James P. Hogan

James Patrick Hogan (27 June 1941 – 12 July 2010) was a British science fiction author. His major works include the Giants series of five novels published between 1977 and 2005.

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 was married four times and fathered six children.

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.

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 later relocated to Sonora, California.

During his later years, Hogan adopted a number of contrarian opinions. He was a proponent of Immanuel Velikovsky's version of catastrophism, arguing Velikovsky's critics were part of "an entrenched priesthood" who refused to seriously examine Velikovsky even when some of his predictions were validated (such as Venus's extremely high surface temperature which was contrary to prevailing scientific opinion in the 1950s); and as of 1999 Hogan accepted the Peter Duesberg hypothesis that AIDS is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than HIV (see AIDS denialism). He criticized the idea of the gradualism of evolution, though he did not propose theistic creationism as an alternative. Hogan was skeptical of scientific consensus about climate change and ozone depletion.

Hogan believed 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". 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".

Hogan died of heart failure at his home in Ireland on Monday, 12 July 2010, aged 69.