I always wondered, given the prominence of the New York electronics company, why N&P didn’t choose a different name? I have to admit, it always takes me a little out of the book.
Maybe because neither of the authors is from NYC? I know I didn’t become aware of the electronics guy until well after I had read Mote.
One presumes that there is an electronics salesperson in NYC named Crazy Eddie.
I don’t recall that name in the book. I do recall one of the protagonists had a rather advanced Apple Watch.
“Political Officer” . . . “Committee for Public Safety” . . . the story does reflect a lot of distinctly Pournellian, and distinctly odious, political prejudices.
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 (and I choose that word advisedly), 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).
Speaking as one who has been “Pournelled” (including a father-and-son double-team upon one occasion) – yeah, his outlook rejects “compromise” as a political virtue. He believes in “winning and losing,” where the American political system is (when working as it was designed to work) based on working together to find a mutually acceptable compromise.
I’ve heard him speak with disdain of the 17th Amendment, holding that Senators should be elected by the government of the states, not by the people of the states. I think he might be a Whig at heart…
That said…and to bring it back to Cafe Society relevance…the son of a gun can write! “King David’s Spaceship” is an independent novel in the “Mote” universe, and well worth reading and enjoying. It’s a joy, and the “E-Ticket Ride” at the end is worth the price of admission.
It was a chain of discount electronics stores. Famous for the frenetic radio/TV commercials that always ended with “Crazy Eddie - his prices ARE INSAAANE!” Closed in the late 80s due to rampant fraud.
There’s no single character named Crazy Eddie. Rather, it’s a concept of the Moties - that all problems can be solved, no matter how ludicrous and immediately damaging the possible solution is. Lots of other things. But that’s why they think all humans are Crazy Eddie - because the humans are sure that the Cycles can be broken. It’s one of the major themes of the book.
Thanks muldoonthief, it has been quite a while since I read it.
Did your pournelling involve bourbon breath and an evident carry, observed from far too closely?
(Not my story - but I’ve heard it first hand from more than one person. I only met Alex once and we were busy making AT&T run for cover.)
Years ago I met Pournelle at his house! And I’ve met his son.
He is indeed that rarest of creatures, almost never spotted in the wild: A paleoconservative with a brain. (A brain now tumor-free, BTW.)
We had Crazy TV Lenny (I’m giving a ten-speed bike with every purchase!). He’s gone now.
FWIW, I figured out why that web link above seems so short - it’s only one of three long letters from RAH to NivenPournelle on the topic (which does not include return letters from JEP, or some long phone conversations in the same time period). My file copy is all one block and I’d forgotten it started and stopped.
He really did give them a huge amount of help.
(The link does appear to be a legitimate archive of sampler pages from the Virginia Edition’s fourth or fifth laundry-list volume. 
)
I felt the opposite way when I was reading the book – as if the Moties chose the term “Crazy Eddie” to specifically refer to something, but the reference was lost on me.
I almost choked–read the bolded and thought there was some movie production I’d missed out on.
Interesting anyway, thanks.
:rolleyes:
Wow, no blatant political bias there, huh?
:rolleyes:
“When a city is grown so overlarge and crowded that it is in immediate danger of collapse . . . when food and clean water flow into the city at a rate just sufficient to feed every mouth, and every hand must work constantly to keep it that way . . . when all transportation is involved in moving vital supplies, and none is left over to move people out of the city should the need arise . . . then it is that Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working conditions.”
Pournelle’s conservatism is ugly and mean-spirited and sticks right out there for all the world to see, like the conservatism of Donald Trump. How can you ignore it?
Did you even read what I quoted? It had nothing to do with whether Pournelle’s political beliefs were distasteful.
It was the typical personal failing of believing that most people who disagree with you politically must be stupid.
And one notable difference between Motie culture and our own is that, in Motie culture, Crazy Eddie is not in the least admired.
Back to that space battle, though, if it hadn’t been cut, it’d have to have been heavily edited. It wouldn’t have made much sense if I didn’t already know about the Alderson Drive from reading Mote: What do they mean by tramways, and so on?