In The Genesis Machine ( 1978) one of these heroes averts the End of the World. Other novels variously succeed in presenting Heroes – generally clumped into male-bonded affinity groups – and scientific problems of a similar nature. Although Hogan's later attempted rescue of the fifth world from Disaster may not fully satisfy, the sequence as a whole remains his best work.

The original sequence is in fact a Hard-SF fable of humanity's origins – we are the direct descendants of a highly aggressive Forerunner species that had inhabited the destroyed fifth planet, and would have conquered the Galaxy had they not blown themselves up – and espouses a vision of the Universe in which other species must learn to cope with the knowledge that we will, some day, come into our inheritance. This willingness on Hogan's part to re-activate sequences that had come to a natural halt generated a further sequel to the Minervan Experiment/Giants series: Mission to Minerva ( 2005), assembled with Entoverse as The Two Worlds (omni 2007), which features Time Travel back to a period before the original sequence began, and the creation of an Alternate History that side-steps the earlier closure. The book turned out to be the first volume in the Minervan Experiment/Giants sequence, being followed by The Gentle Giants of Ganymede ( 1978), both assembled as The Two Moons (omni 2006), plus Giants' Star ( 1981), all three assembled as The Minervan Experiment (omni 1981 vt The Giants Omnibus 1991) the series was continued with Entoverse ( 1991), a tale that laboriously expands the initial premise through the use of a Parallel World in which, rather oddly for a writer pugnaciously associated with the Hard-SF wing of the genre, only Magic can cope with the strangeness of the physical world – in the earlier volumes of the sequence the reader was safely in the hands of an author who brooked no such nonsense. His first novel (and first publication), Inherit the Stars ( 1977), aroused interest for the exhilarating sense it conveys of scientific minds at work on real problems and for the genuinely exciting scope of the sf imagination it deploys. (1941-2010) UK-born systems-design engineer and author, in the USA from 1977 and latterly in Ireland he was a full-time author from 1979.

Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan