Jerry Pournelle

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Jerry Eugene Pournelle (August 7, 1933 – September 8, 2017) was an American polymath scientist, science fiction author, essayist, and one of the first bloggers.

He worked in aerospace in the 1960s and early 1970s but later concentrated on his writing.

He is regarded as "a tireless ambassador for the future" in a gizmodo obituary. "Pournelle is best known for writing hard science fiction, and he has received numerous accolades for his writing."

In addition to his solo writing, Larry Niven coauthored several books with collaborators, most notably Larry Niven.

Pournelle was President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for a time.

He contributed to Byte, writing from the viewpoint of an intelligent consumer with the added benefit of not having to.” He wrote "Chaos Manor," one of the first blogs to discuss politics, computer technology, space technology, and science fiction from 1970 to 1990. Pournelle was also known for his paleoconservative political views, which were occasionally expressed in his literature.

He was one of the founders of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy, which oversaw some of Reagan Administration's space programs, including the earliest versions of what would be called the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Early years

Pournelle was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, the seat of Caddo Parish in northwestern Louisiana, and later lived with his family in Capleville, Tennessee, which is an unincorporated area near Memphis. Perpetual Pournelle, his father, was both a radio advertising executive and general manager of several radio stations. Ruth Pournelle, his mother, was a teacher, but she worked in a munitions factory during World War II.

He attended the first grade at St. Anne's Elementary School in Memphis, which had two grades in a classroom. He attended Coleville Consolidated Elementary School, in Colevile, which had around 25 students per grade, four rooms, and four teachers for eight grades; despite the name, it was a high school at the time; despite its name, it was still a high school at that time.

During the Korean War, he served in the US Army during the Korean War. Pournelle attended the University of Iowa in Iowa City, 1953-54, after his military service. He began attending the University of Washington, where he received his bachelor's degree. An M.S. obtained an M.S. in psychology on June 11, 1955. On March 21, 1958, psychological experiments were conducted; and in political science, a doctorate in psychology was awarded in March 1964.

"Behavioural evaluation of the effects of personality needs and leadership in small discussion groups" is the master's thesis, which dates back to 1957. Pournelle's Ph.D. dissertation is titled "The American political continuum; an investigation of the left-right model as an instrument for researching contemporary American political "isms."

Personal life

In 1959, Pournelle married Roberta Jane Isdell, and the couple had five children. His wife, husband, and son, naval officer Phillip, and his daughter, archaeologist Jennifer, also wrote science fiction in collaboration with their father.

Pournelle battled a brain tumor in 2008, which seemed to respond well to radiation therapy. According to a note on his weblog, he is now cancer-free. Pournelle died on December 16, 2014, after which he was hospitalized for a time. He was writing again by June 2015, but stroke-related complications had slowed his typing. Pournelle died at his home in Studio City, California, on September 8, 2017.

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Career

Pournelle was Russell Kirk's intellectual protégé and Stefan T. Possony's protégé. Pournelle wrote several books with Possony, including The Strategy of Technology (1970). The Strategy has been used as a textbook at the United States Military Academy (West Point), the United States Air Force Academy (Colorado Springs), the Air War College, and the National War College.

When doing operations research at Boeing in the late 1950s, he imagined a weapon made of ten tungsten rods dropping from high above the Earth. These super-dense, super-fast kinetic energy projectiles delivered a lot of destructive power to the target without contaminating the environment with radioactive isotopes, as would occur with a nuclear bomb. Pournelle's most popular weapon, Project Thor, has been named after him. Some people referred to it as "Rods from God." Pournelle was the head of the Boeing Company's Human Factors Laboratory, where his group did pioneering work on astronaut heat tolerance in harsh environments. In addition, his group did experimental work that resulted in the certification of the Boeing 707 plane's passenger oxygen system. He began working as a Systems Analyst in a Boeing design and analysis company, where he conducted strategic analysis of new weapon designs.

Pournelle joined the Aerospace Corporation in San Bernardino, California, as Editor of Project 75, a major study on all ballistic missile technology with the intention of making recommendations to the US Air Force on investment in the technologies that would be deployed in 1975. Pournelle was appointed project manager of several advanced concept studies following the completion of Project 75.

Pournelle, associate director of operations research at North American Rockwell's Space Division, where he participated in the Apollo program and general operations.

He was the founding President of the Pepperdine Research Institute. Pournelle, Max Hunter, and retired Army Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham made a presentation to then Vice President Dan Quayle promoting the DC-X rocket in 1989.

Pournelle was one of those who bought a pro-Vietnam War poster in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1968. In Avalon Hill's magazine The General, he also wrote articles on military tactics and war gaming in the military simulations industry during the 1970s and 1980s. He had previously received first prize in a late 1960s essay competition run by the magazine on how to resolve the Vietnam war. He began to correspond with some of the early figures in Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy role-playing games.

Two of Larry Niven's work made it to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List. Lucifer's Hammer debuted in 1977 at number two in the world of television. Footfall, in which Robert A. Heinlein, a barely revealed minor character, dominated the number one position in 1986.

In 1973, Pournelle became the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Pournelle's close friendship with Newt Gingrich in 1994 led to Gingrich's appointment of Richard Pournelle's nephew as a government employee. Pournelle and Gingrich were rumored to be working on "a science fiction political drama" at the time. Pournelle's friendship with Gingrich was long-established even before pournelle had written the preface to Gingrich's book, Window of Opportunity (1985).

Pournelle wrote his Chaos Manor column on the internet years after Byte's demise, years after Byte closed. He revived it at Byte.com, which he co-founded with journalist Gina Smith, John C. Dvorak, and others. However, after a shakeup, he revealed that rather than staying at UBM, he would join Smith, Dvorak, and 14 other news journalists in starting an independent tech and politics website. Pournelle wrote, edited, and collaborated with young writers and journalists on the art of writing about science and technology as an active editor of the website and others it launched.

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