James P. Hogan (1) (1941–2010)

A sleeper classic, somewhat misrepresented by the pulp-ish packaging. In many ways, this reads better to me now than when I first read it decades ago. Yeah, there's the Unidentified Anomaly (the dead guy), the BDO (alien ship on Ganymede), arguing specialists of many stripes, and plenty of sense-of-wonder cues to make a good pulp, but Hogan did go a couple steps further here.

First, a couple of counter-indications. The frequent smoking, even on spaceships and in computing centers, is a really show more dated and awkward detail. Also, the chauvinistic lack of women in any professional role is partly anachronistic and partly just creepy. So, it seems JPH was truly a bloke of his generation all around: cigars and scotch for all the guys!

On the other hand, his presentation of what are effectively lap-top computers, on-line purchasing, and multinational corporations funding interdisciplinary research teams were pretty forward-thinking for 1977. Best of all, for me at least, was the focus throughout of scientists and administrators behaving right. Scientists get territorial and defensive, even punchy, about their theories and conclusions; teams reduplicate work because they weren't communicating across the hall, arguments go on and on. Like real research or conferences! And though there have been advances in all fields since the late 1970s, Hogan's presentation of evolution, physics, and linguistic reconstruction are pretty much bang on. I might not be fully at home with his attitudes, but he did his homework, and wrote science admin as he'd lived it.

There's a 50,000 year old dead guy on the moon, evidence of aliens in the Solar System, and human bases on a number of other worlds, but the real theme of this book is the researchers working the problem. That doesn't get old. show less

A team of scientists investigates a 50,000-year-old human corpse discovered on the Moon. Through methodical deduction, they unravel an epic mystery, rewriting the origins of humanity and a lost planetary civilization.

In 2027, a lunar mission discovers a well-preserved human astronaut in a bright red spacesuit hidden in a rocky grave. Nicknamed Charlie, testing reveals the body is exactly 50,000 years old. The mystery deepens because early humans 50,000 years ago lacked space travel show more technology, and anatomical tests show he did not evolve on Earth.

Led by UN scientist Victor Hunt and a multidisciplinary team, researchers work collaboratively to test, debate, and analyze clues. Every time they develop a theory about Charlie, new discoveries contradict it, forcing them to look for larger, systemic answers.

Through forensic analysis, archaeological findings, and the discovery of an ancient alien ship on the moon Ganymede, the scientists piece together the history of our solar system. Planet Minerva: 50,000 years ago, a human-like civilization lived on the planet that once orbited between Mars and Jupiter.

A global nuclear war over scarce resources caused Minerva to explode, creating the Asteroid Belt. Charlie was a Lunarian, an inhabitant of Minerva's moon, whose ship crash-landed on Earth's moon. The Minervans were actually the descendants of ancient humans who were transported to Minerva from Earth millions of years ago by mysterious, highly advanced aliens. show less

I loved Inherit the Stars but haven't been loving its sequels; one of my problems has been that the original novel sets up this great image of humanity clinging on beyond all hope and managing to survive when they home planet of Minerva is destroyed, the survivors riding it out on Minerva's moon as it is flung into orbit of Earth. The later novels have ignored this image, focusing on the Ganymeans, who were really only in Inherit the Stars to explain how humanity could both originate on show more Minerva and also share characteristics with other Earth animals. When they did focus on it, they undermined it; we've been told since that the Ganymeans scooped up the Minervans and deposited them on Earth, which is nowhere near as cool.

I was excited, then, to see that the last book in the Minervan series, Mission to Minerva would return us to that original, captivating piece of mythology. Charlie and Koriel, and all that.

Well, I should have expected that Mission to Minerva would just be the most recent disappointing sequel, the worst book in the series in fact. The first half of the book is spent working out Hogan's own hard scientific ideas for time travel, which could perhaps be possibly worthwhile to someone who hasn't read decades of sf that takes both time travel and alternate universes as a part of the landscape.

Hogan could maybe get away with this if it was interesting... but it's not. Not remotely. The first book made scientific problem-solving accessible and exciting; this one makes it into dull gibberish. Here's a key moment in the novel:

"Standing waves." She turned her head back and focused on him. "Defining a structure distributed through a volume of space. That's the way to halt a test object! It propagates as a longitudinal M-wave function. If we project an interference function to create a standing wave in resonance with the normal transverse solution, it will lock into the target universe. It would force the object to materialize there."

But of course! How could I not have figured it out myself? It was obvious!

