So I grew up in the Portobello Road area one 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 and camping around the mountains in Wales and Scotland. Those early years got me into reading books--an interest that has obviously persisted.

I didn't care much for school, though, which was too classically oriented for my tastes, and left at 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. Any how, I made it and 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. (Despite what the flap copy of some of my books says, although the curriculum included some basic aerodynamics, I wasn't an aeronautical engineer. Once these things are inside somebody's computer you can never get them out. I finally specialized in electronics.)

The course at Farnborough was thorough and the standards high, and I enjoyed it. However, I didn't complete the full five years, although I did graduate later. I married very young, and at twenty found myself the proud father of twins. That was the first marriage of three--and the twins were the first of what became six. "Intelligent" systems can be defined as ones that can learn from experience and modify their behavior accordingly. I suppose that puts me in the intermediate category of learning all right, but not changing anything very much as a consequence.

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, defense-related research. Our sins eventually catch up with us, and eventually I moved into sales. That was in the sixties. On-line, realtime 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 traveled around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell, and in the seventies joined Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group, who in 1977 shipped me over to Massachusetts to run their sales training program for salespeople specializing in scientific applications.

I'd been writing science-fiction as a hobby for some years, having begun, as I recollect, for an office bet--which I won by getting my first novel, Inherit the Stars, published in 1977. By 1979 I had written four novels, well received among professional scientists as well as the regular s.f. community. I was among the romantically unemployed at the time, having just sold the house in Massachusetts that marked the high point of my second marriage. So I quit DEC too for good measure to write full-time, and left Boston in the Fall of '79 with a car, two suitcases, a portable Japanese typewriter, and a contract for another book with Del Rey.

I wound up in Orlando, Florida, spent a year there, and met Jackie, from California. We moved to Sonora, a former gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada foothills. One of the most predictable things in life is that the unpredictable will happen. One of the things 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 three sons to go with the three daughters I already had. But we managed to muddle through, so I suppose the survival plan passed its big test.

In the end, it seems that the Irish side of me finally prevailed, and we crossed back over the Atlantic in the late eighties, coming to rest eventually in a town called Bray in northern Wicklow, on the coast about twelve miles south of Dublin. I still keep a place in the U.S., however, in Pensacola, northwest Florida, and I spend part of most years there, which enables me to stay in touch and show my face at some of the conventions. Ireland and the United States complement each other rather well, in that each is nice to get back to after a protracted stay in the other. Alternating between such extremes adds up, in my submission, to a fair approximation to an average lifestyle. It's the same statistical kind of logic that leads one to conclude that, on balance, a manic depressive averages about normal.

James P. Hogan's Home Page

Forum Guest Archives
Next Month's Guest - James Gunn