Pournelle died earlier this month. He (and his writing partner, Larry Niven) were big, popular names back in the 70s, and long ago I read several of his long tomes. I will say this for him: he could write an engaging potboiler, where the plot kept churning along. But in every one of his books, there was a “what the hell am I reading?” moment, followed by a period of introspection in which I had to admit to myself that if I’d been paying attention, I would have noticed that there were clear hints that this regressive conclusion was exactly what he’d been building towards all along. Then I read a few more and realized that you could predict exactly how the story would proceed from the first chapter on: the solution would always be a gushing militaristic/Libertarian fantasy. So I stopped reading him.
Except for one thing: those were also the heady days of the microcomputer revolution, and I read Byte magazine every month. Pournelle had a column in there, that was apparently popular to some people, but that I found plodding, unreadable, and useless. Well, not quite unreadable: I’d hate-read him. His house, which he called Chaos Manor, was stuffed with random computer gadgets, most of which seemed to be mainly there as techno-trophies. And every month there’d be some glitch that he’d solve by calling up one of his connections in the tech industry, and they’d mail him a new gizmo, or more insufferably, some fawning gadget-freak would show up at his door and install it for him. He was a boastful poseur. I much preferred Steve Ciarcia’s columns, where he’d actually do something and explain how it worked.
Anyway, the Daily Beast summarizes Pournelle’s career — schmoozing with Gingrich, promoting the military-industrial complex, praising Reagan and Trump, his grandstanding for the impossible “Star Wars” missile defense system, and includes excerpts of some of those “what the hell am I reading?” moments. Pournelle was overtly political, but strangely, his fans always seem to assume that radical conservative militarism is a non-political stance. Underlying it all, too, was the nasty racism of the well-connected white man.
The line that connects Pournelle, Gingrich and Trump is a view that the future must be secured through aggressive force, and specifically through authoritarian institutions (governmental or non-governmental) that group together humanity’s best and prevent the rest from stifling them. The difficulty, as always, lies in identifying “the best,” and in who’s doing the identification.
At the bottom of Pournelle’s website is the quote, “Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.” It’s not attributed, but the sentiment is an old saw of the far right, going back at least to John Birch Society co-founder and segregationist Thomas J. Anderson in 1961. Today, Pournelle’s particular phrasing is most commonly attributed to white supremacist and anti-semite Richard Cotten. It’s one more indicator that Trump was far from the first to eliminate the line between right-wing thought and outright bigotry.
Most of the obits I’ve seen were pablum. I’m glad someone was willing to call out his pernicious influence.
I also read where someone called his “Chaos Manor” columns “witty”. That person needs to have their license to write retracted.
Back in the ’70s, I read not quite half of one of his books. Threw it away and never read another one. It goes to show just how desperate a young woman could be when it came to craving scifi.
I confess I’ve read a shit-ton of Niven & Pournelle in my life. The right-wing libertarian slant often gave a perplexing flavor to an otherwise well-crafted yarn, but I managed to not let it influence my own social consciousness.
Perhaps that’s not true, I do recall parroting some libertarian schlock in my youth, but I’ve grown up since then.
You would have to pay to to get your product featured in the Chaos Manor byte column. Well, not paid. Specifically, you’d have to send a carton of your review product, and expect them never to get sent back. Presumably Jerry had some easy way to resell them. Not sure if you would exactly call that plausibly deniable; but I think that was the theory.
Yeah, and usually all you’d read in the column was the name of the item he got as a present, some kind of statement about plugging it in, and some praise for the company. Completely useless. But Byte kept paying him for that long-winded crap.
I was a big fan of Niven in my youth, but was turned off, for some reason I can’t describe or defend, by his collaborations. So, I never ended up reading Pournelle. I did find out a few years ago that Niven turned into an anti-Muslim bigot at some point.
Sturgeon’s Law applies to personal heroes, it seems.
I can only remember reading one Pournelle/Niven book (The Mote in God’s Eye) which I think I enjoyed at the time – but never enough to read it again.And I didn’t read Byte since they mostly ignored the Amiga, which was the computer I was into back in the day.
Interestingly I would say your description of him as an author sums up another big Sci Fi name perfectly – Heinlein. And Asimov too, come to that. I wonder if it was just a thing for sci fi authors of that period. Presumably it was a very cliquey club, very much who you knew in order to get published.
Looking at the Pfft article, I see I never read any of his solo books.
But I read almost all of the Niven collaborations.
I have no regrets.
Despite being a science-loving, socially awkward nerd, I have never found sci-fi interesting. And so I never read any of Pournelle’s books.
