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]
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]
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 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".[12]
"Silver Shoes for a Princess" (October 1979, Destinies, October-December 1979, collected in Minds, Machines & Evolution and reworked as the first section of Star Child).
"The Sword of Damocles" (May 1980, Stellar #5, an adapted version appears in Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions).
Minds, Machines & Evolution (ISBN978-0-553-27288-8) – June 1988 (Bantam Spectra, republished by Baen, December 1999, short stories and essays).
Star Child (ISBN978-0-671-87878-8) – June 1998 (expansion of "Silver Shoes for a Princess" to a four-story cycle: "Silver Shoes for a Princess", "Silver Gods from the Sky", "Three Domes and a Tower" and "The Stillness Among the Stars")
Rockets, Redheads & Revolution (ISBN0-671-57807-3) – April 1999 (Baen, short stories and essays)
Martian Knightlife (ISBN978-0-7434-3591-8) – October 2001 (two novellas, "His Own Worst Enemy" and "The Kahl of Tadzhikstan", both featuring the Simon Templar-influenced Kieran Thane)
Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions (title as published; was to be Catastrophes, Creation & Convolutions) (ISBN978-1-4165-0921-9) – December 2005 (Baen, short stories and essays)
The Giants Novels: Inherit the Stars, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede, and Giants' Star (ISBN978-0-345-38885-8) – March 1994 (republication of The Minervan Experiment)
The Two Moons (ISBN978-1-4165-0936-3) - April 2006 (omnnibus of the first two Giants novels)
The Two Worlds (ISBN978-1-4165-3725-0) - September 2007 (omnibus of the third and fourth Giants novels)
Non-fiction[]
Mind Matters – Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence (ISBN978-0-614-28202-3) – March 1997
Kicking the Sacred Cow: Heresy and Impermissible Thoughts in Science (ISBN978-1-4165-2073-3) – July 2004
^Hogan, James P. (April 1999). Rockets, Redheads & Revolution. Baen Books. pp. 151–173. ISBN0-671-57807-3."Well here's what happens to politically incorrect science when it gets in the way of a bandwagon being propelled by 'lots' of money- and to a scientist who ignores it and attempts simply to point at what the fact seem to be trying to say."... "The 'side effects' <of AZT> look just like AIDS."
^Hogan, James P. (April 1999). Rockets, Redheads & Revolution. Baen Books. pp. 175–192. ISBN0-671-57807-3."My own belief, if it isn't obvious already, is that the final story will eventually come together along such catastrophist lines."
^James P. Hogan. Kicking the Sacred Cow. Riverdale, NY: Baen. ISBN0-7434-8828-8.
Truesdale, Dave (18 July 2010). "Classic James P. Hogan Interview". Tangent Online. Retrieved 19 July 2010. Interview originally appeared in Tangent No. 1, July/August 1993, and is reprinted here for the first time.