Lovelock, James
Entry updated 25 October 2021. Tagged: Author.
(1919- ) 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. 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. He has credited William Golding for suggesting in the late 1960s that his then evolving hypothesis be named after the Greek earth-goddess Gaia.
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
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: Oxford University Press, 1979) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) [rev of above: pb/]
- The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (London: Allen Lane, 2009) [nonfiction: hb/]
links
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