James Patrick Hogan
James Patrick Hogan
London, England
Dromahaire, County Leitrim, Ireland
James Patrick Hogan (27 June 1941 12 July 2010) was a British science fiction author.[1]
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 first married at the age of twenty. He married three more times and fathered six children.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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 then relocated to Sonora, California.[citation needed] Hogan died of heart failure at his home in Ireland on Monday, 12 July 2010, aged 69.[2]
Most of Hogan's fiction is so-called hard science fiction.
Hogan's fiction also represents anti-authoritarian social opinions and as such forms part of anarchistic science fiction. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes,[3][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 fusion power would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. Essentially, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage From Yesteryear (influenced strongly by Eric Frank Russell's story "And Then There Were None") about a technologically advanced anarchist society in the Alpha Centauri system, a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government, and the events after their first contact. The story features concepts of civil disobedience, post scarcity and gift economy.[4][citation needed]
During his later years, Hogan's contrarian and anti-authoritarian opinions favored those widely considered extremist. He was a proponent of Immanuel Velikovsky's version of catastrophism,[5] and of 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 the theories of climate change and ozone depletion.[10]
Hogan also endorsed 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".[11] Such theories were considered by many[who?] to contradict his opinions concerning scientific rationality;[how?] he stated repeatedly that these theories had his attention due to the good quality of their presentation a quality he believed established sources should attempt to emulate, rather than resorting to attacking their originators.[citation needed]
During March 2010, in an essay defending Holocaust denier Ernst Zndel, 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]
Compilations of novels in the "Giants series".
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James P. Hogan (writer) - Wikipedia
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