In blogging Saturn's Cradle, I mentioned that this series of Hogan's novels, usually called the "Giants series," was a better example of how he used a significantly different history of the solar system to make his story work. Inherit the Stars, the first book of the series and Hogan's first novel, happened because a friend bet him 50 pounds he couldn't get a science fiction novel published. He took the bet, got the novel published and won it, and began a writing career that lasted until his death in 2010.
Inherit introduces us to Victor Hunt, a scientist who works for a major corporation in the late 2020s that has developed a neutrino scanner that can produce detailed images of things x-rays can't. Vic is called to a Houston office of the United Nations Space Arm (UNSA) to use his scanner on a most unusual corpse -- a man in a space suit who's been on the moon for 50,000 years. The dead man, dubbed "Charlie," is as human as you or I but shouldn't exist, because 50,000 years ago human beings didn't travel through space, use spacesuits or have technological equipment in some cases more advanced than what exists in Hunt's time.
Much of Inherit reads like a mystery as Hunt leads a team of scientists who try to puzzle out the riddle of Charlie's existence. Some scientists, led by biologist Christian Danchekker, refuse to budge from what they know about evolutionary biology and insist Charlie's genetic link to Earth life means he evolved on Earth and is from there. Remains of his civilization must exist somewhere and have yet to be found. Hunt and others, though, don't think that a civilization that could put a man on the moon would have left absolutely no trace of its existence, no matter what might have destroyed them. Hogan, obviously, is writing before Jersey Shore was created.
Finally figuring out Charlie's language allows the teams to decipher his diary, but its information only muddies the water because it introduces yet another planet into the mix, which the scientists call Minerva. Charlie was clearly on Minerva's moon when he described a gigantic battle, but he just as clearly is on the Earth's moon when he dies. The travel times don't match.
Then another ancient race is discovered on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. They are obviously not human, but their incredibly advanced ship dates from twenty-five million years ago. It's also got a cargo of genetic material and preserved species from Earth dating from that time. Hunt and Danchekker are sent to Ganymede to see what they can learn from this new discovery.
Hunt eventually figures out that Minerva was a planet in between Mars and Jupiter that was destroyed in a gigantic "nucleonic" war. Its remains can be found in the asteroid belt and in the form of Pluto. Minerva's moon, shook loose of its orbit by the catastrophe, wandered inward until it was captured by the Earth's gravity and became Earth's moon. Human beings evolved on Minerva after the Ganymeans abandoned the planet 25 million years ago when its carbon dioxide levels rose, and they grew from some of the specimens taken from Earth to Minerva, like those on the wrecked ship. Those same humans made it back to Earth in the aftermath of Minerva's explosion and became modern humans, replacing the human species that had been evolving on Earth itself.
Hogan wrote Saturn's Cradle mostly to illustrate the bizarre catastrophism of Immanuel Velikovsky. The divergent story of the solar system drives the action, which is secondary to it. Inherit the Stars, on the other hand, starts with a mystery -- an ancient spaceman's corpse where no ancient spaceman's corpse should be -- and proceeds to solve it using the evidence uncovered as the story moves forward. Hogan does tend to infodump into his characters' speech, but not much more than the average mystery writer does in explaining the significance of a clue. This infodumping just happens to be full of biological and astronomical terms.
A year after succeeding with Inherit the Stars, Hogan returned to the Giants' world with The Gentle Giants of Ganymede, in which we meet that long-vanished race and learn some more about how their history intertwines with ours. As mentioned before, the Ganymeans were facing the problem of rising carbon dioxide levels on their planet, Minerva. Because of their evolutionary path and the changes they had made in their own bodies when their science advanced far enough, the elevated gas levels would prove fatal to their race. They plotted several solutions, and one involved altering the Sun to help Minerva's ecology keep carbon dioxide levels low. An experiment testing this hypothesis goes wrong, and the Ganymean ship Shapieron flees with its hyperspace drive only partially operational. They can speed up, but they can't slow down, meaning the drive will have to wind itself down, a process that will take 20 years. But since they will be in their time-dilated hyperspace mode, their 20 years will be 25 million years in the normal universe.
The Shapieron detects a signal when Earth scientists try to figure out the equipment of the wrecked Ganymean ship they discovered in Inherit. When the Shapieron investigates, its crew meets humans for the first time and seem to be puzzled that there is intelligent life on the third planet. We'll learn why later.
Hunt and Danchekker, by now friends, help lead some of the contact between humans and Ganymeans, and help fill in some of the details of the story they had roughed out in the previous book. They work with Zorac, an artificial intelligence that runs the Shapieron, to learn the language and customs of their visitors and allow the Ganymeans to learn theirs.
Eventually the Ganymeans decide to visit Earth and spend some time there before mysteriously announcing they're leaving. Careful inspection of the wrecked ship on Ganymede and some of the most ancient records of the Lunarians represented by Charlie suggest to them that their people decided to flee the Solar System for a new world to survive the carbon dioxide danger, and the crew of the Shapieron want to find their people. But the real reason is that the Ganymeans have figured out that their people's experiments actually created the modern human race, and they don't know how humans will respond when they learn that.
Ganymean life evolved without any carnivores, so the competition for survival that was a feature of Earth life never happened among them. They believed that the competition-based ecosystem of Earth would never produce intelligent life, so they didn't think twice about what might happen if they included some of the primitive hominids of 25 million years ago in their specimen harvesting. Those hominids did develop intelligence and became modern humans. Although the Ganymeans depart only wondering if their people traveled to the distant star, a message comes to Earth after they've left from their descendants, welcoming their return.
