My favorite Pournelle book is “King David’s Spaceship,” set in the same universe as the Niven-Pournelle collaboration (and great novel!) “The Mote in God’s Eye.” KDS isn’t too awfully politicized, or, rather, the politics are science fictional, relevant to the (rather fascinating!) premise. Imperial politics, rather than USA politics.
Others of his books…I agree withEvil Captor, but I think KDS is a nice exception.
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Here’s a classic example of Pournelle’s author-on-board politics: The Prince. (Co-authored in part by S.M. Stirling.) The story of the Helots’ rebellion on Sparta is, as Pournelle states in the foreword, a study of Maoist low-intensity conflict from the POV of the state, i.e., how to defeat it. The Helots’ casus belli is that on the planet Sparta, they have no votes – Sparta having an elaborate constitution designed by political scientists, so complex that even the heir to the throne once remarks, “I’d hate to have to explain how it works,” but one feature is that citizenship must be earned, by admission to a “phratry” and militia service, among other things; it is effectively impossible for first- or second-generation immigrants, of whom there are vast numbers. Notably – and quite preposterously, in light of the real-life history of struggles for franchise expansion – the Helots do not seem to have any actual grievance or suffer any socioeconomic disabilities just because of their exclusion from political participation. (Their only apparent ground for resentment is that many of them lived a cushy welfare-state existence on Earth (where “citizen” means “welfare bum” and the antonym is “taxpayer”) and then got deported to a planet where they are expected to work for a living; but none of the Helots’ leaders are making any promises to do anything about that.) In any case, the Helots are portrayed as Pure Evil – their leaders are cynical and amoral and power-mad, and all their followers are dupes and brutes. In the climax, there is a massive street-battle in the capital, in which the middle-class shopkeepers join forces with the elite and slaughter the lumpenprole Helots almost to the last man. The Middle and the High united against the Low in an utterly victorious war-to-the-knife. The pages of that scene fairly drip with Pournelle’s liberated semen. Jerry Pournelle is the kind of paleoconservative who does seem to have a problem with democracy as such (and probably laments the fall of Apartheid – even, one suspects, the fall of the British Empire).
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I thought Lucifer’s Hammer, Inferno and The Mote in God’s Eye were excellent, and better than the average Niven-alone novel.
Funny, I prefer Protector to a lot of his stuff :). Ringworld didn’t do all that much for me ( never bothered with the sequels ).
Having met Larry and Jerry any number of times, I agree with this evaluation. Niven is the fun one.
OK! Read through NEUTRON STAR and A HOLE IN SPACE. Nice, though some of the stories in A HOLE IN SPACE end a bit abruptly. Having read A WORLD OUT OF TIME, reading “Rammer” was especially jarring. I was like, “Great! the story’s just getting started … oh.”
I’ll try RINGWORLD next, I think, but I’ll probably library it; not available for Kindle.