James Lovegrove is the British-born author of over 70 books, which have sold all over the world and been translated into 18 languages.
Straight after graduating from Oxford with a degree in English Literature, James set himself the goal of getting a novel written and sold within two years. In the event, it took two months. The Hope was completed in six weeks and accepted by Macmillan a fortnight later. The seed for the idea for the novel — a world in microcosm on an ocean liner — was planted during a cross-Channel ferry journey.
His next book, Escardy Gap, was co-written with Peter Crowther over a period of a year and a half, the two authors playing a game of creative tag, each completing a section in turn and leaving the other to carry the story on. The result has proved a cult favourite, and was voted by readers of SFX as one of the top fifty SF/Fantasy novels of all time.
Days, a satire on consumerism, was shortlisted for the 1998 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The book’s genesis most probably lies in the many visits James used to make as a child to the Oxford Street department store owned by his grandfather. It was written over a period of nine months while James was living in the north-west suburbs of Chicago.
Subsequent works have all been published to great acclaim. These include the Brexit-predicting Untied Kingdom, Worldstorm, Provender Gleed and the back-to-back double-novella Gig. Untied Kingdom was shortlisted for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, while “Carry The Moon In My Pocket”, a short story, won Japan’s Seiun Award in 2011 for Best Foreign Short Story. It and other stories by James, more than 60 in total, have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies over the years, and most have been gathered in two collections, Imagined Slights and Diversifications.
James has also written for children. Wings, a short novel for reluctant readers, was short-listed for several awards, while his fantasy saga for teens, The Clouded World, written under the pseudonym Jay Amory, has been translated into 7 other languages. A five-book series for reluctant readers, The 5 Lords Of Pain, appeared at two-monthly intervals throughout 2010.
James has produced the Pantheon series, a set of standalone military-SF adventures combining high-tech weaponry and ancient gods. The third of these, The Age Of Odin, made it onto the New York Times bestseller list, and it and all the others have been a huge success, selling over a quarter of a million copies. The ninth and last volume in the series, Age of Legends, appeared in 2019.
He has also penned a dozen Sherlock Holmes novels. These comprise The Stuff Of Nightmares, Gods Of War, The Thinking Engine, The Labyrinth of Death and The Devil’s Dust, along with the Cthulhu Casebooks, a four-volume series mashing up the fictional worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft. His latest Holmes offerings are Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon, Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons (a continuation of The Hound of the Baskervilles), and Sherlock Holmes and the Three Winter Terrors. His Holmes short stories are collected as The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes.
James has written several books tying in to established intellectual properties. These include four novels set in the Firefly ’verse, from the much-missed TV series and its follow-up movie. His first Firefly novel is Big Damn Hero (based on a story outline by Nancy Holder). His second is The Magnificent Nine, which was shortlisted for the Dragon Award for Best Media Tie-in Novel. His third, The Ghost Machine, won that award, and his fourth is Life Signs.
His two Marvel novels are Doctor Strange: Dimension War and Fantastic Four: The Coming of Galactus. These are retellings of classic tales from Marvel Comics’ Silver Age. Then there’s Conan: Cult of the Obsidian Moon, featuring Robert E Howard’s famous pulp-fiction barbarian hero. The novel is a standalone adventure with links to the Black Stone storyline that has run in the Conan comics from Titan Publishing. James has written a novella, "The Siege of Lamakan", featuring another Howard character, El Borak.
As a sideline, James reviews fiction for the Financial Times, specialising in the children's, science fiction, fantasy, horror and graphic novel genres, and has been a regular and prolific contributor to numerous other publications, among them The Literary Review, Interzone, BBC MindGames, Comic Heroes and The Baker Street Journal.