But back in 1978-1985, my high school and college years, I was subscribed to Byte and loved it. I read Chaos Manor, but even as a kid, I thought Pournelle’s columns were weak. He would gush about Godbout Computers, and what terrific support they gave, and claimed that he was just an ordinary user, just reporting the facts. Hogwash. He would be comp’d products (“In exchange for his service of using their product and giving them honest feedback” or somesuch). Then when his son, Alex started contributing too, it was just too much incest and it became the only part of the magazine I skipped.
Weirdly, I think the Chaos Manor columns were the [i]first[/i] stuff of his I read. Way, way back, when my get young self would lay hands on a copy of Byte somehow (maybe at the public library mostly? I don’t remember that part). I remember the rambling, but it was fine with me, impressed and jealous as the me of the time was of the hardware, A local network with a bunch of 486s from Gateway? Wowee.
Then it was just a matter of a short walk from the magazine rack to the SF shelves, which IIRC was my introduction to SF generally. Some Niven/Pournelle collab. initially, and then down a road starting with Niven (I know I didn’t go back and revisit the pure Pournelle until much later). The libertarian bent in a lot of that stuff seeped into my young consciousness I’m sure – or unconsciousness, really, because I suspect I mostly didn’t notice it.
Ironically, I think when I finally did start to notice was when I got around to Heinlein sometime in my later teens. Maybe in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Suddenly it crystallized for me that the whole notion that libertarian utopia could be achieved if we just pushed enough of the ‘wrong sort’ out of airlocks struck me as not only monstrous, but absurd.
Not only did that cathartically de-program whatever strains of that nonsense which had managed to take thus far, I’ve also always found it a useful sort of touchstone for insight into conservo-libertarian thinking. That quasi-racist eliminationist strain is almost always lurking just below the surface, possibly because it’s a handy way to paper over the practical problems any real libertarian-ish program actually has. (Alas, I was not surprised by the confluence of racists and techno-libertarians in the alt-right. Disappointed, but not surprised.)
After that, when I later got around to to them, I read the treatment of the cartoonishly depicted bad guys in e.g., Pournelle’s CoDominium universe in a whole new light.
Pournelle used to brag about helping engineer the inertial guidance system for the early cruise missiles. At that time I had just moved to a county under the flight path along which they tested those babies, where the results were reported in the local paper. They were lucky to hit the right state.
Prior to the collaboration, I greatly enjoyed Niven’s sf: quirky supermen individualists don’t grate as harshly as Bircher stereotypes & overworked plots, at least to me. Was he always such a wingnut, or did Pournelle drag him (further) down?
Bleh. It’s really hard not to read some of these comments as yet another rendition of “I hate his politics therefore I also hate his writing. Even though (so embarrassing) I did like it, when I was young and unenlightened. But retroactively I no longer like what I used to like.”
Right.
I like his writing (and I don’t care about his politics–I’d evaluate that separately and independently). I recall in Inferno, a kind of modern novelization of Dante, they wrote critically of hell in general and in particular of the fact that gay people were consigned to hell just for being gay. I thought that was actually fairly progressive at the time.
In the early ’70’s I read the Niven-Pournelle collaborations with enjoyment, that is, until I read “Lucifer’s Hammer”.
That story was just filled with racism, sexism, and all manner of ugly stuff, but I persevered until the end of book. And then . . .. The ugliest part to me was the suburban dad who was leading a scout troop on a camping expedition when the asteroid hit. A few months later he ran into one of his friends; the friend was distressed when he saw the fifteen-year-old scouts shacked up with Girl Guides of same age, some of the young girls already pregnant. The Scout Leader (now clearly a Tribal Chief) said that they had met a Girl Guide troop and that things had returned to the “natural state of things”, i.e. girls are helpless without men, and when they are with men, girls are their sexual playthings. (And that didn’t even address the problem of ignorant teenagers giving birth in tents, without either medicine or medical practitioners.) It made me sick. The only thing I read of theirs after that was “Footfall”, because I am apocalypse-fiction fan.
Same here, but also none of the collaborations with Niven. So… I’m not familiar with any(?) of his writing. I semi-recall one reason I didn’t read any, the back-of-book blurbs intended to “sell” you the story were, at the least, not my cup of tea; what they “sold” me was the idea “this is not worth it”. Whether or not that is true(-ish), I’ve obviously no idea.
About Inferno, I remember the silly pot-shot Niven & Pournelle took at Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. by consigning him to one of their circles of Hell in that novel. For some reason Vonnegut’s personal philosophy/ies really got under the skin a certain type of SF writer & fan. I’m sure Vonnegut couldn’t have cared less about that.
