I am greatly saddened to read on Slashdot that Jerry Pournelle has passed.
I suppose most who recognize the name will do so in the context of Science Fiction, as he was an enormously prolific writer and often co-author with Larry Niven. I’ve been a lover of “hard” Science Fiction since I graduated from children’s books, and together Niven and Pournelle created some of my all-time favorite books, including (with Steven Barnes) Legacy of Heorot, which I still think of, out of all the books I’ve ever read, as the book that had the greatest potential to be turned into a great movie but never was. As with many of Niven and Pournelle’s books, it had wide influence on many other works that was barely acknowledged outside of the circles of fans who knew it very well, elements of the book becoming commonplace in popular culture without knowledge of the source.
However, as is the case with many very intelligent people Jerry Pournelle’s interests were broad and varied, and they intersected my own fairly often. At least back in the 1970’s and 1980’s he was an avid survivalist and active in that field, memorably writing the forward to Mel Tappan’s book Tappan on Survival, which despite Mel Tappan’s death in 1980 is still often found for sale at gun shows and is well worth having and reading today. Jerry Pournelle’s interest in survival greatly contributed to Niven and Pournelle’s famous book Lucifer’s Hammer, my favorite of their collaborations, which wrote about the effects of a comet hitting the Earth. If that is tired stuff today it is only because this remarkable book created an entire new genre, and has been imitated thousands of times in print and on screen. Though dated in some ways (and, of course, attacked for being politically incorrect despite having been written in a time when that concept was not common in the free world) it is still hugely entertaining and a great first step to guide readers to who have never given survival subjects serious thought.
Jerry Pournelle is also famous for his long-standing monthly column in Byte magazine, to which I subscribe and which I looked forward to reading every month. He was at the forefront of the “computer revolution” back when most people considered the entire subject a passing fad, and I shared many of the passions he wrote about and loved learning everything I could about it, even if I couldn’t afford hardware and software in the realm in which he got to play. Back then it would not be unusual to find me reading his column in Byte while surrounded in a tiny basement apartment with computers and computer parts in various stages of testing and completion, not counting three or four in active use. Those were heady times when there was a lot going on, but the information revolution had not yet taken hold and it was a constant struggle to stay informed and keep up. Jerry Pournelle’s column helped greatly while also being entertaining, a rare combination even today.
Jerry Pournelle also wrote a great many military Science Fiction novels on his own and in collaboration with authors other than Larry Niven. That was never my favorite genre, even when handled by masters of the form like Robert Heinlein, but I read several of them as they came out and generally enjoyed them. They were often based on actual, little-known historical events and not infrequently displayed a wide knowledge of strategy and tactics, subjects about which many later authors in the field, even famous ones, seem to understand very little.
There was even a remote connection between Jerry Pournelle and one of my other favorite subjects, martial arts. Larry Niven co-authored several books with Steven Barnes, and all three of them authored Legacy of Heorot. Steven Barnes is an avid lifelong martial artist (and self-defense pistol shooter, which may be an intersection with Mal Tappan) and was a student of Dan Inosanto, himself once the leading student of Bruce Lee.
I remember reading once the contention that there are, at any given time in history, only about four hundred really influential people in the world, and that as such it’s really not too surprising that there are a lot of direct and indirect connections between them. Jerry Pournelle was indisputably one of those four hundred for our times.
Though I never met or even corresponded with him, I personally feel a sense of great loss at the passing of Jerry Pournelle. The world has become a little grimmer and harder to live in, just knowing that he’s no longer there to look to as a resource. He was unique, his influence affected many times more people than ever knew his name, and he is, and will be, greatly missed.
– Robert the Wombat