James P. Hogan had died.
He wrote science fiction. The books I read, over 20 years ago, were generally pretty good. He has the distinction for me of having written one of my favorite debut novels, Inherit the Stars. It was a murder mystery, a science mystery, a space adventure, and a thorough-going exposition on forensics of all sorts, including, in the end, “evolutionary” forensics (if such a thing exists).
There is profound irony in that. The plot hinges around a spacesuited corpse found on the moon at a time when it shouldn’t have been there. The story is the series of investigations finding out where it came from. Mars, it is ultimately learned. But the creature in the suit—hundreds of thousands of years old—could not possibly have evolved on Mars. Hogan employed genetics and evolutionary biology to solve the mystery.
The irony is that later in his life—for all I know, even then—he became an evolution denier. Go to his web page and you can find links to papers by such leading lights of woo-woo Intelligent Design as Michael Behe and William Dembski.
But that’s not all. He was a Holocaust Denier. He was careful not to put it up as a category on his site, with the other things he seemed to be opposed to. Yet he had made public statements to that effect.
I stopped reading Hogan when it became clear in his novels that he harbored an absolute hatred of communism and the Soviet Union, so much so that occasionally the polemic spilled into the prose and he seemed at times on the verge of blaming everything on them. I was never a fan of the Eastern Bloc, but science fiction ought to be about opening possibilities, not treating our entrenched fears as some sort of biblical dogma. I got bored. I never went back. I wonder sometimes how he coped with Perestroika and the collapse of the Wall.
I write this as a coda to the bit on Mel Gibson.  I read many of his novels and enjoyed them. I had even spent time in his company and found it pleasurable. He could tell a good story, a good joke, he was witty, and certainly smart. But smart doesn’t guarantee rationality or a lock on truth. Very smart people sometimes hold the most bizarre ideas in the face of reality—of course, being very smart they can explain their misconstruals in such a way that undoing them can become nearly impossible.
But the work was one thing, the man something else. I doubt, knowing what I know about his politics and beliefs now, I’ll bother to read another of his books—there’s too little time and too many other books, so any method of cutting back on the list is viable—but all I can do in retrospect is shake my head and wonder at the dark cul-de-sacs humans sometimes slip into and never get out of.