When Fred Hoyle published his first science-fiction novel, The Black Cloud, in 1957, he was already a distinguished and world-famous scientist and teacher, on his way toward a prestigious astronomy chair at Cambridge, and about to join the research staff of the cutting-edge observatory of the Mount Palomar radio telescope. Both his literary and his scientific careers thrived until his death in 2001. Among the many British scientists who have tried their hand at science fiction, Hoyle is the most important. His science-fiction output was steady for decades, along with a prodigious production of scholarship and popularizations in various fields of science. The quality of this output made him one of the principal figures in pre-New Wave British science fiction.

Fred Hoyle was born in Bingley, Yorkshire, in 1915, the son of Ben Hoyle, a wool merchant, and Mabel Pickard Hoyle. He was educated at Cambridge, where he started teaching in...