pournelle

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle has a pretty good take on the post-apocalyptic chaos & breakdown in society that will likely ensue.

Maybe KMP should have recycled Jerry Pournelle's account for a certain bright 19-year-old, instead...

The Iron Law of Oligarchy [0], Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1], and the Iron Law of Institutions [2] are all closely related.

In Niven and Pournelle's version, Hell is a form of purgatory.

That distinction is probably why I enjoyed Niven & Pournelle's Inferno much more than Dante's.

Yeah, with turists like Jerry Pournelle, who needs Stephen Wolfram?

Niven & Pournelle's Footfall also had an Orion-type ship.

(Spoilers ahead for those who haven't read both Infernos.) While Niven & Pournelle's Inferno was definitely inspired by Dante's, it's a key plot point that Niven & Pournelle's Hell was fundamentally different.

My first introduction to this was via Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno, about an SF writer who dies and then finds himself in Dante's version of Hell.

Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye suggested something to push against: if you're in a magnetic field, you can turn by giving your craft an electric charge.

I recall mainly the jury-rigged pipes that a character based on one of Niven/Pournelle's friends kept working at the cost of his own heroic death.

Bova, Niven, Pournelle, even Varley, these days), but it's really hard to write about a medium-distance future that plausibly follows from our world.

Interestingly, Pournelle was the kind of guy who could exercise Macsyma, or at least his first computer program solved a system of 60 or so linear equations on a IBM 650, an "affordable" machine back in the '50s that used a magnetic drum for its main memory.

There's a pretty well known concept around writing "Restart Civilization" texts (They make an appearance in another niven/pournelle book, The Mote in Gods Eye) - I just think the animagraffs would be a useful addition to the tools in which to do so.

The science fiction author, Jerry Pournelle, who has a measured IQ of 180, once complained to Richard Feynman, "I don't understand quantum mechanics." Feynman replied, "That's okay, Jerry; neither do I."

"I have met people who were justifying censorship, population control and unfair business practices because they could benefit from them someday." There's worse ahead of you, this is the same industry that employs people like weev, Eric Raymond, mencius moldbug, and (sort of) Jerry Pournelle.

Maybe KMP should have recycled Jerry Pournelle's account for a certain bright 19-year-old, instead...

The Iron Law of Oligarchy [0], Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1], and the Iron Law of Institutions [2] are all closely related.

In Niven and Pournelle's version, Hell is a form of purgatory.