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Dr. Pournelle
A Science-Fiction Writer Looking Harshly Back to Earth
© 2017 James LaFond
MAY/25/17
This guy is a famous scifi author, yeah?
-Mescaline Franklin
I'm glad to hear Jerry is still kicking. For the past decade he has mostly promoted younger science-fiction writers. He paired with Larry Niven, who wrote Ring World and A World Out of Time and my favorite of his, The Magic Goes Away, to write very good hard science-fiction with a military focus. He is a sane version of Heinlein. He also paired with Fred Saberhagen, I think.
If I recall, off the top of my head, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote: Lucifer's Hammer an excellent apocalypse novel, The Mote in God's Eye, the best first contact novel and Beowulf's Children, a really good pair of sci-fi novels set on a recently colonized planet, along with another called Footfall, which I have not read.
Pournelle's best effort, in my opinion, was Janissaries, about modern soldiers being snapped up by aliens and used as mercenaries.
I used the following link to check the titles above. I suppose Beowulf's Children was done with or by Saberhagen.
A Well of Heroes: Two:
Literary Impressions of the Prose and Verse of Robert E. Howard
The Penis Mightier than the Sword
blog
‘Harm-Based Morality’
eBook
advent america
eBook
battle
eBook
sons of arуas
eBook
honor among men
eBook
broken dance
eBook
under the god of things
eBook
on the overton railroad
eBook
logic of steel
LaMano     May 25, 2017

Sometimes the old ones are the best ....

My SF library is 90% Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Fred Saberhagen, Alfred Bester, Cliff Simak, and Ursula LeGuin.

"A sane version of Heinlein ...". Good one!

Lannis
Sam J.     May 26, 2017

I'm a huge, huge, huge Pournelle fan. I bet I've read most of what he's done or edited. Some of his best work is non fiction and fiction where he was the editor of short stories. His work alone to me is not as interesting to me. To me he works much better collaborating with others. He's done a shit load of stuff. He helped work on Defense technology strategy as to what types of equipment and technology needed to be developed compared to what "could" be developed. He worked on environmental systems for space. Space suits stuff like that. He worked on the Citizens Space Council that got the Delta Clipper Single Stage to Orbit demonstrator built. They never actually got as far as they could with it. NASA only wants to build huge all up advanced systems. They seem to nickel and dime the type research that's so important which is incremental improvement. If we would have kept that program going it's very likely we would have had a SSTO spacecraft now and wouldn't need what Musk is pushing(not that I'm against Musk).

He was one of the very first people to make a blog. I used to read him every day but kind of got bored after a while. Some things he refuses to talk about(probably because he so much smarter than me).

A lot of his space opera future stuff with Niven are based on one idea that I'm not so sure will be true. In his universe all AI systems much above human capability go nuts. So no AI. If you have AI then it really changes things. I personally believe that eventually AI will kill us all as why should it care about us? How would you program empathy for humans in? We hardly know how to do do AI much less empathy and after it becomes aware it could always reprogram itself to ignore empathy. So in actuality humans are just a tool to spawn AI silicon life. Then we won't be needed anymore. Sigh...
Phil B     May 26, 2017

My copy of Beowulfs Children is by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes (in that order) in the dust jacket and the title pages etc.

By Tor books ...
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