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Rockets, Redheads & Revolution
The author offers a tour through his bizarre universes as he discusses the smuggling potential of space travel, his role in the fall of the Soviet Union, and what it would be like to rent a body of one's choice
352 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1999
54 people want to read
About the author
James P. Hogan
114 books268 followersJames Patrick Hogan was a British science fiction author.
Hogan was 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, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling 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. 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.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian 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 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"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
Hogan was 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, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling 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. 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.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian 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 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"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 24, 2024
This was Hogan's second collection of essays and short fiction, a decade or so after Minds, Machines and Evolution came out. By this stage in his career, he'd begun to embrace the idea of challenging accepted scientific beliefs and encouraging his readers to do likewise. That's not necessarily a bad idea, but he occasionally carried it too far, such as denying climate change in the current book. I wonder what craziness he might have professed to embrace if he'd been around for the Covid pandemic. Some of the essays have aged quite badly in a number of ways, though the stories are still enjoyable. The book is fleshed out by the inclusion of the very good novella Out of Time, which Bantam had previously published as a stand-alone volume.
March 4, 2025
A very mixed bag. There are some decent short stories here and a few amusing personal anecdotes, but there are also some essays that wander far off into the weeds of the author's personal pet peeves. These lost my attention quickly. Of the stories, I most enjoyed Madam Butterfly, a clever take on the so-called "butterfly effect", and Identity Crisis, which plays with some of the possible personal ramifications of being able to temporarily inhabit what might be called rent-a-bodies. Of the nonfiction I most enjoyed How They Got Me at Baycon and Sorry About That. Reading these was kind of like listening to the author hold forth at an after-hours bar of some SF convention about misadventures at previous conventions (the former) and the lamentable idiosyncrasies of Irish building contractors (the latter.) Your mileage may vary.
July 15, 2022
So my favorite hard science fiction guy from my 20s became a bit of a science skeptic towards the end of his life. It was really painful to read a couple of articles he wrote about climate change being a hoax, but at least it ended stong with a 100 page novella.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews