SciFi Author (and Byte Columnist) Jerry Pournelle Has Died (jerrypournelle.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader BinBoy writes: Science fiction author and Byte magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle has died according to a statement by his son Alex posted to Jerry's web site. A well-wishing page has been set up for visitor's to post their thoughts and memories of Mr. Pournelle.
Pournelle's literary career included the 1985 science fiction novel Footfall with Larry Niven, which became a #1 New York Times best-seller -- one of several successful collaborations between the two authors. In a Slashdot interview in 2003, Larry Niven credited Jerry for the prominent role of religion in their 1974 book The Mote in God's Eye.

Wikipedia also remembers how Byte magazine announced Pournelle's legendary debut as a columnist in their June 1980 issue.
"The other day we were sitting around the BYTE offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world. We wondered, "Who could cover some of the latest developments for us in a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) style?" The phone rang. It was Jerry Pournelle with an idea for a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) series of articles to be presented in BYTE on a semi-regular (i.e.: every 2 to 3 months) basis, which would cover the wild microcomputer goings-on at the Pournelle House ("Chaos Manor") in Southern California. We said yes."
Slashdot reader tengu1sd fondly remembers Pournelle as "frequently loud, but well reasoned." He also shares a link to a new appreciation posted on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America site. And Slashdot reader Nova Express also remembers Pournelle's Chaos Manor website "later became one of the first blogs on the Internet."

Comments

Re:Terrible news

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad for you. You missed out on some great books and a magazine that helped define early PCs and programming.

Go back to your mobile device and continue ignoring the world.

Well, I'm not glad he is gone, but I am not sad.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think he was intelligent and thoughtful capable of cutting through the crap, yet sadly his last "post" exemplifies all that I later found mistaken and flawed in his approach.

Maybe he isn't quite as much of a flaming ideologue as some of the die-hards here, but it still reeks of a bias, a sneering condescending disdain for the liberals that he blames for all the problems of the world.

All supported with a litany of aphorisms to recite until they are ingrained into your very soul.

Sad to lose such a man, but we lost him to his own bitterness many years ago.

Re:Terrible news

[Anonymous Coward]

Until Dr. Dobbs, BYTE was the technical go to computer magazine about what was happening in computers.
I credit them with almost everything I've learned about computers (despite having multiple EE degrees). When I was a little kid, I'd go to the library and spend hours a day reading all of the periodicals. BYTE was my favourite,even though I had no idea what they were talking about. I read every issue from 1975 until I got a subscription the early 90's when it took a huge dive in quality

He helped create the future

[mykepredko]

Take a look in the Sci-Fi section of Amazon or a local bookstore. Mr. Pournelle made some terrific contributions to the genre. "The Mote in God's Eye" being my favourite, a collaboration between him and Larry Niven (I also really liked "Oath of Fealty") but he wrote a number of very entertaining novels as well as edited a lot of great anthologies - seeing his name on a book meant is was definitely worth reading.

In regards to Byte, I was in university at the time and I remember that other students and, more than a few professors, would go directly to his articles - he gave a different, less hyped, picture of Silicon Valley, the products, some of the people, and what was really happening and what was important. What I found most useful was his (along with family and staff) tribulations in trying out new products and setting them up - a lot of wisdom for what would be later known as "User Experience".

He hasn't written a lot in the last twenty years, but he left his mark in a very positive way.

Re:He helped create the future

[Teancum]

Most of what he has written in the past twenty years is mostly on his blog. He wrote quite a bit on politics (a pretty staunch libertarian but with Republican leanings) and climatology (where he was definitely in the "skeptic" camp).

One of his largest accomplishments was being on the President's Space Council where he was one of the backers and political supporters of the DC-X. He personally got into the lobbying effort to get funding for that project through Congress... something that as a project developed many of the theories and ideas for VTOL orbital spacecraft. Without the DC-X it is unlikely that SpaceX would have been able to their their Falcon 9 to land the way it did.

His largest political failure was a proposed lunar exploration prize program similar to the X-Prize but on a larger scale. He got the Republican House leadership (including the then-speaker Newt Gingrich) to accept his idea of basically appropriating $10 billion toward the first three companies that would successfully send and return astronauts to the Moon in the 1990's. After getting the House leadership on board including the minority ranking members (Democrats) of the Science and Space committees, Newt got into his own political mess that ended up killing the whole idea. I can only imagine what might have been had that proposal actually gone forward.

Mr. Pournelle knew Dan Quayle too (through the Space Council), but he pretty much dropped out of politics in such a direct manner after Bill Clinton was elected except through commentary like I mentioned above.

It could be argued that Jerry Pournelle also pioneered the idea of a blog on the web and was one of the first to do that where he entered some of his first entries as hand written HTML.... definitely doing that well before the word itself was coined. He did it as a way to continue his Chaos Manner series even post Byte, but went in different directions as well.

Re:He helped create the future

[thomst]

mykepredko enthused:

Take a look in the Sci-Fi section of Amazon or a local bookstore. Mr. Pournelle made some terrific contributions to the genre.

-1 Disagree

As an SF writer, Pournelle was, at best, a hack. Were it not for Larry Niven, he'd be known only for his Byte column. As a writer of fiction, his prose was pedestrian, his characters one-dimensional, and his philosophy repugnant.

He was also an intolerant, alchoholic narcissist.

I know I'm going to attract a lot of hate for the above, but hear me out before you downmod me.

At an SF convention in the Bay Area, he was on a panel discussing the Reagan Star Wars initiative - and pretty strident in his advocacy of it. After the panel discussion concluded, one of the attendees approached him to engage him in debate about the program. The guy made it clear that he disagreed with Pournelle about the initiative's technical feasibility, was concerned by its projected cost, and felt that it would decrease geopolitical stability. He made his points calmly and respectfully, and he stood his ground, despite Pournelle calling him a Communist and a traitor. When he pointed out that ad hominems didn't address his factual arguments, Pournelle sucker-punched him.

I was there. I witnessed it. And whatever respect I might have had for Jerry Pournelle permanently vanished the moment he resorted to violence to silence someone who presented zero physical threat, merely because he didn't like what the man had to say.

That action is of a piece with the facsistic philosophy he espoused via his fantasy doppelganger John Christian Falkenberg, and is best exemplified by Falkenberg's "final solution" to the problem of overpopulation of the planet Hadley by involuntarily-transported convict-colonists. Falkenberg conspires to trap them in the capitol city's stadium, then orders his troopers to murder literally thousands of them - and Pournelle presents this act of mass murder with a straight face as somehow necessary, noble, and right.

It's an absolutely classic example of narcissist wish-fulfillment: treating the lives people of whose political views and power he disapproves as subhuman, and therefore legitimate targets of genocide ... all for the "greater good", of course. And, because Falkenberg has the "strength" to murder thousands whose only crime is that he considers them surplus population, Pournelle presents this despicable atrocity as admirable and praiseworthy.

It turned my stomach when I read it in Analog as a 20-something, and it still revolts me today.

It was clear to me then that Pournelle desperately wanted to be Gordon R. Dickson and the Falkenberg chronicles was his attempt to re-imagine the Childe Cycle from a far-right perspective - and minus all that nauseating, limp-wristed, left-wing compassion and humanity with which Dickson insisted on spoiling his narrative. Humanity and compassion had no place in Pournelle's philosophy. To him they were unnecessary distractions that should ruthlessly be dispensed with, along with the undeserving hordes of subhuman trash.

What makes Pournelle's fiction particualrly dull is that he constantly indulged himself in polemical justifications for his principal characters' psychopathic actions by constructing antagonists who were uniformly, relentlessly unidimensional caricatures, rather than characters. No one who disagreed with what he presented as ideologically-correct attitudes, strategies, and philosophies displays ANY characteristics other than unwavering venality and profound physical cowardice. (Well, okay, I'll concede that some of them also exhibit ham-fisted duplicity, as well.) They barely even aspire to the status of straw men, much less fully-realized, three-dimensional characters complete with depth, nuance, and complexity. They are, without exception, not so much cartoons as stick figures.

