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James P. Hogan
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 James P. Hogan, with Robert L. Forward and Charles Sheffield, was a leader in the new generation
of hard sf writers in the early 1980s. At the same moment when Gregory Benford (and slightly later, Greg
Bear) raised the literary standards of hard sf with their novels and stories, Hogan entered the field as if it were
1939 or 1949 and he had just discovered Heinlein and Asimov, Campbell and Astounding. This was in certain
ways a great step backward, and shows a strong reaction on the part of a significant portion of the reading
audience against the fashionable literary sf of the day (not, we hasten to add, against the hard sf but against the
"speculative fiction"). Generally uninterested in reading in the contemporary field, Hogan in particular set about
reinventing it from the forties onward, in novels filled with ideas and technology -- such as
Inherit the Stars (1977), The Genesis
Machine (1978), The Two Faces of
Tomorrow (1979), Thrice in Time (1980), and
Code of the Lifemaker (1983) -- that made him one of the more popular writers of the decade.
He has published very few short stories (collected in
Minds, Machines & Evolution [1988]); the novel
is his natural metier. This little hard sf satire skewers one of the favorite targets of the techie community:
bureaucracy and governmental regulation of science -- as Mr. Spock would say, "it is illogical." Regularly
presented as the enemies of science and reason since the 1940s, the politician and the bureaucrat had become
in the 1980s stock stereotype villains of Analog-type stories. Hogan, who writes for scientists and engineers
and not for the more literate segments of the sf community, represents that community's feelings and prejudices
through his fiction as much as any sf writer of the 1980s. This story represents that strain of hard sf
descended from Raymond F. Jones' "The Person from Porlock." While it is intended to entertain by preaching to
the converted, there seems to be an endless appetite among devotees of hard sf for amusements of this sort.
And one must acknowledge that it seems easy enough and clever enough to the nonliterary aspiring writer of sf
that in each decade it encourages new writers from the scientific and engineering community to enter the field,
as Hogan has remarked he did, with the attitude that "I can do that and do it better." This is one of the ways
in which hard sf continues to attract new writers today.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
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Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
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Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.