From rec.arts.sf.written Fri Dec 2 06:23:49 1985 From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) Organization: Bayou Telecommunications Subject: Janissaries III -- _Storms of Victory_ Date: 2 Dec 87 06:23:49 GMT First, there was the book _Janissaries_, by Jerry Pournelle. Which strengthens my contention that Pournelle or Niven alone are much better than when together. It was altogether a quite interesting action-adventure yarn. The premise was a bit forced, but who cares... we got to see fairly well drawn characters, lots of action, all that wonderful medieval warfare that Pournelle so much loves, and consideration of the connections needed to build modern society (e.g., not being able to build an industrial base without figuring out some way to raise more food). The latter two are a couple of Pournelle's pet topics, and probably are the reason for the clumsy premise. ANYHOW, not artsy or anything, but still a good read for the kind of person who gets into that kind of thing. BUT, then, we get a string of sequels. And guess what? The characters turned to pure cardboard and spend all their time walking around talking to each other as if they were in downtown Poughkeepsie, they keep fighting innumerble battls on and on and on with no relief in sight for the poor reader, and things simply get downright BOR-ING. If you've ever read Ursula Le Guin's essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", you might know what I mean... sorry, the magic gone, it just ain't there no more. The main problem, I think, is that Jerry Pournelle did not actually write these sequels. He provided a plot outline and character summary to Roland Green, who then filled it all in with his wordy prose that might work well in a psychological novel but certainly not in an action-adventure flick. And no matter how good of a character summary that Jerry gave Roland, Roland still doesn't know near as much about the characters as Jerry did... for example, in one of my stories I have a character named "Jeanne", ask me a question, like what did she do at 4pm on January 4 of two years ago, and I can tell you. After all, I made her, I know how she thinks, I know how she lives, I know what she'd be doing then. No matter how good the summary, you can't really give an outsider a clear picture of this person's hopes and wishes and dreams, short of writing a novel (which was the whole point in the first place!). Anyhow, it's beginning to look like this series is going to drag on forever (although Jerry brought in things that imply that the next one is going to be the last), and if you was thinking of buying it, forget it. I'm glad I didn't -- I checked it out of the library. Note: I haven't the foggiest idea where this book would rank on Chuq's ratings scale, but I'm positive it's in the lower half -- no "above average" here! -- Eric Green elg@usl.CSNET Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 {cbosgd,ihnp4}!killer!elg Lafayette, LA 70509 From rec.arts.sf.written Fri Mar 26 15:12:32 1993 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Path: lysator.liu.se!isy!liuida!sunic!uunet!decwrl!netcomsv!netcom.com!dani From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) Subject: Pournelle and Stirling: Prince of Sparta Message-ID: Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1993 05:24:17 GMT Lines: 40 "Prince of Sparta" ends the story begun in "Prince of Mercenaries" and "Go Tell the Spartans" -- the story of the fall of the CoDominium, which is to Pournelle's future history what the Federation was to Piper's. The center cannot hold, and things are going to hell in a handbasket. This story focuses upon Sparta -- a world which seems to be the joint brainchild of Lycurgus and the Chicago School of Economics. Since it's Pournelle and Stirling, you know it's going to be military sf, but it's military sf of a particularly messy kind. The twentieth century has seen a dramatic rise in a messier (from the military perspective) kind of warfare -- in which armies slap at guerillas and insurgents and irregulars as ineffectively as at any blood-draining swarm of mosquitoes. The authors see this trend accelerating, spurred on by the growth of an underclass which has no stake in the established society. We already know (from further-in-the-future novels) that the problem is going to be 'solved' when the CoDominium becomes an Empire, and a failed democracy gives way to monarchy. I'm not sure what to think of that. The book is thought-provoking, as sf ought to be, and the authors have done their homework. On the other hand, when democracy fails, aristocracy succeeds, liberal ideals fail and plant the seeds of their own destruction, and only hard-nosed pragmatism can deal with society's home-grown barbarians, it seems to be entirely by auctorial fiat. To the extent that the authors have a 'case' to make about the directions our own society is headed, they have opted to dramatize their case, rather than to make a case for it. This book, and its predecessors, *are* thought-provoking, because they dramatize some of the nastiest dilemmas of today's society. They don't have much beyond wish-fulfillment in the way of