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BIOGRAPHY Pournelle was born Jeremia Eugene Pournelle in Shreveport , Louisiana . He served in the US Army during the Korean War , receiving a direct commission as a Lieutenant of Artillery in the field in Korea. After Korea, he obtained advanced degrees in Psychology , Statistics , Engineering , and Political Science , including two PhDs. He acquired political experience by serving as Executive Assistant to the Mayor and Director of Research for the City of Los Angeles , campaign manager for Congressman Barry Goldwater Jr. (Rep.), and campaign manager for the third (successful) campaign for Mayor Sam Yorty (Dem.). Pournelle was an intellectual protege of Russell Kirk ( Kenneth Cole , Pournelle's mentor at the University of Washington, was co-founder with Kirk of Modern Age) and Stefan T. Possony with whom Pournelle wrote numerous publications including '' The Strategy Of Technology '', onetime textbook at USMA (West Point) and USAFA (Colorado Springs). His work in the aerospace industry including editing ''Project 75'', a 1964 study of 1975 defense requirements. He worked in operations research at Boeing , Aerospace Corporation , and North American Rockwell Space Division , and was founding President of the Pepperdine Research Institute . WRITING CAREER Pournelle began fiction writing non- SF work under a pseudonym in 1965 . His early SF was published as "Wade Curtis", in '' Analog '' and other magazines. Some SF novels under his own name include:
In the mid-1970s, Pournelle began a collaborative relationship with Larry Niven . Their first novel together was '' The Mote In God's Eye '' (1974). Its sequel in 1991 was '' The Gripping Hand ''. Other collaborations by Pournelle and Niven include:
In 1985, ''Footfall'', in which Robert A. Heinlein was a thinly veiled minor character, reached the number one spot on ''The New York Times'' bestseller list. Another bestseller, ''Lucifer's Hammer'' (1977), reached number two. ''Fallen Angels'' won the Prometheus Award in 1992 for Best Novel and Japan's Seiun Award for Foreign Novel in 1998. See {Link without Title} THEMES From the beginning, Pournelle's work has engaged strong Military themes. Several books are centered on a fictional Mercenary Infantry force known as ''Falkenberg's Legion''. There are strong parallels between these stories and the ''Dorsai'' mercenary stories by Gordon R. Dickson , as well as Heinlein's Starship Troopers , although Pournelle's work takes far fewer technological leaps than either of these. JOURNALISM Pournelle wrote the "Chaos Manor" column in the print version of ''Byte'' for many years, describing his experiences with various hardware and software configurations, some sent by vendors for his approval. He continues to write the column for the online version and international print editions of ''Byte''. Since 2003, he has also been contributing to the computer programming magazine '' Dr. Dobb's Journal ''. Since 1998, Pournelle has maintained a daily online journal, "View from Chaos Manor", in effect a Blog dating from before the use of that term. He says he resists using ''blog'' because he considers the word ugly and because he maintains that his "View" is primarily a vehicle for writing rather than a collection of links. Humor is an important part of his journalistic output. He wrote of an incident when he and his wife drove to Baja California to witness a Total Eclipse . Driving a rugged trail to a mountain top, the better to see the Umbra approaching at hundreds of miles per hour, they found another vehicle there. Parking next to it, Mrs. Roberta Pournelle rolled down a window and asked "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon ?" POLITICS In a 1997 article "wrote parts of Reagan's 1983 SDI speech, and provided much of the background for the policy, we certainly did not write the speech ... We were not trying to boost space, we were trying to win the Cold War". . The Council's first report [1980 became the transition team policy paper on space for the incoming Reagan administration. The third report was certainly quoted in the Reagan "Star Wars" speech. Pournelle opposed both Gulf Wars, maintaining that the money would be better spent developing energy technologies for the United States. He is quoted as saying "with what we spent in Iraq we could build nuclear power plants and space solar power satellites and tell the Arabs to drink their oil." His web site is critical of the Iraq War, but demands support of troops committed there. "Once you send the troops in, you have no choice but to give them what they need until you bring them home." Pournelle is also known for his Pournelle Chart , a 2-dimensional coordinate system used to distinguish political ideologies. It is similar to the Nolan Chart , except that the X axis refers to your feelings toward state and centralised government (farthest right being state worship, farthest left being the idea of a state as the "ultimate evil"), and the Y axis refers to your belief that all problems in society have rational solutions. (top being complete confidence in planning, bottom being its total lack). POLITICS IN THE FICTION In his books Pournelle delights in again and again creating situations and dilemmas from which the only solution (at least, the only one offered to the reader) is taking an action which is decidedly not "politically correct". However