HOGAN, James P(atrick)

(1941-)

   UK-born systems-design engineer and writer, in the USA from 1977 and a full-time author from 1979. His first novel (and first publication), Inherit the Stars (1977), aroused interest for the exhilarating sense itconveys of scientific minds at work on real problems and for the genuinely exciting scope of the sf imagination it deploys. The book turned out to be the first volume in the Minervan Experiment sequence, being followed by The Gentle Giants of Ganymede (1978) and Giants' Star (1981), all threebeing assembled as The Minervan Experiment (omni 1981; vt The Giants Omnibus 1991). Much later, the sequence continued with Entoverse (1991), atale that laboriously expands the initial premise through the use of a parallel universe in which, rather oddly for a writer pugnaciously associated with the HARD-SF wing of the genre, only MAGIC can cope with the strangeness of the physical world - in the earlier volumes of the sequence the reader was safely in the hands of an author who brooked no such nonsense. The sequence is in fact a hard-sf fable of humanity's origins - we are the direct descendants of the highly aggressive inhabitants of the destroyed fifth planet, who would have conquered the Galaxy had they not blown themselves up - and espouses a vision of theUniverse in which other species must learn to cope with the knowledge that we will, some day, come into our inheritance. Although JPH could not maintain the flow of speculative thought that drove the first volumes, the sequence stands as his best work.Other novels variously succeed in presenting HEROES - generally clumped into male-bonded affinity groups - and scientific problems of a similar nature. In The Genesis Machine (1978) one of these heroes averts the END OF THE WORLD. In Voyage from Yesteryear (1982) a colony world, governed according to the kind of TricksterLibertarianism of old and honoured ASF writers like Eric Frank RUSSELL, effortlessly faces down and flummoxes an attempt by Earth to re-establish control. In Code of the Lifemaker (1983) a ROBOT civilization on Titan is saved from similarly corrupt Earth corporations. But in Endgame Enigma (1987) a NEAR FUTURE Russian threat to dominate the world via armedsatellite is recounted with leaden flippancy, and this brought to the fore a problem JPH has presented to his readers from the first. Though most of them either share or accept his right-wing POLITICS, and tolerate his editorial intrusions about personal betes-noires like the ECOLOGY movement, JPH's extreme awkwardness as a stylist and creator of character has made his books difficult, at times, actually to read. When he abandons his strengths - his hard-edged sense of how SCIENTISTS think, and his joyful capacity to stretch the terms of SPACE OPERA - this gaucheness is difficult to ignore. It is to be hoped that he will return to the game of thought.

   JC

   Other works: The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979); Thrice Upon a Time (1980); The Proteus Operation (1985), a HITLER-WINS story; Minds, Machines \& Evolution (coll 1988); The Mirror Maze (1989); The Infinity Gambit (1991).

   See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; AUTOMATION; EVOLUTION; LIBERTARIAN SF; MOON; NUCLEAR POWER; UTOPIAS.