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 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]
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]
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 didn't 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 didn't 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; 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]
