James Cooke Brown

Who was James Cooke Brown?

Dr. James Cooke Brown was a sociologist and science fiction author. He is notable for creating the artificial language Loglan and for designing the Parker Brothers board game Careers.

Brown's novel The Troika Incident describes a worldwide free knowledge base similar to the Internet. The novel begins with the belief that the world is on the eve of self-destruction, but then it presents a world about a century from now which is a paradise of peace and prosperity, all based on ideas, movements, and knowledge presently available in the world. In its metafictional structure, the novel is a call for social change, not through revolution but through free education and the resilience of human ingenuity. Long out of print and relatively rare, an e-book version of the novel was released in 2012. The novel envisioned all books and periodicals being viewed on portable electronic devices called "readers" in the year 2070, when it is set. The author would doubtless appreciate the irony of "The Troika Incident" being viewed on almost exactly the "readers" he imagined.

Among his other achievements, Brown designed, and had built, a three-hulled sailboat, called a trimaran.