Lovelock, James
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1919-2022) UK environmentalist, biologist and author whose proposal of the Gaia (which see) hypothesis in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979; rev 2000) has had considerable influence on sf and the old concept of Living Worlds. He credited William Golding for suggesting in the late 1960s that his then evolving hypothesis be named after the Greek earth-goddess Gaia. His early guarded optimism about Gaia's capacity to self-regulate against the effects of Climate Change is very much darkened in The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (2009), where he predicts the imminent overwhelming of the current Gaian balance due to greenhouse gases, resulting in a sudden climactic jump to a new equilibrium with a consequent increase in global surface temperature of approximately 9 degrees Celsius. Greater optimism may be found in his late work Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (2019) with Bryan Appleyard, which celebrated the huge expansion of human knowledge during his own lifetime and expressed hopes that a Cyborg-like fusion of human and Computer Intelligence might address the problems of keeping Earth habitable.
With Michael Allaby Lovelock wrote one sf novel, The Greening of Mars (1984), a fictionalized Utopian discussion of how Mars might be Terraformed and settled (see Colonization of Other Worlds). [DRL/JC]
James Ephraim Lovelock
born Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire: 26 July 1919
died Abbotsbury, Dorset: 26 July 2022
works
- The Greening of Mars (London: André Deutsch, 1984) with Michael Allaby [hb/Pat Fogarty]
nonfiction (selected)
- Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1979) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2000) [rev of above: pb/]
- The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1988) [nonfiction: hb/photographic]
- The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (London: Allen Lane, 2009) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (London: Penguin Books, 2019) with Bryan Appleyard [hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry