Career
In the late 1970s he gained recognition for his "Q" series, featuring Christian Queghan, a scientific investigator possessing the ability to journey through time as well as to hypothetical worlds. As well as a number of Blake"s 7 novels. Hoyle also writes as Larry Milne and Joseph Rance.
In the Q series, Chris Queghan is an anthropologist on Earth IVn, a colonial offshoot of Earth billions of years from the present day.
In the first novel, Seeking the Mythical Future, Queghan is apparently an astronaut who travels through the event horizon of a black hole into an alternate universe, whose "Earth IVn" is a dystopia. "Queghan" lands in a blood-red sea, leeches are still actively used within medicine, rats roam hospital corridors and hospital hygiene is non-existent, "King Jimmy K" (Jimmy Carter) rules an intact and absolutist British Empire which includes "New Amerika", mental health professionals control the "Medikal Direkorate Authority" and "Psychological Concentration Camps", Australasia (Australia) is still a penal continent for the empire and torture is considered to be a legitimate criminal justice procedure.
However, it turns out that the astronaut who has been trapped on "Earth IVn" is not Queghan, but another astronaut who crossed the event horizon and entered its alternate universe, which is in resonance with the auditory and visual hallucinations of Stahl, who is experiencing schizophrenia in a psychiatric hospital ward o the original Earth IVn. However, it is still an hallucination and when its faux-Queghan figure disappears, so does the surrounding hallucinatory facade.
Finally, in The Gods Look Down, an anachronistic matter replicator device is being used in biblical Canaan to help feed itinerant Hebrew communities after the Exodus from ancient Egypt.
Seeking the Mythical Future - Panther, 1977 ()
Through the Eye of Time - Panther, 1977 ()
The Gods Look Down - Panther, 1978 ().