these stories are not mere one-sided polemics. The protagonists are at the mercy of forces they may understand but cannot control, forces which are very real and which operate in our world today. If Pournelle has specific targets in mind, they are those who for ideological or personal reasons ignore or bypass these truths. The forces involved are the need for resources, especially energy, the inevitable stratification of societies and the consequences of disturbing the existing order, and the tendency of cultures to drift towards the politics of entitlement, as demonstrated by Welfare State s throughout history. Similar themes occur in the work of H. Beam Piper , who was an influence on Pournelle. In The Mercenary , latter integrated into Falkenberg's Legion , the newly-independent planet Hadley is threatened with economic collapse, famine, and resulting mass death. This can be only avoided by having a large part of its city population is relocated to the countryside and assigned to work in agriculture. But this solution is unpopular and the popular, leading party won't hear of it. The party uses bloody, violent means to force the planet's President to resign and get themselves into power. The story's protagonist, mercenary commander John Christian Falkenberg, solves the problem. Falkenberg leads his troops into the sports stadium where the dominant party holds new presidential elections and attacks the populists. Many in the crowd are armed and ready to fight. The party's leaders are killed, as are many others. Now, there are no more obstacles to declaring martial law and getting the relocation plan carried out forthwith. With the mission accomplished, Falkenberg and his troops depart the planet en route to the next assignment. Later on Falkenberg is invited to help another planet, New Washington, in its War of Independence. The plot carries some obvious hints of the American War Of Independence , but with quite a different ending. The liberated planet is plagued with factional strife which could erupt into bloodshed and civil war - whereupon Falkenberg brushes aside the political leaders who had invited him there (except for one whom he marries). Falkenberg imposes his kind of order, founds a dynasty and settles down with his loyal troops, a satisfactory conclusion to a long interstellar roving career. One of his friends calling him half-jokingly "King John I", and at the last which the reader hears of him, he is considering to actually call himself a king. (In later stages of Pornelle's future history, monarchy - and not necessarily a constitutional one - does become again humanity's dominant political system). In Footfall , elephant-like alien invaders land in Kansas, and the only way to dislodge them seems to be large-scale nuclear strikes which would kill a big lot of American citizens together with the aliens and render Kansas a radioactive wasteland - which is precisely what the US government proceeds to do. Later on, when the aliens continue their offensive and seize large parts of Africa, the US President secretly authorizes the construction of a spaceship powered by nuclear blasts - the only way of getting at the hovering alien mothership and ending the threat. The environmental considerations which led to stopping such a project in the 1960's are brushed aside in the emergency. An investigative journalist discovers this environmentally-damaging government project and plans to reveal it, in the hope of a Pulitzer - but is murdered by his best friend to whom he had revealed his intention, and who is determined to protect the secret at all costs. The ship takes off, with radioactive contamination of Earth's atmosphere considered an acceptable price, and successfully engages with the alien ship. But at the critical moment the President grows "soft" and is willing to settle for less than the aliens' unconditional surrender. Whereupon the President's civil and military associates seize power, hold the President incommunicado and hand effective power to the hawkish National Security Adviser - who carries the war to a successful conclusion and secures the aliens' surrender. In Lucifer's Hammer , the world is thrown into total chaos by the disastrous strike of a comet. The one hope of restoring a technological civilization is a nuclear power station which miraculously survived intact - but a coalition of religious fanatics, militant environmental activists and Afro-Americans are determined to destroy the station, and they possess the guns to do it. The good guys seem helpless to stop them, until a scientist comes up with the formula for constructing Napalm bombs - and they proceed to build them, incinerate en masse the advancing environmentalists, save the power station and get on with the reconstruction of civilization. (The scientist saviour, who had selflessly given the production of napalm priority over Insulin , dies of diabetes). High Justice is a collection of seven stories, all of which portary as the heroes (or at least, the protagonists whose success the author seems to desire) agents and executives of Multinational Corporations (upgraded to multi-planetary corporations in the later stories) who successfully defend their corporation's business interests in ways fair or foul, at various science-fictional settings. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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