James Patrick Hogan (27 June 1941 – 12 July 2010) was a British science fiction author.[1] His major works include the
Giants series of five novels published between 1977 and 2005.
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 studying the practice and theory of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He was married four times and fathered six children.[2]
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually began working with sales during the 1960s, traveling around Europe as a sales engineer for
Honeywell. During the 1970s he joined the
Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and during 1977 relocated to
Boston, Massachusetts to manage its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit The Stars, during the same year to win an office bet.[3]
He quit DEC during 1979 and began writing full-time, relocating to
Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They later relocated to
Sonora, California.[4]
During his later years, Hogan adopted a number of contrarian opinions. He was a proponent of
Immanuel Velikovsky's version of
catastrophism, arguing Velikovsky's critics were part of "an entrenched priesthood" who refused to seriously examine Velikovsky even when some of his predictions were validated (such as Venus's extremely high surface temperature which was contrary to prevailing scientific opinion in the 1950s);[5] and as of 1999 Hogan accepted the
Peter Duesberg hypothesis that AIDS is caused by
pharmaceutical[6] use rather than HIV (see
AIDS denialism).[7] He criticized the idea of the
gradualism of
evolution,[8][9] though he did not propose theistic
creationism as an alternative. Hogan
was skeptical of scientific consensus about
climate change and
ozone depletion.[10]
Hogan believed 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".[11] 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".[12]
Hogan died of heart failure at his home in Ireland on Monday, 12 July 2010, aged 69.[13]
"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).
Minds, Machines & Evolution (
ISBN978-0-553-27288-8) – June 1988 (Bantam Spectra, republished by Baen, December 1999, short stories and essays).
Star Child (
ISBN978-0-671-87878-8) – 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 (
ISBN0-671-57807-3) – April 1999 (Baen, short stories and essays)
Martian Knightlife (
ISBN978-0-7434-3591-8) – 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) (
ISBN978-1-4165-0921-9) – December 2005 (Baen, short stories and essays)
The Giants Novels: Inherit the Stars, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede, and Giants' Star (
ISBN978-0-345-38885-8) – March 1994 (republication of The Minervan Experiment)
The Two Moons (
ISBN978-1-4165-0936-3) - April 2006 (omnnibus of the first two Giants novels)
The Two Worlds (
ISBN978-1-4165-3725-0) - September 2007 (omnibus of the third and fourth Giants novels)
Non-fiction
Mind Matters – Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence (
ISBN978-0-614-28202-3) – March 1997
Kicking the Sacred Cow: Heresy and Impermissible Thoughts in Science (
ISBN978-1-4165-2073-3) – July 2004
^Hogan, James P. (April 1999).
Rockets, Redheads & Revolution.
Baen Books. pp.
151–173.
ISBN0-671-57807-3."Well here's what happens to politically incorrect science when it gets in the way of a bandwagon being propelled by 'lots' of money- and to a scientist who ignores it and attempts simply to point at what the fact seem to be trying to say."... "The 'side effects' <of AZT> look just like AIDS."
Truesdale, Dave (18 July 2010).
"Classic James P. Hogan Interview". Tangent Online. Archived from
the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 19 July 2010. Interview originally appeared in Tangent No. 1, July/August 1993, and is reprinted here for the first time.