Giants is easily the best book of the original trilogy. Hogan includes a moving scene where the Shapieron crew buries their dead on Pluto, the largest piece left of their original world -- keeping their promise to bring them home. He's pretty deft at showing how Zorac's understanding of human speech evolves over time, starting simple and concrete and becoming complex and abstract. Although the solution to the mystery isn't as central as it is in Inherit, it's strong enough to maintain the book's pace and makes a good frame for the story of the first contact. The science is basic enough to be understandable and flows with the narrative more smoothly than the first book.
Hogan didn't return to the Giants universe until 1981, after he'd published his well-recieved tale of artifical intelligence, The Two Faces of Tomorrow, and the physics/suspense/time-alteration novel Thrice Upon a Time. Although still a better read than the fourth and fifth books of this series, Giant's Star feels rushed and pasted together, rather than developed out of whole cloth.
In the months following the Shapieron's departure, officials in UNSA and some governments have opened communications with the descendants of the Ganymeans, who did reach another planet and have flourished since then. But some of the signals seem strange, and it's almost as if the humans are communicating with two different groups. Neither group has an accurate picture of what Earth is like now, and Hunt is brought in to try to help UNSA and the diplomats break through the wall of misinformation to communicate directly with this new group of Giants.
He and Danchekker succeed, and direct links are established with the group, now on a planet called Thurien. They learn that another group in Thurien society, on a planet called Jevlen, have been giving misinformation to the Thuriens that shows a heavily armed, warlike society dominating Earth and preparing to attack Thurien. The Jevlenese turn out to be humans, more descendants of those who had lived on the destroyed planet Minerva. The Ganymeans rescued large numbers of humans before Minerva was destroyed, but put members of one warring nation on Earth and brought the other one to Jevlen.
Natural catastrophes wiped out the memory of Minervan origins for the humans on Earth, but those on Jevlen remember and are holding a serious grudge. They plan to attack both the Ganymeans and the Earth humans, their ancient enemies. Hunt, Danchekker and the UNSA group lack the arms to fight the Jevlenese, so they have to work with the Thuriens to trick their enemy into disarming and hold off the attack. This attempt succeeds, but the Jevlenese warlords escape. A glitch sends them 50,000 years into the past at Minerva itself, starting the whole cycle all over again.
Star suffers from a load of implausibilities, like the aforementioned time loop, and Hogan's lapse into frequently preaching damnation to the evils of superstition and exaltation to the rationalism of science. The Jevlenese used their advanced technology to foment anti-knowledge and mysticism on Earth to insure Earth science didn't progress as fast as Jevlen's did. The Jevlenese leader is a buffoon villain, although he's amusing when his supercomputer, Jevex, succumbs to manipulation from the Thurien supercomputer, Visar.
And Star has plenty of Hogan's wry humor sprinkled here and there, as the humans learn how their bodies cope with the virtual reality network of Visar and as Jevex insists nothing's wrong even though it has been taken over by the other computer. But on the whole it would have been better off either not written or left to cook a little longer so Hogan could integrate his story better and slough off some of the preaching and silliness. Even so, it's the second best place to end the series -- the first would have been after Gentle Giants. The virtual reality tale Entoverse and the time travel Mission to Minerva adventure that sketches how the Minervan super-war came to be add little to the Giants' story and seem more like attempts to capitalize on a brand name to make a paycheck.
As mentioned in the Saturn's Cradle note, Hogan in later life held to some strange ideas like the Velikovsky theories and some ugly ones, like questioning the extent of the Holocaust. He has yet to make such ideas public during the Giants series, if he holds them, so they don't really affect the initial trilogy. He does some interesting predicting, especially for the late 1970s, offering virtual reality, neutrino scanning, the Internet and e-commerce in recognizable formats even if they don't quite match what we have seen actually develop and they've developed earlier than he thought. His characters still smoke -- even on spaceships! -- and he seems to hold that society will continue the kind of laid-back swinging 70s vibe it had in 1977, when Inherit was first published.
The most fun aspect of the Giants' universe is the presence of human beings throughout the solar system. Permanent bases on the moon and Mars, scientific outposts on Jupter's moons, manned exploration of Saturn's moons and the asteroids are all a feature of life in the late 2020s and early 2030s, a perfectly reasonable expectation in 1977 that's proved problematic only because politicians suck, especially when it comes to space.
Hogan does attach all of this work to the United Nations, perhaps somewhat reasonable in 1977 before that body started doing idiotic things like putting Iran on its women's rights council or the Sudan on its human rights commissions, or having officials who ran profiteering schemes off humanitarian efforts in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He suggests that the world's superpowers aimed their competitiveness elsewhere than conflict when weapons were invented that could guarantee the earth's total destruction, and terrorism and conflict died out when people began to have access to energy, food and other resources. That part of his vision's a mixed bag on the accuracy front so far.
In all, though, the Giants' trilogy is a well-thought-out, well-executed story of plausible science, careful reasoning, logical mysteries to be solved and believable characters dealing with the new world they're discovering. It doesn't suffer from too much technobabble, even if it skirts that a couple of times, and it lacks the embarassingly bad sex scenes that ruin a lot of otherwise interesting hard science fiction. It represents what Hogan should have tried to do with Saturn's Cradle but also serves as a reminder of how badly that novel stumbled.