of an occupying power, without resorting to physical violence. It is one of the primary methods of nonviolent resistance...
.
His novels include:
- Inherit the Stars - May 1977 (1st book in Giants series
Giants Series is a series of five science fiction books by author James P. Hogan beginning in 1977. The story follows several scientists who discover how humans originated on a planet named Minerva which orbited the Sol System between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter...
)
- 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
Thrice Upon A Time is a science fiction novel by James P. Hogan, first published in 1980. Unlike most other time travel stories, Thrice Upon A Time considers the ramifications of sending messages into the past and/or receiving messages from the future, rather than the sending of physical objects...
- March 1980
- Giants' Star - July 1981 (3rd book in Giants series)
- Voyage from Yesteryear
Voyage from Yesteryear is a 1982 science fiction novel by the author James P. Hogan. It explores themes of anarchism and the appropriateness of certain social values in the context of high-technology....
- July 1982
- The Minervan Experiment - November 1982 (an omnibus edition of the first three books of the Giants series)
- Code of the Lifemaker
Code of the Lifemaker is a 1983 novel by science fiction author James P. Hogan. NASA's Advance Automation for Space Missions was the direct inspiration for this novel detailing first contact between Earth explorers and the Taloids, clanking replicators who have colonized Saturn's moon Titan.A...
- June 1983 (exploring ideas of a Clanking replicatorA clanking replicator is an artificial self-replicating system that relies on conventional large-scale technology and automation. The term evolved to distinguish such systems from the microscopic "assemblers" that nanotechnology may make possible...
robotic system)
- The Proteus Operation
The Proteus Operation is a science fiction novel which was written by James P. Hogan and published in 1985. Alternate history, time travel, and parallel universes form the basis of its plot, in which a group of military commandos, diplomats, and scientists travel back to 1939...
- 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
Realtime Interrupt is a 1995 science fiction novel by James P. Hogan set in a near-future Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.It tells the story of Joe Corrigan, who awakens in a Pittsburgh hospital without memory...
- 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, December 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
Controversy
In recent years, Hogan's views have tended towards those widely considered "fringe" or
pseudoscientificPseudoscience is a methodology, belief, or practice that is claimed to be scientific, or that is made to appear to be scientific, but which does not adhere to an appropriate scientific methodology, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
. He is a serious proponent of
Immanuel VelikovskyImmanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-born American independent scholar, best known as the author of a number of controversial books reinterpreting the events of ancient history, in particular the US bestseller Worlds in Collision, published in 1950...
's version of
catastrophismCatastrophism is the idea that Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope.The dominant paradigm of modern geology, in contrast, is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...
, and of the theory that
AIDSAcquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus ....
is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than
HIVHuman immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which the immune system begins to fail, leading to life-threatening opportunistic infections. Infection with HIV occurs by the transfer of blood, semen, vaginal fluid,...
(see AIDS denialism). He has stated that he finds basic evidence of
evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
's being random to be lacking - or to disprove the theory outright, though he doesn't propose theistic
creationismCreationism refers to the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in some form by a supernatural being or beings, commonly a single deity...
as an alternative. Hogan is also skeptical of the alleged scientific consensus on global warming and
ozone depletionOzone depletion describes two distinct, but related observations: a slow, steady decline of about 4% per decade in the total volume of ozone in Earth's stratosphere since the late 1970s, and a much larger, but seasonal, decrease in stratospheric ozone over Earth's polar regions during the same...
.
Hogan has also espoused the idea that the
Holocaust didn't happenHolocaust denial is the claim that the genocide of Jews during World War II—usually referred to as the Holocaust—did not occur at all, or that it did not happen in the manner or to the extent historically recognized....
in the manner described by mainstream historians, writing that he finds the work of
Arthur ButzArthur R. Butz is a Holocaust denier and associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University. He achieved tenure in 1974 and currently teaches classes in control system theory and Digital Signal Processing. Butz attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he...
and Mark Weber to be "more scholarly, scientific, and convincing than what the history written by the victors says." 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 originatorsCharacter assassination is an attempt to tarnish a person's reputation. It may involve exaggeration or manipulation of facts to present an untrue picture of the targeted person...
. 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).
External links
- Official website
- Bibliography on SciFan
SciFan is an online database for fans of science fiction and fantasy books.The site provides detailed bibliographies, linking books together into series' where appropriate and, in turn, grouping series by universe...