Jerry Pournelle, science fiction writer.
August 7, 1933 – September 8, 2017
Jerry Pournelle, once upon a time, was at the top of the second tier of science fiction writers, right below giants like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. That was a long time ago, in the 1970’s, back when he was still insecure enough to take direction from editors. After around 1980 or so, only collaborators could keep him from writing blatantly racist and sexist military / fascist fan fiction, as his arrogance and ego took over and outran what talent he had. And even collaborators didn’t always manage to keep him from going off the rails.
Ask any con-goer, and they’ll have their own “Jerry stories”. He was not a surly prickly presence like Harlan Ellison, but his sexist, arrogant and domineering behavior at cons was infamous. Yet, despite the fact that he was born in the Deep South and had many of the beliefs typical of his generation of Southerners, including racism and sexism that were typical of more “genteel” Southerners (nothing crude like the racism and sexism of the Orange Racist Pussy Grabber), he had one redeeming quality: He was not a stupid man. Furthermore, he was not a mendacious man like, say, William F. Buckley. He didn’t bend the truth in order to justify his beliefs, and when in positions of responsibility he performed his responsibilities fairly and without bias. During his stint as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, he didn’t run it as a white boy’s club, he ran it in a fair manner that benefited all of its members, even the minority and female members.
Furthermore, while arrogant and egotistical, he was not a mean-spirited man, and did not cloister himself away from people and ideas that might challenge his own beliefs. He rarely changed his own beliefs, but unlike his son Alex who has made death threats against liberals, he didn’t demonize people simply because they had beliefs different from his. He collaborated with Steven Barnes, a black liberal writer, and he collaborated with Charles Sheffield, notoriously liberal writer of Brother to Dragons which is probably the most radical left-wing science fiction novel ever published by Baen Books during Jim Baen’s lifetime (and which is sadly out of print despite being the Campbell Award winner in 1993). He even tolerated Joe Haldeman, the ferociously anti-war author of The Forever War whose opinion of Jerry’s war fan fiction was unprintable. Quipped Pohl Anderson at one con, “He’ll put up with Joe because Joe makes the metal detectors go off at airports.” I.e., as a Vietnam veteran who still had shrapnel in him from being blown up in Vietnam, in Jerry’s mind that earned Joe the right to say whatever Joe wanted to say, regardless of whether Jerry agreed with him or not.
So anyhow, on September 7, Jerry wrote something about DACA on his web site, basically parroting the Trump administration line that Obama had no right to create the program so Trump was forced, forced I say (at what gunpoint?) to end it, and mentioning as an aside that he had enjoyed Dragoncon but had caught a cold and/or the flu. Then he went to sleep, and he didn’t wake up again. It was a quiet death, likely pneumonia, the old man’s gentle helper in passing from this mortal coil. And so it goes.
In any event, Jerry leaves behind a lot of good science fiction, as well as some spectacularly bad science fiction in his later years. I doubt any of it will survive the test of history, but he entertained and in some cases educated a whole lot of people in this lifetime. He was an ass, but the world has art in it today that would not have existed if he’d never existed. In the end, that’s all that anybody can ever wish for.
R.I.P to an ornery old ass…
– Badtux the Fiction Penguin
I didn’t know much about Jerry Pournelle but I had a favourable impression of him because of the one thing with his name in it that I remember reading: “The Mote in God’s Eye.” He and Larry Niven got the names on the cover of that one. I was on a Niven “Ringworld” reading binge, which is why I got it from the library. Sorry to hear he was a fascist.
Reading your political analysis of Pournelle, it struck me that during the five or six years I was heavily into sci-fi (late teens-early uni) I wasn’t politically awake. I didn’t grok the political undertones in everything the way I have for the past few decades. Some writers, especially Heinlein, were so overt that it was impossible to miss. And “Forever War” was anti-war enough that an unconscious reader like me saw it clearly. Overall, though, I only thought about the plot, not the political philosophy when I blazed through such books. If I was to re-read many of my former sci-fi faves these days, I wonder what new sights I’d see them through?
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Ah yes, The Mote In God’s Eye. Remember that the bad guy there is a liberal and the good guy is a manly military man….
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As a younger, more naïve reader I, too, missed much of the fascism, racism, and sexism in Pournelle’s work, with one notable exception: the black cannibal gangs in “Lucifer’s Hammer.” I was loving that book until those particular bad guys showed up, and then it was like WTF? I’ve been thinking about re-reading “Footfall” since I heard Pournelle died, but I fear it too will have things in it I’d rather not see.
At least, so far as I know, Pournelle never sank as low as Heinlein did with his piece of crap “Farnham’s Freehold.”
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I lost interest in Pournelle’s fiction long ago when, after reading a couple of books, I noticed that his heroes and villains were all uniformly rather stupid. This was particularly obvious in The Mote In God’s Eye, where you’d be reading along and think “what is wrong with these people?”
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For me, ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’ was a bookmark in my literary journey, much the same way as Asimov’s ‘Foundation Trilogy’ or Clarke’s “The Past Through Tomorrow’ were. I can’t and won’t hold JP’s worldview against him any more than I would of anyone whose work I admire. We are all a steamy frothy cocktail of our life’s story, and sometimes (most times) it’s an uncontrollable thing. Thanks for this honest obit… we should all be so fortunate.
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I liked Pournelle’s earlier military SF, the early Falkenberg books etc. before he started collaborating with S.M. Stirling (another guy I haven’t quite made up my mind about).
I vaguely know his other son Phil, who seems a very decent and intelligent guy – just retired from 27 years in the Navy.
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Stirling seems to have lost his mind in 2001, spewing a bunch of tripe about genociding Muslims. A shame, Stirling was always more pulpy than Pournelle but he’s had a lot of very good female / African-American / gay characters over the years. But Muslims seem to send him over the edge.
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I remember enjoying JP’s “Janissary” series when I was younger. It’s not the most original of ideas, but he does a fairly decent job with making a good story out of it.
MO his later stuff is practically unreadable if you don’t have a fetish for licking the backsides of people with weapons. For a guy who is supposed to have served during Korea Pournelle has a ridiculous fetish for the supposed finer clay from which soldiers are made; you’d think a guy who had actually worked with other soldiers would have known better…
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The first book in the “Janissaries” series, written in 1979, was pretty good. It showcased Jerry’s research in military history, and it had fine characterization of the main characters that made it feel like it was inhabited by living people. The other books, written by Roland Green based on outlines by Jerry while Jerry himself worked on “Oath of Fealty” and “Footfall” with Larry Niven (yep, basically ghost-written, though the actual writer did get a co-author credit), basically felt like they were written by someone who didn’t know the characters but simply moved them from place to place as required by the plot outlines. Which basically was the case.
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