James P Hogan was born in London in 1941 of an Irish father and a German mother. He grew up around the Portobello Road area of London, and took to reading whilst hiking and camping around the mountains in Wales and Scotland.

A successful scholarship examination got him into the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough to take a five-year course in electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. This all led to him working as a design engineer, for both industrial and academic applications, and eventually led him into computers. Having travelled all over Europe as a sales engineer, in 1977 he found himself in Massachusetts, working for Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group.

At the same time as all this was happening, James has his first novel, Inherit the Stars, published by Del Rey in 1977. By 1979, and with four books published, he quit the day job to concentrate on being a full-time writer.

James is firmly planted at the hard science end of the science-fiction spectrum, and continues to write prolifically. He has 22 novels published so far, with another due in the summer of 2003. He has also written one non-fiction book, Mind Matters: Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence, as well as having had one of his books, The Two Faces of Tomorrow adapted into a comic book series, which was published in thirteen parts by Dark Horse Comics in America, as well as as a two-parter by Kodansha in Japan.

In the late Eighties James and his family moved to Ireland, and, following a brief stay in Bray in County Wicklow, he now lives in County Sligo.

We are delighted to have James attending what is his first SF con in Ireland.