John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) “I’m reading an old collection of interconnected science fiction stories by Jerry” — TopicDigg

I’m reading an old collection of interconnected science fiction stories by Jerry Pournelle, written in the early 70s. His best books were later co-authored with Larry Niven, but it is still solid work in my favored “competence porn” genre, with entrepreneurs as protagonists. It stands out to me that he was despairing for America when he wrote the stories. Things looked bad at the time, and his fiction projected it into the future. Social unrest, Vietnam, Watergate, economic recession, energy crisis, and for a patriotic space guy, abandoning Apollo. The backdrop for the stories was that America was unfixable, which is, of course, a motivation to go to space in fiction, but I do think he was genuinely worried by what he saw around him. But over the next decade, things got better, and Jerry had a front row seat for the rise of the technology sector, writing the Chaos Manor column in Byte magazine for many years. He also got to see the founding of SpaceX, a company straight out of a hard SF novel, and they re-flew a landed rocket shortly before he died. Trends aren’t fate. Bad situations can be fixed, and good ones still need to be defended. RIP Jerry, I’m glad you got to see things turn around.