Of course, the same can fairly be said of Pournelle's protagonists, so that's

Re:He helped create the future

[thomst]

slaker observed:

I really wish this were modded up. I've been active in various parts of literary SF fandom for a some time and while I can't say I have had any direct interaction with him, I've heard more Jerry Pournelle horror stories than any two other writers, even when one of them is Harlan Ellison.

As it turns out, I had a Harlan moment, too.

It was at the Worldcon in St. Louis in 1969. The Heidelberg delegation threw a raging party to celebrate their city being picked as the host for the next Worldcon. Bathtub full of beer - good beer, not that Annhauser-Busch crap - genuine Absinthe, heavy on the wormwood, Goldschlager before that became a frat-boy thing, schnapps for days. It was pretty well-attended, as you might imagine, including by the underaged yours truly, and a good time was had by all ...

... until Harlan showed up.

Now this was pretty much the peak of Harlan's fame. He had just won the Hugo for his short story The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, A Boy and His Dog (which had won a Hugo the previous year) was being made into a movie, based on his own screenplay, Dangerous Visions had won two years earlier (and thereby established his cred as an editor and anthologist), and The City on the Edge of Forever had taken the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation the previous year. All of that undoubtedly went to his head - as did, I suspect, a certain quantity of Bolivian marching powder, and an undoubtedly significant dosage of alcohol, as well.

So he was definitely feeling his oats when he rolled into the party with a fawning hottie on each arm. I was sitting on the floor, doing a pretty credible job of holding up the wall as they entered, close enough for me to visually confirm that neither woman was burdened by underclothing. (Ah, miniskirts - how I miss you!). Anyway, as Harlan stood there in his $800 suit, chin outthrust, clearly reveling in his status as lord of all he surveyed, and only slightly unsteady on his feet, a teenage girl with bad skin, braces, glasses with Coke-bottle lenses, a white cardigan, and a poodle skirt appeared in front of him, trembling in awe at the glory of his physical presence in the same room, a copy of Dangerous Visions clutched to her bosom.

"Oh, Mr. Ellison," she gushed, "I just love your work! I've read everything you've written. Would you please do me the honor of signing my copy of Dangerous Visions?"

Himself inspected her as if she were a particularly unappetizing invertebrate he'd discovered squirming under under a freshly-lifted rock.

"You," he announced, "are a worthless, little piece of shit. I'm here to enjoy myself, not sign autographs for the likes of you. Go the fuck away. And stay the fuck away."

That was my first lesson in why it's a bad idea to meet your heroes. That poor, dumpy girl reacted as if Harlan had punched her in the face, physically recoling from his casual viciousness; the very picture of profound public humiliation. Clutching herself in emotional pain, she scurried away, tears cataracting down her crumpled face, and vanished into the depths of the Germans' suite.

Just for a moment, I considered jumping to my feet and confronting the little prick on her behalf - but I was 17, and seriously stoned, and he was Harlan fucking Ellison ... and the moment passed.

it was years before I began to forgive Harlan for that act of narcissistic cruelty. Only when I learned that he had given the late, great Theodore Sturgeon free lodging in his Mad Hatter's mansion in the L.A. hills, and paid his medical bills during his final illness did I finally, grudgingly concede that he might - just might - have some semblance of a human heart hiding within that puffin chest.

Maybe.

But I've never forgotten the way he deliberately, publicly stabbed a teenaged girl in the heart for no defensible reason. And I'm utterly certain that she has never forgotten it, either ...

Re:Well, I'm not glad he is gone, but I am not sad

[ColdWetDog]

I'm imagining a beyond-the-grave interview from Heinlein. Pournelle was a pantywaist compared to RAH.

