I’ve never much cared for science fiction. Not sure why – it just never took for me.
The exception was always Jerry Pournelle – pretty much the only person who ever wrote sci-fi that ever grabbed me.
That goes back almost forty years, to reading, among others, Lucifer’s Hammer – a book that probably grabbed me in the same way The Walking Dead does today.
There was more; fifteen years ago, during the heyday of the blog, Pournelle had an influential site – and he read and frequently llinked to Shot In The Dark; I’m not sure if any of you in my audience today found me through Pournelle, but I know he gave me a good boost in traffic back in the day.
Anyway – rest in peace, Jerry Pournelle.
I do like a lot of different sci fi stuff. I guess that it started with the original Star Trek series, which started when I was in 7th grade.
I have actually read Lucifer’s Hammer. Excellent read!
I remember Jerry mostly from his Chaos Manor column in Byte Magazine.
Does anyone else remember Byte?
I remember Byte. Never really read it, but I remember it.
I remember Byte, it seemed to be pitched toward the hardware/IEEE guys but I subscribed from homebrew C/PM through Windows NT – Pournelle was always a must read.
Byte was my tabloid bible for years. But then, I’m a hardware/EE kind of guy who dabbled in S100 CP/M systems “back in the day.” I enjoyed Jerry’s Byte columns, but more for the humor than anything else. They were the informed layman’s reactions to the other stuff in those absolutely massive magazines. One of the key features, though, was that you knew that Jerry would never be bought off by a company. He played it straight and you knew it.
I liked much of his SF. He was to me more of an extension of the Asimov line of SF than much of what was current at the time, and I like my SF to be heavier on the science than on the psychology (a la LeGuin) or the politics (a la Scalzi). I liked the works in which he collaborated with Niven the best. But outside of his hard SF, I really liked Lucifer’s Hammer, of course, as a product of the disaster themed times in which it came out. But one of my favorites of his was his was Inferno and the sequel Escape from Hell (working title: “Dante meets Vatican II”).
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