Once the characters do travel back in time to Minerva, the book doesn't really get any better. Even the original breakdown of Minervan relations turns out to go back to Jevlenese crazies-- can't humans ever do anything terrible for themselves? It doesn't help that Hogan is unable to write villainous characters without making them one-note and brutish. Complex politics are certainly not his forte. Also, there's not even a sign of Charlie and Koriel!

When I read Entoverse, I complained about Hogan's reactionary politics. I should have counted my blessings; Mission to Minerva has characters explaining how a new glorious age is going to come into existence ad nauseam. When he shows this instead of telling it, it almost works: the book's closing image of Earthers, Jevlenese, Ganymeans, and Minervans united in a common cause is almost uplifting. But that's one moment in an overlong novel.

Inherit the Stars will always remain a favorite novel of mine. But the only one of the sequels that has even been vaguely worth my time is Giants' Star; this is definitely a case where I should have quit while I was ahead. show less

I have fond memories of reading James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars from when I was a kid. It was passed on to me by my father, and I know I read it at least twice. A few years ago, I acquired this book-- the first I knew that Inherit the Stars had any sequels, much less four. It's first two are collected here, and I took the opportunity to reread the original and read the other two for the first time:

Inherit the Stars
It's pretty easy to read many sf stories as essentially detective fiction, show more but perhaps that has never been more true than with this novel. The novel lays out a very intriguing mystery-- how did the corpse of a human being in a spacesuit end up on the moon 50,000 years ago?-- and all of the information, and then proceeds to have the characters solve it. There's not much of characterization or depth here, really, but that's not what you're reading it for. Even if you've read the book before and know the answer, there's a certain joy in watching a set of skilled professionals at work, slowing piecing together the clues and unraveling the mystery.

Inherit the Stars was published around a decade after Thomas Kuhn blew open the scientific world with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and it would not surprise me at all to learn that Hogan had read his work; the book in many ways epitomizes what Kuhn says about the moment of crisis that causes a paradigm change. Some attempt to keep on working in the old paradigm, ignoring bits that don't fit, others plunge ahead, and it's hard for everyone to communicate without a common language.

There are also some interesting echoes of Darwin. One of my favorite parts of The Descent of Man is when Darwin talks about the valiant little ape who saved his comrade, as it's inspiring; we as a species came into existence because of a countless number of events of tenacious survival. Inherit the Stars ends similarly, with the solution to the mystery actually being quite inspirational in what it says about humankind.

The Gentle Giants of Ganymede
This book suffers one of the most common problems of sequels. It's essentially the same book as the first one, only less compelling. It's structured around a mystery, but instead of "how did the corpse of a human being in a spacesuit end up on the moon 50,000 years ago?", it's something about amino acids. Of course, it grows more complex from there, but one central mystery never drives the novel, just a number of small and underdeveloped ones.

One of the big weaknesses in Inherit the Stars, by the by, is that the characters uncover the spaceship on Ganymede at the exact moment they need the information it contains. Lucky them! The Gentle Giants of Ganymede exacerbates this tenfold with its big coincidence; all in all, I found this a dull and pointless sequel.

Giants' Star
Thankfully, things pick up with Giants' Star, which takes the series from scientific mysteries to political ones; this is actually a pretty fast-paced thriller about alien interference in human development. There's spy missions, space warfare, alien invasions, and some really cool mysteries to unravel. It's a massive change in tone from the first two books, and involving in a much less intellectual way than Inherit the Stars, but I liked it a lot anyway-- you just have to enjoy it for what it is. The plots within plots get pretty elaborate at some points.

It does undermine the series' own mythology in some key ways, though. One of the problems I have with the Foundation series as it goes on is that it constantly undoes its own purpose: you start out thinking psychohistory predicts everything, but soon you find out that the Second Foundation's telepaths manipulated everything, and then you find out that there are even further levels of manipulation, so that psychohistory (ostensibly the core premise of the series) doesn't work at all. Something similar happens here; by the end of Giants' Star, you've learned that the scientists in Inherit the Stars were right about what happened... but for all the wrong reasons. It reads as though readers objected to Hogan's solution on scientific grounds, and he had to keep on coming up with reasons it could still work, disrupting the sheer elegance of the original. I also think that focusing on the giants is focusing on the less interesting part of the series premise-- Charley's people are the cool ones!

If you can just look at Giants' Star as a standalone though, it works pretty well, and I'm interested enough that I've picked up the last two books in the series, and hopefully I'll read them soon...

(These books also introduced me to the UK idea of the "cryptic crossword." Geeze! I struggle with the L.A. Times one enough, and I'll stick to that, thank you very much.) show less