One of the best parts of Byte

[Megane]

Back in '87, the tax laws were changing so that you couldn't deduct magazine subscriptions as a business expense. That didn't matter to me, but they made a special offer of a six-year subscription for $99. By the time that ran out in '93, Byte had gotten... boring. It seemed like it was nothing but reviews, and stuff that would mostly be of interest to IT department types. Except for one thing, Jerry's column. That was the only reason left for me to care about Byte, and it wasn't enough to get me to renew again.

It was good to read about the various problems he would encounter and overcome, and it was also good to know that someone else cared about keyboard layouts. Back around that time, lots of crap was being done to keyboard layouts, obviously by people who had never learned to touch-type. The worst were the broken backspace key (usually a backslash between +/= and a tiny backspace key) making the right pinky have to go too far, something between Z and left shift making the left pinky have to go too far (hey, if the Europeans do it, it must be good!), and big return keys, usually resulting in the \| key pushing something else around. But I've been a Mac guy since 1985, and Apple managed to avoid such annoyances in their keyboards. Fortunately, a sane layout won, at least in the US.

I still have a couple of old Northgate keyboards, and a stack of Model Ms that I acquired over the years, and I hope to get around to replacing their guts with a "bluepill" board running my own USB code. But it won't do me a lot of good, since most of my typing these days is done on a laptop, where there just isn't room for a good mechanical keyboard.

Anyhow, I tried to see if I could look at his most recent Chaos Manor postings, but it appears that the database behind it has overloaded. At least the page linked in TFS seems to have been made static.

Byte

[JBMcB]

Byte was THE magazine to read for general computer news in the late 80's and early 90's. I have a bunch of them and I re-read them from time to time. This is back when nobody knew what was coming down the pipe, or what would even work. You had document-based object-oriented application paradigms being tried out, all kinds of new languages, new processor and hardware architectures being tried out. Weird storage mediums (floptical? ZIP drives? MO Drives?) By today's standards, weird OSes being tried out (BeOS, OS/2, even QNX made a bid for the desktop)

Now the big research goes into what kind of screens the next smartphones will have, or how much faster the next version of the same graphics card you own will be.

Damn it.

[AJWM]

I read Jerry's science fiction back when he was writing for Analog Science Fiction magazine, and later had the opportunity to work with him at Byte magazine. Byte even flew me out to Chaos Manor to get him up to speed on their new BIX system, a computer conferencing system (a pre-Web forerunner to systems like /., Ars Technica, etc.) based on software I wrote. He invited me to a party where I met the likes of Larry Niven, Bob Silverberg and Poul Anderson.

I later worked with him, Niven, Anderson and a number of other writers, scientists and astronauts as part of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy. We (mostly he) helped get the DC-X project started -- reusable, vertical-takeoff-and-landing rocket technology that SpaceX built on for their Falcon launcher.

He inspired me to start selling my writing, both non-fiction and later fiction. In fact, by a series of events I won't go into here (but involving the Council and an International Space Development Conference) he led to me meeting the woman I later married. When we had twin boys, we briefly (very briefly) considered naming them Jerry and Larry.

His passing isn't a complete surprise; he was getting on in years and he had had health issues in recent years, but it is still sad to see him gone. My condolences to his family, who were all very gracious when I visited his home.

Ad astra, Jerry.

A brilliant individual is gone.

[bfwebster]

I got to know Jerry personally when I started writing for BYTE back in 1984. While I had read his BYTE column as well as much of his science fiction writings to date (both solo and with Larry Niven), what I didn't appreciate until some fact time with him was how much he knew about so many subjects. "Chaos Manor" (his name for the house that he and Roberta lived in in Studio CIty) was so named because of the shelves and stacks of books everywhere, on every conceivable subject. Jerry had a BA/MA in psychology and a PhD in political science; he was also an army vet, and did a lot of consulting for the US government, both in terms of the military and the space program. He also had what was pretty much a photographic memory. When I would argue with him on subjects, he'd bring up facts and figures from a vast array of sources.

He also didn't suffer fools gladly, which is why he ticked off so many people. :-) Also, he knew too much for them to prove him wrong, which these days is an unforgivable sin. ..bruce..

