October the First Is Too Late

About the Author

Fred Hoyle was born at Bingley, Yorkshire in 1915 and educated at Bingley Grammar School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, becoming the first member of his family to attend university. During the Second World War, Hoyle was appointed to the Admiralty and worked on secret projects such as radar and code-breaking. After the war, as a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, Hoyle was a lecturer in mathe­matics from 1945 until 1958, when he was appointed to the prestigious post of Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy. He became the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge in 1967 and was knighted in 1972. He also held a position as a visiting professor of astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology.

Internationally famous as a scientist, Hoyle is remembered today as the foremost proponent of the steady­-state theory of the universe and for his pioneering work in the field of stellar nucleosynthesis. An extremely original thinker, Hoyle was not afraid to advance controversial ideas, many of which were later proved correct. In the 1950s, when his paper on interstellar molecules was rejected for publication, he rewrote his ideas as a novel, The Black Cloud (1957). This book was a popular success and has rarely been out of print in Great Brit­ain; its success paved the way for a number of other science fiction works, often co-authored by Hoyle with his son Geoffrey.

Several of Hoyle’s works, including Ossian’s Ride (1959), A for Andromeda (1962), Fifth Planet (1963), and October the First Is Too Late (1966), have gone on to be recognized as classics of the genre. Hoyle was also well known for his nonfiction writings, which aimed at making science accessible to popular audiences and young readers, and for his BBC radio broadcasts and television work. He died in 2001.