How do you know it was viewed as as a “shot” at Vonnegut? Do you have a reference? I always viewed it as a tribute; an ironic criticism of the peevishness of god (or the great juju as they called the deity.) I could of course be wrong–hence my question about whether it is just your opinion or you know of some documented animosity they held toward Vonnegut.
It’s a pot-shot because it literally is one in the novel itself, as this passage from the protagonist, an SF author himself, shows:
The peevishness is entirely Niven and Pournelle’s here, not god’s.
@11
In retrospect, this might be due to his daughter, Jennifer, being gay. She recently wrote a sequel to the Moties series in which the main human character is gender neutral.
___
I recall my brother once noting that a common element in Pournelle’s solo books was that no matter how advanced the technology in the stories, he always found a way to stage the final battle with pikes and bows.
I had an encounter with Jerry Pournelle via e-mail almost 20 years ago. I read a piece he had written for his website on Immanuel Velikovsky. It was typical of a certain type of writing about the Velikovsky affair in which the writer(s) dump all over critics of Velikovsky, in this case especially Carl Sagan while being very, very generous to St. Immanuel of Velikovsky. In fact had become by then a virtual trope to dump on Carl Sagan for his alleged role in “persecuting” the most holy Immanuel Velikovsky. Jerry Pournelle also complained about “big science” supressing Velikovsky and the role of “big science” in supressing unorthox ideas and how Velikovsky was largely attacked not because his ideas were absurd but because they challenged the “dogma” of Uniformism in geology etc.
I wrote an e-mail to Jerry Pournelle in which I vehemently criticised Pournelle’s portrayal of the Velikovsky affair. Jerry got upset because I called Velikovsky a high-IQ fool. Also Jerry Pournelle was upset that I referred to Velikovsky has a crank. Further Jerry Pournelle had argued that the writings of people like Velikovsky should be read and their ideas taken seriously. I wrote that I doubted Scientists should read the acres and acres of crap that flood pseudo-science market. I further wrote that I had read Velikovsky for the first time when I was 12 and I concluded then that Velikovsky was wrong. That seemed to bother Jerry Pournelle. Jerry Pournelle also pulled the Galileo gambit. Ignoring that for every Galileo who is vindicated there are 10,000+ cranks who are not.
We exchanged dueling e-mails for a bit and Jerry told me that he would post our exchanges. At that moment I re-read my e-mails and I concluded that I had let my contempt for Velikovsky get the better of me and requested that he not post my name. Jerry Pournelle did not post my name.
I am no quite clear sure what this says about Jerry Pournelle, but it is interesting that he seemed to have had a bee in his bonnet about “big science” which now reminds me of a sort of conspiracy style of thought. I am pleased that he did not print my name then although later I couldn’t care but I thought it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.
In regards to Immanuel Velikovsky I feel that I was in fact far too kind to him in referring to him has a high IQ fool and crank. I used to think that Velikovsky really believed the nonsense he wrote. I now think, given the lies and distortions replete in his books that he was likely a conscious charlatan out to bilk the public with his attempt to validate Old Testament miracles.
You may be right, but I’m not convinced. You have, for example, conveniently left off the part of this passage where the protagonist, when criticizing the Vonnegut character, is then criticized (by Mussolini) for his massive ego. In other words, they do not portray the protagonist in a favorable light for his criticism. They portray him as whining.
If the main character had criticized Hemingway for writing at a childish fifth-grade level, it would not necessarily mean the writers were criticizing Hemingway for writing at a childish fifth-grade level. Do you agree?
It’s a pot-shot because one of the things Dante himself did in the original Divine Comedy was take liberties in settling scores with his contemporaries, because he could as the writer of it. It wasn’t God who punished them, but Dante who wrote with wrath aimed at those who displeased him. It’s not as if Niven and Pournelle didn’t know this themselves, and made use of Dante’s example to have a character in the novel serve to voice their own opinion of Vonnegut.
As an aside here, what’s rather rich about the stated reason why Vonnegut was consigned to Hell for creating false religions was the fact that if either Niven or Pournelle really wanted to consign a writer to Hell for that venal sin, they had no better choice than fellow SF author L. Ron Hubbard, who created Scientology! That story is well known in SF circles and I know Niven and Pournelle knew Hubbard’s back-story. Of course back in the 1976 Hubbard might have sued them over that, so I can’t blame them for not including that in Inferno.
#20, The last word belongs to you. Peace.
#21, sure. FWIW, there were plenty of characters in Inferno who got what was deemed coming to them, like the lady who had campaigned to ban cyclamates as artificial sweeteners because they caused cancer. Let it be said that Jerry Pournelle did not tolerate such fools lightly!