Re:Sadly he became a Trumpist in his last days

[mean pun]

Well, yes and no. He had strong and not always rational views on many things. I still remember him arguing that Basic was a superior language over C. The real reason was that he just did not understand C, but the dizzying logic he used to come up with an alternative explanation for his preference was both scary and entertaining. Similar for his political views: they were a disappointment because they were argued just as poorly.

However, the main reason they were a disappointment was that on many other things he HAD a very rational and well-reasoned view. He knew what he wanted, he was very willing to spend time and money to get what he wanted, and he was very rational about it, on his own terms. That was important at the time as a counterweight to all those lofty ideas about what computers could and could not do, and all the technological geekery that went on in the rest of Byte. Arguing that Byte went downhill because of him is therefore just not reasonable. He was an important feature in Byte, and he had a unique view on the computer world that was important for that world.

Re:Sadly he became a Trumpist in his last days

[Aighearach]

Panspermia has basically nothing to do with "evolution" in the Darwinist sense, all of that is the same. It only differs on the question of what got it started. Darwin didn't insist on a certain mechanism for Earth life to start, his argument is that all Earth life could evolve from a primordial form; panspermia is simply an offered primordial mechanism! Darwin talked about believing in "spontaneous generation" but also that he understood science to be not far advanced enough to handle the question. There is no reason at all to believe that panspermia is inconsistent with his views.

But the huge, gaping, unresolvable problem with the claim that panspermia is anti-Darwinist is that panspermia still supposes the exact same spontaneous generation as Darwin was considering, it simply moves it back to an earlier time in a different geographical place.

All thnigs said and done

[Wizardess]

I met Jerry decades ago at a Soldier of Fortune convention to which my then boyfriend had dragged me. As the days progressed my attire morphed somewhat, to John's obvious delight. In those days I was pretty decent looking. Then I got sadder and wider instead of wiser. So I was dressed down somewhat extremely when John and I were sitting at one of the Sahara Hotel's (RIP) bars awaiting Jerry's presentation. We were talking about an observation I, an engineer in the RF communications field, had noticed. I asked John to back me if I went over to ask Jerry about it.

Jerry had just been approached by a trophy hunter who tried to bed the macho men at the SoF convention and write a book about it. Jerry had brushed her off. So I walked over. He expected another proposition. "May I ask a question about the people here at the convention?"

He allowed me to ask. So I asked something like this (the exact quote is lost in time), "For a collection of men who are obviously interested in the art of warfare why in heck is there no communications equipment on display along with the firearms in the huckster room?"

Jerry performed the best double-take I have ever seen. His expression went through states faster than I could register. Finally with a mildly bewildered look he allowed as how he didn't know and that it was indeed a good question. Then we went off to his presentation.

Some time later I got into my car with John and we went to the local Science Fiction and Fantasy club, LASFS. Jerry was there and recognized me. We had fun talking dirty, I mean techie both PCs and novels.

Along about 1985 when BYTE Magazine's online service BIX was being beta tested Jerry whispered to me during a LASFS meeting, "Don't leave before you talk to me." So outside we talked. He gave me the instructions for accessing BIX's beta test. I didn't know he was a damn pusher! {^_-} It infected me so badly that by the time BIX's lights were turned out I was the head moderator on the system and getting paid for my addiction.

During all this time I never once saw Jerry as anything other than an old style gentleman to those who treated him fairly and decently. If I had to grade how much I respected him on a scale of one to ten it would be something like 15. We didn't always agree. But he respected me and I respected him. (And I still think the Commodore Amiga was better than either the Macintosh or the IBM PC of the same era. {^_-})

Damn I'm going to miss him even though I've been expecting it and dreading that it would happen someday. Warranties expire. His did. Mine is in the process. Still, losing him is a serious loss. I sit here imagining his parade ground tenor happily giving God some computer advice to make his job easier or spinning yet another good yarn.

Jerry, please rest in peace. Your legacy will live on for a long time.

{^_^} Joanne Dow