James Kahn

• 1. Introduction

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  James Kahn was born on the 30th of December, 1947, in Chicago, and by the time most people encounter his name, they are holding a paperback copy of Return of the Jedi. That novelization made him a household name among a generation of Star Wars readers. But the path that led him there runs through a draft lottery number of 3, a Chicago riot, an alien resuscitation, and a young actor named George Clooney playing a character Kahn invented. How does a physician who helped build an emergency medicine residency program end up on a film set playing the doctor who pronounces E.T. dead? The answer is a life that refused to stay in any single lane.

• 2. Chicago Roots

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  Kahn picked up the guitar at age 12, growing up in a city that would mark him in more ways than one. He graduated from Maine Township High School West in 1965 and enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he majored in biology. His draft lottery number came up as 3, one of the lowest possible draws, and he threw himself into the anti-Vietnam War movement. He was present at the 1968 Democratic Convention riots in Chicago, one of the most photographed confrontations of that era. At the university he also studied with the Byronic scholar Jerome McGann, absorbing a literary sensibility that would surface years later in his own fiction. It was a short story called "The Box" that cracked the door to a professional writing life. During his fifth year in college, the story won second place in a university contest. One of the judges, Daryl Hine, forwarded it to Playboy magazine, which bought it and published it in March 1971, making Kahn a professional writer before he had finished his undergraduate studies.

• 3. Medicine and the First Novel

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  Medical school followed at the same institution, and Kahn graduated in 1974. In 1973, while still training, he placed a second short story, "Mobius Trip," in a Chicago-based magazine called Gallery, which did not survive long. After graduating he completed a medical internship at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Then came the first of several deliberate pauses in his medical career: a year-long hiatus during which he wrote his debut novel, Diagnosis: Murder, later published by Carlyle Press. He returned to residency training, working through various Los Angeles emergency departments before finishing at UCLA, where he helped build the residency program in Emergency Medicine itself. He joined the group of specialists who created and then ran the emergency department at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California.

• 4. Science Fiction and Spielberg

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  At St. John's Hospital, while treating patients, Kahn was writing science fiction. The first two books in his New World series, World Enough, and Time in 1980 and Time's Dark Laughter in 1982, were published by Del Rey Publishing. An unexpected phone call changed the trajectory of his writing career. Kathleen Kennedy and Melissa Matheson reached out to Kahn and his emergency department colleagues, seeking technical advice on how to resuscitate an alien for a film then tentatively titled A Boy's Life. That film became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg. Kahn took a role in the finished picture: he is the doctor on screen who confirms E.T.'s death. On the set, he handed Spielberg a copy of World Enough, and Time. That gesture led directly to Kahn receiving the assignment to novelize Poltergeist, which was in post-production at the time.

• 5. Novelizations and Television

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  Return of the Jedi followed in 1983, then Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, The Goonies in 1985, and Poltergeist II in 1986. Television work arrived alongside the novelizations. His first series credit was on St. Elsewhere. Then came E/R, a sitcom about an emergency department starring Elliott Gould and Mary MacDonald. For that show, Kahn created a character: a teenage orderly named Ace, played by a then-unknown George Clooney. Kahn went on to write for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Xena: Warrior Princess, TekWar (created by William Shatner), and Star Trek: Voyager, on which he also served as Supervising Producer. He co-executive produced Melrose Place during its final years, from 1996 to 1998. His work on All My Children earned an Emmy nomination for him and the writing staff.

• 6. Music and Later Work

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  After roughly two decades in television, Kahn turned toward music under the guidance of singer-songwriter Kate Wallace and music producer David West. His Americana and folk album Waterline was self-released in 2011. The first song from his planned second album, Roadhouse Full of Blues, was released as a music video and short film titled Dolores Quits Dancing. The third novel in the New World series, Timefall, appeared in 1987 from St. Martin's Press, the same publisher that later released his medical thriller The Echo Vector. That thriller marked a return to the emergency medicine world he had never fully left, drawing on more than a decade of clinical experience in Los Angeles trauma rooms.