Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:42:00 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: James P. Hogan (1941 - 2010)
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Michael Walsh wrote:
 > Madeleine Yeh <myeh at wap.org> 07/14/10 12:27 AM >>>
 >>   "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net> wrote:
 >>> James P. Hogan was found dead at home on July 12
 >>> according to his> literary agent.
 >>
 >>> He was one of my favorite authors in the '80s and '90s.
 >>> But then he got obsessed with Velikovskyism, making his later novels
 >>> unreadable. So much for my hopes that he would eventually outgrow
 >>> that phase and return to good writing.

 >>    I don't remember any of his later novels.    What was
 >> Velikovskyism?

> "And then the witch doctor, he told me what to do
> He said that ....":
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky

Yeah, I actually *read* Velikovsky, back in the late sixties. I remember being
unsure if I should be horrified that there was *any* "controversy" about the
Scientific Community Deliberately Blackballing Him For Unorthodoxy, or ROTFL.

Short version: a few thousand years ago, Jupiter spit out Venus, which careened
around the solar system, and left a millions-of-miles-long lightening down to
the MIddle East, which was followed by some wandering escaped slaves from Egypt
<g>, and eventually settled into its current orbit around the Sun....

 mark "even Shaver was saner than this"
--
"Bush, himself the most intellectually backward American
  president [sic] of my political lifetime, is surrounded
  by advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their
  political, military and diplomatic illiteracy."
-- Gerald Kaufman, Former British Labour Minister