Well known Irish popular science and science fiction author James P “Jim” Hogan died at his home in Ireland on July 12^th. His passing was sudden and unexpected, and certainly caused me a deal of sadness. Jim and I had become fairly good friends, corresponding regularly over the past several years, and he had enthusiastically promoted The Virtue of Heresy (see his website http://www.jamesphogan.com/heretics/toc.php). I, in turn, have a special place on my bookshelf for his very important work, Kicking the Sacred Cow. I didn’t buy into all of his scepticism—his views on Velikovskian catastrophism left me cold, and he didn’t ever convince me that there’s no link between AIDS and HIV—but in the main, the principles put forward in Kicking the Sacred Cow brought to me the enlightening realisation that healthy scepticism is a wholly different kettle of fish from being an iconoclast.

Jim’s story should have been told in an autobiography, but he didn’t get around to it, more’s the pity. It was something we’d been urging him to do because, like the late Arthur C. Clarke, he lived a richly embroidered life, and his forebears no less so. He did relent eventually and laid out the tentative outline that follows. It’s a glimpse into a fascinating life:

I was born in London in 1941, my father Irish, mother German. She crossed Europe on foot at the age of 19 to find England and a soldier that she had met in the British occupying forces stationed in Silesia, nowadays a part of Poland, after World War I. She did, and they married, and had three children. However, he had been gassed in the trenches and died from the effects during the thirties. She remarried the Hogan who was my father. A lot of people have said that story should be written as a book. Maybe, one day.

So I grew up in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London, very down-to-earth and working class. I'd arrived in the world with quite severe deformities to both feet, which took many years of surgery to correct. But the doctors did a good job, and by the time I was a teenager I was able to go hiking, camping, and rock climbing around the mountains in Wales and Scotland. One thing that resulted from those early years was an insatiable appetite for reading books--an interest that has obviously persisted.

I didn't care much for school, though, which was too classically oriented for my tastes at the time, and so, I left at age sixteen to embark on a miscellany of jobs leading nowhere until my mother persuaded me to have a try at a series of competitive examinations held every year for scholarships at government research institutions around the country. The upshot was that I joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough to take an intensive, broad-based five-year program covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. The course at Farnborough was very comprehensive, structured in the form of a "thin sandwich," which consisted of three months in college alternating with three months of practical work, commencing with turning, milling, fitting, welding, carpentry, and so on in the Establishment workshops, and progressing in subsequent years through departments like Photography, Instrumentation, Chemistry, Engines, Structures, Wind Tunnels, with some lucky individuals ending up flying as observers in planes on research missions over the Atlantic. The college itself was run by the Establishment and staffed not by educationalists but by former engineers and other professionals. The speech given by the RAE Technical College principal to new intakes and their proud parents at the beginning of each academic year was a masterpiece of brevity and astute psychological insight to the minds of 16-to-18-year-olds just venturing out into the world and conscious of their impending independence a role of responsibility that comes with it. He said, "We have no book of rules or regulations at this college. You have left school and are now adults. You are expected to behave accordingly." And then he sat down.

The standards at Farnborough were high, but perhaps partly as a consequence of the impetuousness of Irish genes, in addition to enjoying the work and meeting its demands, I married young to a Yorkshire lass called Iris, and at twenty found myself the proud father of twins, Debbie and Jane, and then two years later of another daughter, Tina. There had been some talk at Farnborough of my being sent on a physics scholarship to Cambridge, but the new family responsibilities pretty much put the lid on that. To begin with, I worked as a design engineer for several companies, involved mainly with digital control and instrumentation for scientific and industrial applications--data collection and analysis in industrial and academic labs; control and monitoring in paper, glass, and steelmaking, manufacturing, defence-related research. Our sins eventually catch up with us, however, and eventually I moved into sales. That was in the 1960s. On-line, real-time computers were rapidly taking over from hard-wired electronics, and it was probably inevitable that anyone working in those areas would gravitate into the computer industry. I travelled around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell, and in the seventies joined Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group, working for several years in the London area and then transferring north to the company's Yorkshire office in Leeds.

In 1977 I married my second wife, Lyn, who was from Worcester, and in the same year DEC shipped me over to Massachusetts to run their training program for salespeople specializing in scientific applications. Following after the magnificent years of the Apollo Program, this was a tremendous experience for people who at that time saw Americans as these incredible "can-do" people across the ocean, who produced the jets and computers used everywhere around the world and walked on the Moon even as experts in other places were still writing papers proving that it was impossible.

By this time I'd been writing science-fiction as a hobby for some years. It began when I saw and enjoyed the movie 2001 but didn't understand the ending. The whole thing ended up as an office bet that I couldn't write a science fiction novel and get it published. To cut a long story short I did, and it was, in the shape of Inherit the Stars, which made 50 pounds (I was still in the UK at the time) on top of Del Rey's advance. By 1979 I had written four novels, which were well received among professional scientists as well as the regular s.f. community, and embarked on the renovation of a large, 7-bedroom colonial house in Massachusetts. No sooner was this project completed, however, when Lyn and I decided to go separate ways. For good measure I quit DEC too to write full-time and left Boston in the Fall of '79 to become one of the romantically unemployed, with a car, two suitcases, a portable typewriter and a contract for another book with Del Rey, and no clear idea of where I was heading.

After several months of adventuring around the south-eastern and southern States I wound up in Orlando, Florida, where I spent a year and took up with a lady called Jackie, who had been a handguns instructor in the U.S. Navy, transferred to the Army to become a general's secretary, and had also seen the end of her second marriage. She was originally from California, and we ended up moving there, to a former gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada foothills called Sonora. One of the most predictable things in life is that the unpredictable will happen. Something that my idyllic visions of a carefree writer's life hadn't taken into account on the day I drove south from Massachusetts was acquiring another wife and three sons—Alex, Mike, and Joe—to go with the three daughters that I already had. And, yes, we bought another old house in the center of town and embarked on a scheme of renovations and alterations. As is so often said of life, we live and we learn . . . and then we forget. Women tell me it's much the same with having babies.

Life in the mountain foothill country was free, easy, and invigoratingly "different." Surrounded by hills, Sonora had never expanded to automobile scale, and was still one of those towns with a Main Street lined by shops and bars close together, where people walked places, built around a T-junction which in those days boasted the only set of traffic lights in Tuolumne County. It seemed to be a town of individualists, where people gravitated who had woken up one morning deciding to quit their crummy job and do what they wanted to do. The bookstore was run by a former psychologist from UCLA; a one-time weapons designer from Lockheed owned the health-food store; passing the sandwich store frequently earned a Biblical harangue from the evangelical fundamentalist manager, while the best friend of the Iranian with the restaurant around the corner was an Israeli. We had recluse who spent most of his time studying mathematics, when he wasn't hobnobbing with the local barber, whose other consuming interest was chess, and who sometimes took on 20 players simultaneously in the ice-cream parlour. We had an admirer of Nazism who played German military choral music when he and his wife invited you for dinner, a hard-drinking, pot-smoking, fornicating Jehovah's Witness, and an ex-Air Force chemist with a love of spelunking, who now owned commercial caves. The striking thing was that everyone accepted everyone else as they were and had no ideas about how people "ought" to be. A microcosm, maybe, of how the world could be too.

So there's an outline of the plot so far, which has gotten a little more convoluted in places than the kind of thing I had in mind at the outset. I haven't really worked out the ending yet, either. But I'd hope there are a few more chapters to go before that becomes too much of a pressing issue.

Thank you, Jim old buddy. Rest in peace.