James P. Hogan (writer)


James Patrick Hogan was a British science fiction author. His major works include the Giants series of five novels published between 1977 and 2005.
WWW jamesphogan.com

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.
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.
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.
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 ; and as of 1999 Hogan accepted the Peter Duesberg hypothesis that AIDS is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than HIV. He criticized the idea of the gradualism of evolution, though he did not propose theistic creationism as an alternative. Hogan was skeptical of scientific consensus about climate change and ozone depletion.
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". 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".
Hogan died of heart failure at his home in Ireland on Monday, 12 July 2010, aged 69.

Novels

Giants series

  1. Inherit the Stars – May 1977.
  2. The Gentle Giants of Ganymede – May 1978.
  3. Giants' Star – July 1981.
  4. Entoverse – October 1991.
  5. Mission to Minerva – May 2005.

Short stories

  • "Assassin".
  • "Silver Shoes for a Princess".
  • "The Sword of Damocles".
  • "Neander-Tale".
  • "Till Death Us Do Part".
  • "Making Light".
  • "Identity Crisis".
  • "The Pacifist".
  • "Code of the Lifemaker: Prologue".
  • "Merry Gravmas".
  • "Generation Gap".
  • "Rules Within Rules".
  • "The Absolutely Foolproof Alibi".
  • "Down To Earth".
  • "Leapfrog".
  • "Last Ditch".
  • "Out of Time".
  • "Zap Thy Neighbor".
  • "Madam Butterfly".
  • "Silver Gods from the Sky".
  • "Three Domes and a Tower".
  • "The Stillness Among the Stars".
  • "His Own Worst Enemy".
  • "The Kahl of Tadzhikstan".
  • "Convolution".
  • "Take Two".
  • "Jailhouse Rock".
  • "The Colonizing of Tharle".
  • "The Tree of Dreams".
  • "The Falcon".
  • "Decontamination Squad".
  • "The Guardians".
  • "Murphy's War".
  • "Escape".

Short story collections and fixups

  • Minds, Machines & Evolution – June 1988.
  • Star Child – June 1998
  • Rockets, Redheads & Revolution – April 1999
  • Martian Knightlife – October 2001
  • Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions – December 2005

Omnibus editions

Compilations of novels in the "Giants series".

Non-fiction

  • Mind Matters – Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence – March 1997
  • Kicking the Sacred Cow: Heresy and Impermissible Thoughts in Science – July 2004