James Patrick Hogan was a British science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

.

Biography

Hogan was born in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, England

England

England 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, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. He was raised in the Portobello Road

Portobello Road

Portobello 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. On Saturdays it is home to Portobello Road Market, one of London's...

 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

Royal Aircraft Establishment

The Royal Aircraft Establishment , was a British research establishment, known by several different names during its history, that eventually came under the aegis of the UK Ministry of Defence , before finally losing its identity in mergers with other institutions.The first site was at Farnborough...

 at Farnborough

Farnborough Airfield

Farnborough Airport or TAG London Farnborough Airport is an airport situated in Farnborough, Rushmoor, Hampshire, England...

 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.

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

Honeywell

Honeywell International, Inc. 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 Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston

Boston

Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. 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. As of the 2010...

 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 Orlando, Florida

Orlando, Florida

Orlando is a 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 area. According to the 2010 US Census, the city had a population of 238,300, making Orlando the 79th largest city in the United States...

, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California

Sonora, California

Sonora is the county seat of Tuolumne County, California. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 4,903, up from 4,423 at the 2000 census. Sonora is the only incorporated community in Tuolumne County.-Geography:...

. Hogan died of a heart attack at his home in Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 on Monday, 12 July 2010, aged 69.

Writings

Most of Hogan's fiction is hard science fiction

Hard science fiction

Hard 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...

.

Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian

Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority. It is usually opposed to individualism and democracy...

 social views and as such forms part of anarchist science fiction. Many of his novels have strong anarchist

Anarchism

Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...

 or libertarian

Libertarianism

Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...

 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 fusion

Fusion power

Fusion power is the power generated by nuclear fusion processes. In fusion reactions two light atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus . In doing so they release a comparatively large amount of energy arising from the binding energy due to the strong nuclear force which is manifested...

 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

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....

(strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell

Eric Frank Russell

Eric 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 None

The Great Explosion

The Great Explosion is a satirical science fiction novel by Eric Frank Russell, first published in 1962. The story is divided into three sections...

"), a high-tech anarchist society in the Alpha Centauri

Alpha Centauri

Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in the southern constellation of Centaurus...

 system, a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government

Dictatorship

A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...

, and the events following their first contact. The story features concepts of civil disobedience

Civil disobedience

Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is commonly, though not always, defined as being nonviolent resistance. It is one form of civil resistance...

, post scarcity

Post scarcity

Post scarcity is a hypothetical form of economy or society, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free...

 and gift economy

Gift economy

In the social sciences, a gift economy is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards . Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community...

.

Controversy

In his later years, Hogan's views tended towards those widely considered "fringe" or pseudoscientific

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...

. He was a proponent of Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-born American independent scholar of Jewish origins, 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 catastrophism

Catastrophism

Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...

, and of the theory that AIDS

AIDS

Acquired 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 HIV

HIV

Human immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...

 (see AIDS denialism). He stated that he found basic evidence of evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

's being random to be lacking — or to disprove the theory outright, though he didn't propose theistic creationism

Creationism

Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...

 as an alternative. Hogan was skeptical of the theories on climate change

Climate change

Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...

 and ozone depletion

Ozone depletion

Ozone depletion describes two distinct but related phenomena observed since the late 1970s: a steady decline of about 4% per decade in the total volume of ozone in Earth's stratosphere , and a much larger springtime decrease in stratospheric ozone over Earth's polar regions. The latter phenomenon...

.

Hogan also espoused the idea that the Holocaust didn't happen

Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...

 in the manner described by mainstream historians, writing that he found the work of Arthur Butz

Arthur Butz

Arthur 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.-Education:...

 and Mark Weber

Mark Weber

Mark Edward Weber is the director of the Institute for Historical Review, an American Holocaust denial organization based in southern California....

 to be "more scholarly, scientific, and convincing than what the history written by the victors says." Such theories were seen by many to contradict his views on scientific rationality; 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

Character assassination

Character assassination is an attempt to tarnish a person's reputation. It may involve exaggeration, misleading half-truths, or manipulation of facts to present an untrue picture of the targeted person...

.

In March 2010, in an essay defending Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel

Ernst Zündel

Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel is a German Holocaust denier and pamphleteer who was jailed several times in Canada for publishing literature which "is likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group" and for being a threat to national security, in the United States for overstaying his visa,...

, 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."

External links

• James P. Hogan, entry at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd edition (draft)
• Bibliography on SciFan
  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...
  
  
• image of young James P. Hogan on Facebook