James P. Hogan (writer)

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James Patrick Hogan
James P. Hogan 2005.JPG
At the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, August 2005.
Born James Patrick Hogan
(1941-06-27)27 June 1941
London, England
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Dromahaire, County Leitrim, Ireland

James Patrick Hogan (27 June 1941 – 12 July 2010) was a British science fiction author.[1]

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. He married three more times and fathered six children.[2]

Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, traveling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet.[citation needed]

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.[2] Hogan died of a heart attack at his home in Ireland on Monday, 12 July 2010, aged 69.[3]

Writings

Most of Hogan's fiction is hard science fiction.

Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views and as such forms part of anarchist science fiction. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes,[citation needed] 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 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") about a high-tech anarchist society in the Alpha Centauri system, a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government, and the events following their first contact. The story features concepts of civil disobedience, post scarcity and gift economy.[citation needed]

Controversy

In his later years, Hogan's views tended towards those widely considered "fringe" or pseudoscientific. He was a proponent of Immanuel Velikovsky's version of catastrophism,[4] and of the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than HIV (see AIDS denialism).[5] He criticised the theory of evolution,[6] though he did not propose theistic creationism as an alternative. Hogan was skeptical of the theories on climate change and ozone depletion.[7]

Hogan also espoused the idea that the Holocaust did not happen in the manner described by mainstream historians, writing that he found the work of Arthur Butz and Mark Weber to be "more scholarly, scientific, and convincing than what the history written by the victors says."[8] Such theories were seen by many[who?] to contradict his views on scientific rationality[how?]; he repeatedly stated that these theories held his attention due to the high quality of their presentation – a quality he believed established sources should attempt to emulate, rather than resorting to attacking their originators.[citation needed]

In March 2010, in an essay defending Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, Hogan stated that the mainstream history of the Holocaust includes "claims that are wildly fantastic, mutually contradictory, and defy common sense and often physical possibility."[9]

James Nicoll described Hogan as having fallen victim to the "brain eater" in a 1999 Usenet post, where he commented that "engineering training provides no protection from nutty ideas."[10]

Bibliography

Novels

Short stories

  • "Assassin" (May 1978, Stellar #4, recollected in Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "Silver Shoes for a Princess" (October 1979, Destinies, October-December 1979, collected in Minds, Machines & Evolution and reworked as the first section of Star Child)
  • "The Sword of Damocles" (May 1980, Stellar #5, an adapted version appears in Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions)
  • "Neander-Tale" (December 1980, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, collected in Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "Till Death Us Do Part" (January 1981, Stellar #6, collected in Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "Making Light" (August 1981, Stellar #7, collected in Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "Identity Crisis" (August 1981, Stellar #7, collected in Rockets, Redheads & Revolution)
  • "The Pacifist" (June 1988, Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "Code of the Lifemaker: Prologue" (June 1988, Minds, Machines & Evolution (the first segment of the novel of the same name))
  • "Merry Gravmas" (June 1988, Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "Generation Gap" (June 1988, Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "Rules Within Rules" (June 1988, Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "The Absolutely Foolproof Alibi" (June 1988, Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "Down to Earth" (June 1988, Minds, Machines & Evolution)
  • "Leapfrog" (August 1989, Alternate Empires, collected in Rockets, Redheads & Revolution)
  • "Last Ditch" (December 1992, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, collected in Rockets, Redheads & Revolution)
  • "Out of Time" (December 1993, chapbook (ISBN 978-0-553-29971-7), collected in Rockets, Redheads & Revolution)
  • "Zap Thy Neighbor" (September 1995, How to Save the World, collected in Rockets, Redheads & Revolution)
  • "Madam Butterfly" (July 1997, Free Space, collected in Rockets, Redheads & Revolution)
  • "Silver Gods from the Sky" (June 1998, Star Child (second part))
  • "Three Domes and a Tower" (June 1998, Star Child (third part))
  • "The Stillness Among the Stars" (June 1998, Star Child (fourth part))
  • "His Own Worst Enemy" (October 2001, Martian Knightlife (a Kieran Thane story))
  • "The Kahl of Tadzhikstan" (October 2001, Martian Knightlife (a Kieran Thane story))
  • "Convolution" (October 2001, Past Imperfect, collected in Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions)
  • "Take Two" (December 2001, Silicon Dreams, collected in Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions)
  • "Jailhouse Rock" (June 2004, Cosmic Tales: Adventures in Sol System (a Kieran Thane story))
  • "The Colonizing of Tharle" (July 2004, Visions of Liberty)
  • "The Tree of Dreams" (February 2005, Cosmic Tales II: Adventures in Far Futures, collected in Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions)
  • "The Falcon" (June 2005, Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, Summer 2005, collected in Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions)
  • "Decontamination Squad" (July 2005, Challenger #22, collected in Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions)
  • "The Guardians" (December 2005, Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions)
  • "Murphy's War" (August 2007, Jim Baen's Universe)
  • "Escape" (February 2008, Transhuman)

Short story collections and fixups

  • Minds, Machines & Evolution (ISBN 978-0-553-27288-8) – June 1988 (Bantam Spectra, republished by Baen, December 1999, short stories and essays)
  • Star Child (ISBN 978-0-671-87878-8) – June 1998 (expansion of "Silver Shoes for a Princess" to a four-story cycle: "Silver Shoes for a Princess", "Silver Gods from the Sky", "Three Domes and a Tower" and "The Stillness Among the Stars")
  • Rockets, Redheads & Revolution (ISBN 0-671-57807-3) – April 1999 (Baen, short stories and essays)
  • Martian Knightlife (ISBN 978-0-7434-3591-8) – October 2001 (two novellas, "His Own Worst Enemy" and "The Kahl of Tadzhikstan", both featuring the Simon Templar-influenced Kieran Thane)
  • Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions (title as published; was to be Catastrophes, Creation & Convolutions) (ISBN 978-1-4165-0921-9) – December 2005 (Baen, short stories and essays)

Omnibus editions

Compilations of novels in the "Giants series".

Non-fiction

References

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External links