That’s a rather uncharitable reading. I rather doubt anyone is retroactively changing their taste. The reaction we had when we were 12 or whatever is obviously the reaction we had, and nothing (modulo, perhaps, the unreliability of memory), can change that. But it’s silly to pretend that our tastes and ongoing experiences of things can’t, don’t or shouldn’t change as we learn and grow, or that such a change is even a particularly unusual occurrence.
It’s also not outrageous to be unwilling or unable to disentangle an artist’s politics or behavior from our evaluation or enjoyment of their work. This is the case even in the case of, say, acting, where an actor’s character can (theoretically) be completely divorced from their real-life persona. Yet outside knowledge, for example that they badly mistreated an ex-spouse, may naturally color our experience of their acting, even if the performance is otherwise objectively excellent. This isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s how art works.
And of course in the case of an author like Pournelle, the ideology in question isn’t exactly that divorced from the prose. Nor in all probability can it be. Writing is driven by the characters and how they act and react, and that is informed by the author’s own views and study of people. Since much of our differences in politics and ideology amounts to differences in how we believe people behave and what motivates them, that’s going to get baked into the stories we write, if only at a subliminal level.
And so once you become aware of the ideology pressed into a story, particularly if it begins to diverge from your own, it’s difficult not to notice. The characters will, from the reader’s perspective, behave unnaturally. It’d be silly to pretend that’s not going to affect what you get from the book.
For myself, I wouldn’t exactly say I didn’t enjoy Pournelle’s books, particularly back in the day. As PZ noted, Pournelle was a competent enough storyteller. And some of those stories — particularly the Niven collabs like Mote — definitely have a place in the list of great 20thC SF works. Nevertheless, I’m simply not able to take them for granted and read them simply as stories, as perhaps I once was (and am still with other authors who are either less heavy handed or whose observations of humanity are more in line with my own). Reading today, I’d say I read them more as specimens. They’re exhibits which provide insight into the author’s own twisted view of the world rather than the world itself.
Well, my obit for Jerry Pournelle was entitled “R.I.P. to a right-wing ass: Dr. Jerry Pournelle” so not all obituaries were fawning :).
I think it’s important to remember what Jerry’s doctorate was in: Political Science. His doctoral thesis was basically about how to effectively use propaganda. Reading his works as if they were right-wing propaganda is most likely the best way to read them. Then it becomes easy to figure out what he’s actually doing, with his condemnation of “effete intellectuals”, his condoning of mass murder and military dictatorship to “save” a nation, and his glorification of violence in the service of “manly men” who were perfect moral exemplars.
He had his good side, too, such as his ability to work with people who were quite definitely *not* right wing zealots, people like Steve Barnes and Charles Sheffield. And from all accounts he served well as SFWA president, serving all of the membership, not just the white male membership. But basically, he was a right-wing ass, a blowhard, and an arrogant jerk. Anybody who ever attended a SF con that Jerry was at has their own “Jerry story” to tell where he behaved like an ass. He had a core of sycophants who sucked up to him, and his ego went through the roof over that, and the result was not at all pretty.
I ran into him at an early INTEROP, when the company I was working for was looking to do an IPO and our PR agency was trying some “edgy” marketing moves (I also got blown off by Esther Dyson) Pournelle was strutting around with a cane and a big hat, holding court as people would run up to him and bask in his presence. I thought less of them for that, not him. But I wanted to ask him how the same author who did Ringworld did The Legacy of Heorot. His column was pretty horrible for anyone technical, but fairly captured the technology experience of the older generation encountering all the new stuff. (“OMG 286 is faaast!!”) I told the PR person to forget it, anything he had to say about encrypted VPNs was going to be embarrassing.
Like Heinlein, he seemed to project the idea that when the chips come down, what we all need is authority! My feeling is that people who feel that way tend not to authorities, themselves, but rather followers who just haven’t found the right dear leader yet.
Ugh, it’s too damn early to read that awfulness. I remember reading Footfall and thinking that the aliens would be too damn easy to beat.
That ‘Inequality is Freedom’ trope always hit me as a big fat Orwellian oxymoron, a wad of bullshit that captures people’s brains because it is so thought-stopping.
For example: Someone is pointing a gun at your head. Are you two equal? Are you free?
Freedom and inequality are opposites. Slaves and masters are never equal.
Bad Tux above nailed it with: “R.I.P. to a right-wing ass: Dr. Jerry Pournelle”, although I would have personally added “bloviating”.
