Conference noted::sf

    we've had "the mote in God's eye" for some time now - 
    
    Is the mote in Murcheson's eye a new one ??
    
    David_who's_saving_up_for_yet_another_trip_to_the_bookshop
    

    
    It's definitely Murcheson, and its the *moat around* his eye, rather
    than the *mote in* it!  It was mentioned towards the end of topic
    645 (as a SEARCH has just shown me).
    
    Mat_who_has_no_money_because_he's_just_been_to_the_bookshop!
    *:o)
    

    Niven is reportedly still battling his writer's block, and 
    "The Moat ..." (and yes, it's a sequel to "The Mote ...") apparently
    remains uncompleted.
    
    Fred

    
    Apparently the good guys have blockaded the little critters and
    "Moat" deals with them getting free.
    
    Willie
    

    Has anybody heard anything more about this?
    
    - Hoyt

    re: .-1, 1.73

    If you look at Pournelle's columns in Byte he seems to be talking
    about it all the time.  That's not surprising given his
    overbearing personality.  I've seen him speak at cons and have
    been appalled by his behavior.  He constantly interrupted and
    denigrated the other speakers.  His collaborations with Niven
    have distracted if not actually damaged Niven's own writing.  
    He and Jim Baen have been responsible for the tremendous increase
    in militarist SF in the last few years, Pournelle as an editor
    and Baen as a publisher.  They have perverted an entire field of
    SF, space fiction, into space war fiction.  
    
    Most writers have no overall effect on SF, of course, and some
    have a positive effect.  I think Pournelle is actively harmful.
    The field is worse for his having been in it.  
    
    /jlr

�They have perverted an entire field of
�    SF, space fiction, into space war fiction.  
    
    This kind of "perversion" has been around for decades.

    re:.7
    
    I think you're missing John's point. He isn't saying that "space
    war fiction" is new, but that it's coming to dominate a good part
    of the field.
    
    --- jerry

re: .8
    
>    I think you're missing John's point.

(hmmn...is that "j" in "jlr" for "john"??  i can't recall now)

"space opera" has always been concerned with war...but not always to
the point of glorifying it (take two space operas like Charles Harness's
_The Paradox Men_ or Iain Banks's _Consider Phlebas_, for example)

								paul

    Let me say that I certainly appreciate Larry Niven more than Jerry
    Pournelle.
    
    That said, I believe some of their earlier collaborations are
    fantastic.  I think The Moat in God's Eye, is one of the finest works
    of science fiction I have ever read.  Unique believable aliens,
    plausible future history ....  I liked it a lot.
    
    Some of their later stuff seems more Pournelle/Niven than
    Niven/Pournelle.  I think that is due more to Niven's burn-out than
    Pournelle's bad influence.  
    
    And why blame Pournelle for the turn in science fiction.  Boy is that
    a weak arguement.  It is kind of like that guy who buys a Toyota and
    claims that the Japanese practice unfair trade.  It isn't the fault of
    the writer that military science fiction dominates the present
    offerings, it is the fault of the buying public!  They wouldn't publish
    it if no one was buying it.
    
    tony

I'm not quite sure how Pournelle is guilty of glorifying war to a greater 
extent than any other author writing "space opera".  In fact, one could
argue that his stuff does a lot less glorifying than the traditional "hero 
slaughters 20,000,000 space invaders without mussing his hair" school.

Pounelle's soldiers tend to be a good deal more realistically drawn and,
what's more, the good guys get shot, maimed and killed!  The reason Pournelle
bothers a lot of people is not that he glorifies war, but that he sees the 
warrior as a necessary and valuable member of the human tribe. 

-dave
(ex-USAF)

    I agree with .11
    
    But let me say that some people were drawn to Niven BECAUSE of 'the
    golden age' in his known space series of almost 300 years without war.
    
    I certainly found it facinating, inspiring and hopefully prophetic.
    
    Tony

    Re: .10
    
    Different strokes and all, but...
    
    I have 3 Pournelle/Niven novels - "Lucifer's Hammer", "Oath of Fealty"
    and "Mote In God's Eye".  I have listed them here in order of
    preference.  LH was very enjoyable, OOF was OK, but a bit confusing,
    but MIGE went right over my head and kept on going.  Didn't care for it
    at all.
    
    K.C.

    re:.11
    
    Part of it is that Pournelle (and Baen, as per jlr's note) have
    "pushed" military sf in the last decade. In addition to Pournelle's
    Co-Dominium stories, which largely focus on the military aspects
    of the universe, and his Janissaries novels, he/they started the
    THERE WILL BE WAR anthology series; the FAR FRONTIERS and NEW
    DESTINIES anthology series seemed to include an inordinate amount
    of war-oriented stories; Pournelle has "share-cropped" his "War
    World" series, and so forth.
    
    Certainly, Pournelle and Baen aren't the only ones pushing the
    "military agenda" in sf (David Drake is another one), but they seem
    to have started the ball rolling about a dozen years ago. Everyone
    else seems like a band-wagon jumper on.
    
    Personally, I think it's largely a reflection of the times. Our
    society in general has leaned more in that direction over the last
    decade.
    
    I think Pournelle *does* glorify war inasmuch as he seems to feel
    (in my opinion) that as nasty a business as it is, it's still a
    "noble" endeavor. Contrast that with, say, Haldeman's THE FOREVER
    WAR.
    
    --- jerry

    re: .-1

    Was the militarist bent of modern SF inevitable?  Maybe so, given
    the more military-oriented attitudes of the US in the last few
    years.  But for any genre to catch on it must have both a receptive 
    audience and dedicated partisans to market it.  Books don't come
    into being spontaneously; they take years of sustained effort on
    the part of their authors and publishers to reach the public's
    eye.  
    
    Militarism is what Pournelle and Baen have been pushing,
    just as hacker outlaws and virtual reality is what Gibson and
    Sterling have been pushing.  Both have established sub-genres
    because of their partisanship.  Since I despise the one and
    am intrigued by the other, I think G&S have had a much more
    beneficial effect on SF.
    
    /jlr (re: .9, it's John Leonhard Redford)
    
    PS  Little-known fact: the climax of Pournelle's "The Mercenary",
    where the heroic colonel massacres a stadium-full of dissident
    civilians, was a case of art imitating life.  When General Pinochet 
    took over Chile in 1974, he also rounded up people into soccer
    stadiums and shot them.  He only killed commies, of course.
    
    PPS Does anyone know what Pournelle actually did in the Korean
    War?  He was in the military then, but I'm curious as to how much
    of the war he actually saw.  Gene Wolfe was in the infantry in
    Korea, and his experience appeared in the story "The HORARs of
    War", one of his more straightforward and horrifying pieces.  You
    can find it in his collection "Endangered Species".

    
    FWIW, the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire did the same during the
    Nike rebellion--waited until the feuding Blue and Green (political) 
    parties were at the stadium for the chariot races and then wiped 
    them both out.
    
    Did Pournelle once edit a book of short stories by new writers? Most
    of them were pretty bad--I rmemeber one in particular where the 
    characters spoke in this horrible Uncle Remus-style dialogue while 
    they tried to launch an airplane from a skyscraper or some god-awful
    thing like that. I recall the story was written by some woman who
    was regularly published in her garden club newsletter. I seriously
    considered tearing up the book and mailing the pieces to Pournelle.
    
    Ed Eck