Writing, Jerry Pournelle liked to say, “is hard work.” Not exactly an original observation, but Pournelle, who died on September 8 at the age of 84, strove to make his writerly life a little easier: He was apparently the first person to publish a work of fiction that had been written wholly using a computer. He spent thousands on the machine in the late 1970s but felt that it had paid for itself within a year by allowing him to write and edit with greater haste and accuracy—which meant he could “make a living at it.”
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1933 and schooled in Tennessee, Jerry Eugene Pournelle was just 16 when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1949. He shipped out to Korea and suffered hearing loss as an artilleryman. After four years of service, Pournelle enrolled, via the GI Bill, at the University of Washington. There he met Roberta, who would be his wife of nearly six decades, and earned degrees in psychology and eventually a doctorate in political science. His dissertation proposed a new model for plotting American political actors, wherein one axis represents their “attitude toward political authority and power” and the other their “attitude toward planned social progress.” It never really caught on, but became a footnote in the political science literature.
It wasn’t for political science but for science fiction that Pournelle would become best known. He first started writing short and long fiction pseudonymously and by 1973 had written under his own name the first novel in the massive “CoDominium” series about future politics and interstellar empires—a project that eventually sprawled to more than two dozen books by various authors and that is still growing today.
Pournelle often collaborated with his dear friend the novelist Larry Niven on wildly imaginative stories. Their book Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) describes the apocalyptic collapse of civilization in California following a comet strike in the Pacific Ocean. Footfall (1985) is about an invasion by a race of extraterrestrial, multi-trunked elephants. And Fallen Angels (1991), for which Pournelle and Niven were joined by the SF author Michael Flynn, spoofed climate hysteria with a return of glaciers and the salvation of the planet by space enthusiasts, with many of the characters based on real people.
Perhaps Pournelle’s most acclaimed work, also written with Niven, was The Mote in God’s Eye (1974). The book has humans establishing interstellar colonies by 2020 and beginning a Great Exodus from Earth. The first chapter vividly depicts warfare in space—and nicely represents a certain militaristic and masculine strain of SF prose:
Robert Heinlein, no slouch in the manly space-style department, called the book “possibly the best contact-with-aliens story ever written.”
Pournelle was one of the very few science fiction authors who in some way helped shape real-world technology. As a consultant at the Boeing company in the late 1950s, he developed concepts for advanced space weapons. His 1970 book The Strategy of Technology, cowritten with his mentor Stefan Possony, is still occasionally mentioned in the service academies. His prowess in all things computing garnered him a monthly column in Byte during that magazine’s heyday in the ’80s and ’90s.
And he had an outsized influence on U.S. space and defense policy. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he and others would gather at Niven’s home in Tarzana, California, to hammer out policy recommendations. These meetings evolved into something more formal, the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy, which Pournelle chaired. In addition to several science fiction authors, the group included Buzz Aldrin and a handful of other astronauts, retired military officers like Army General Danny Graham, and several figures from the aerospace industry. (I was too junior to be invited, but my then-boss at the Aerospace Corporation participated.) Congressman Newt Gingrich was involved, too. The group recommended to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger the commencement of a missile-defense program, a proposal that helped inspire President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. To the extent that the prospect of American missile-defense technology hastened the end of the Cold War—by making it plain to Soviet leaders that mutually assured destruction would no longer be mutual—Pournelle can be said to have played a small but not insignificant part in nudging the world toward freedom.
Pournelle was a member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and regularly attended its meetings. Here he is pictured holding a sword at a society meeting, circa 1988. (Photo credit: Pip R. Lagenta / Flickr)
Given his inclination to support military robustness and his disdain for the ideas of the “limits to growth” crowd, it’s no wonder that Pournelle’s techno-political activism contributed to a rift in the science fiction community. As William J. Broad described it in a 1985 New York Times article, camps formed around support and opposition to missile defense, with Pournelle, Heinlein, and other allies pitted against the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and the famously liberal Isaac Asimov.
In the early 1990s, Pournelle’s space group convened again, joining with Maxwell Hunter of Lockheed to push for government funding for McDonnell Douglas’s DC-X. That experimental rocket was intended to demonstrate reusability in vertical takeoff and landing, in the hope of reducing launch costs. The DC-X was “conceived in my living room,” Pournelle said—an exaggeration, but forgivable in light of his role in obtaining government support. The program was later subsumed by NASA, and some of the resulting ideas are today being adapted by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.
In recent years, in addition to writing his stories and novels, Pournelle chronicled his reactions to current events in a quirky blog called “Chaos Manor” (also his name for his home in Studio City, California). He sought, as he often put it, to “inject reality” into political questions—offering rambling thoughts on such varied subjects as chemical weapons, Obamacare, and immigration. Chaos Manor was often informative and always entertaining, despite, and sometimes because of, its author’s lapses into curmudgeonliness.
Although Pournelle often joked that his politics were “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan,” his views might best be described as “conservatarian.” But his friendships transcended political differences. After Pournelle’s death, Norman Spinrad, a self-described anarchist, recalled on Facebook how Pournelle joined him on the barricades when, as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), Spinrad fought against publishers on behalf of writers. George R. R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame) blogged his own reminiscence about Pournelle, noting that while “his politics were not my politics, there was no one better to have in your foxhole.” Pournelle, during his own stint as SFWA president, fought for Martin in a dispute with a publisher, and
After the memorial service for Pournelle last weekend, the novelist Harry Turtledove said in an email that “Jerry was one of the really genuine people I’ve known. My politics are a good deal to the left of his, but we got on well anyhow.” Turtledove, known for his ingenious alternative histories, also remarked that “Jerry was the best plot doctor I ever worked with.”
Pournelle was, to the end, a believer in the power of imagination to expand the horizons of humankind. Our world is a better place for having been the home to this man who hoped for worlds yet to come.
Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer, is the author of Safe Is Not an Option.