In my perspective Jerry Pournelle exhibited a lot of very negative traits. His endorsement of Velikovsky was not the only time that he showed a marvelous lack of scientific literacy. Reagan’s idiot Star Wars Defense System also comes to mind. As an alleged aerospace engineer he was also incompetent as an engineer. In one Byte column he explained how he had used vise grips to bend a disk drive cage out of the way so that he could install a processor that was located directly under that cage, while later admitting that it had not occurred to him to simply remove the motherboard like any reasonable person would have done. It turns out that as an aerospace engineer all he did was to define the electronics box size, location and power while others did the actual internal electronic design.
It was trivially easy to detect which parts of the Pournelle and Niven stories were written by a right-wing puritan. And he also anthropomorphically named all of his computers. Of course Byte eventually turned itself into a magazine for managers, dropping all technical content. I still recall the ludicrous Byte article by someone had just recently discovered that you can store more than one bit of information within a computer word (not Byte’s only article publication mistake).
starfleetdude @20: “…if either Niven or Pournelle really wanted to consign a writer to Hell for that venal sin, they had no better choice than fellow SF author L. Ron Hubbard, who created Scientology!”
Pretty sure they did assign Hubbard to Hell. Page 206 of the Pocket Books paperback edition of Inferno:
“We’ve got him,” said the demon…
It was, in a sense, the last word in centaurs. At one end was most of what I took for a trilobite. The head of the trilobite was a gristly primitive fish. …and so on up the line, lungfish, proto-rat, bigger rat… finally a true man.…
“He founded a religion that masks as a form of lay psychiatry. Members try to recall previous lives in their presumed animal ancestry. They also recall their own past lives… and that adds an interesting blackmail angle, because those who hear confession are more dedicated than honorable.”
As for Pournelle, the last published work of his that I know about was the final volume in his There Will Be War series of anthologies, which was published under the Castalia House imprint. For those of you who are fortunate enough not to know, Castalia House was founded, and is run by, a gent named Theodore “Vox Day” Beale.
I remember trying to read a few Pournelle books when I was in high school.
I remember finding them intolerably boring, which was quite a feat considering the stuff that I would read at the time.
I had a nasty email exchange with Pournelle around 1980 or 1981 (when I was in grad school) over a massively ignorant column he’d written (in Byte, I think). He had criticized computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra and a program Dijkstra had written. He compared Dijkstra’s code unfavorably with some horror of a slab of unreadable Pascal.
It was clear Pournelle had no idea about what Dijkstra was about, in terms of writing provably-correct programs, and I told him so. It didn’t go well.
@Trickster Goddess, #17:
I doubt that Jennifer Pournelle had anything to do with it, because Inferno was published in 1976. She would have been a teenager while it was being written (per her research profile, she would enter Michigan State U in 1977), and I guess I just think that it’s implausible that she would have been out to her hardass right-wing father at that time. I could be wrong.
As I recall, the protagonist in Inferno thinks sympathetically of the [male] gay couple that were his neighbors, and who didn’t bother anyone. It’s not unreasonable to posit that that was actually Niven (or, perhaps, Pournelle) thinking of actual gay people that he knew of.
Regarding Vonnegut — I am pretty sure that the huge monument the protagonist finds raised to Vonnegut was meant as mockery, not tribute. Remember that that portion of Hell was a burning hot mausoleum. Vonnegut was, by Hell’s rules, interred forever in a coffin-sized roasting box.
Niven and Pournelle did have a way of giving tribute to people they liked and thought were worthy: They could put them in Limbo; the part of Hell for the virtuous pagans. I recall that in the sequel, there was such an individual (although I forget who he was supposed to be).
I also recall that in the sequel, Oppenheimer was in the bottommost circle of hell, and Pournelle explained (in the introduction) why he belonged there (in Pournelle’s own words).
(I never finished the sequel, so there may be additional points I don’t know)
marcus ranum @25: “…I wanted to ask [Pournelle] how the same author who did Ringworld did The Legacy of Heorot.”
Ringworld had one author, Larry Niven. Legacy of Heorot was a three-way collaboration, between Niven, Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. Perhaps that accounts for the differences between those novels?
“Interestingly I would say your description of him as an author sums up another big Sci Fi name perfectly – Heinlein. And Asimov too, come to that. I wonder if it was just a thing for sci fi authors of that period. Presumably it was a very cliquey club, very much who you knew in order to get published.”
No way. While Asimov (a life-long liberal (in the right sense) who always voted Democrat) knew Heinlein, he often criticized his right-wing libertarian politics and the fact that his politics changed when his wife changed.
Of course, few people are all-good or all-evil.