answers, though. ----- Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com "The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." -- W.B. Yeats From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 02:06:55 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: aaron@amisk.cs.ualberta.ca (Aaron V. Humphrey) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Prograde Reviews--Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle:The Gripping Hand Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 8 Jun 1994 19:15:04 GMT Organization: The Anna Amabiaca Fan Club Lines: 51 Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <2t3md7$gju@scapa.cs.ualberta.ca> Reply-To: aaron@amisk.cs.ualberta.ca NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu Originator: mcb@remarque.berkeley.edu Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle: The Gripping Hand A Prograde Review by Aaron V. Humphrey I never really understood the entire furor about _The Mote In God's Eye_. I read the book, it was okay, but I didn't like it as much as _Footfall_. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I found out how much so many other people liked it. So I wasn't terribly disappointed by _The Gripping Hand_, since I didn't feel that it had that much to live up to. It doesn't have the whole thrill of the first-contact story in _Mote_, true. And it takes a long time to get to the Motie segments anyway. But I liked the character development of Horace Bury and Kevin Renner, among others. The only characters I remembered from _Mote_ were ones I didn't like, like Sally Blaine... I remembered a fair few more from this one. I think one of the "problems" is that the Motie problem left over from the last book was something that needed to be tied up, but by itself it wasn't meaty enough for an entire book, without some "padding" that would concentrate on other matters--in this case, Horace Bury trying to convince anyone else that the Moties are still a threat. I read it without being affected by the hype that surrounded it...and I found it quite readable. If you're expecting the next SF classic, this wasn't it, but _every_ book can't be a classic... %A Niven, Larry %A Pournelle, Jerry %T The Gripping Hand %I Pocket %C New York %D 1993 %G ISBN 0-671-79574-0 %P 412 pp %S Mote %V Book 2 %O Paperback, USD5.99, CAD7.50 [P.S. In case anyone's confused about 'Retrograde' vs. 'Prograde' reviews, what they mean is simply that the latter are more recent, and the former are for 'older' books; the arbitrary dividing line I'm using at the moment is 1990.] -- --Alfvaen (Editor of Communique) Current Album--The Beatles:Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Current Book--Michelle Sagara:Lady of Mercy "It's a one-time thing. It just happens a lot." --Suzanne Vega From rec.arts.sf.written Mon Oct 10 09:33:38 1994 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!uunet!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!news.acns.nwu.edu!news.eecs.nwu.edu!wolff From: wolff@eecs.nwu.edu (Daniel Dobson) Subject: BOOK REVIEW: Niven and Pournelle's FOOTFALL (very minor spoilers) Message-ID: Summary: FOOTFALL = Stephen King Sender: wolff@eden.eecs.nwu.edu Organization: EECS Department, Northwestern University Date: Sat, 8 Oct 1994 01:30:31 GMT Lines: 103 BOOK REVIEW: FOOTFALL, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (SPOILERS, though very, very, very few that aren't spoiled by the front cover.) Giant mutant elephants invade earth after travelling in coldsleep all the way from Alpha Centauri. They're not really hyper-intelligent green men or clever interstellar traders out for a buck; these are H.G. Well's-style invaders who want the peoples of the Earth to roll over and submit to their domination. It sounds good. It has a neat cover. It even has a satisfyingly large number of words to back it up. Reading it, though, was like eating junk food---sure, it felt good while I was doing it, but I felt vaguely sick afterwards. Or like watching the entire run of "Married...with children" at once: you can't believe you spent all the time and effort for. . .this. Don't get me wrong; it wasn't like I didn't enjoy reading it. But I was never able to really worry about anything in the story. Were the good guys going to win? Could the Earth really crawl out from beneath the clawed, grey foot of the Travelling Herd? Oh, please. Nothing beats good, old-fashioned Yankee knowhow. Not ever. I called that from early on, though exactly *how* they were going to do that was beyond me. And I managed to be surprised at the end. Some of the ideas were interesting---how would primitive herd animals react to human individuality and spirit? In the wild, when an animal submits to the alpha male, it gives up all power to the victor and end of conflict until the next mating season. But here, the alien mindset of these animals can't contain these higher-order thoughts of life without the herd and without this reflex domination/submission idea. Interesting, as was INTEGRAL TREES. Niven and Pournelle have at least grabbed hold of some neat SF ideas drawn from the wild. But then, we get to the story. I work in AI, and we often characterize the world in warped ways. Some of my favorite examples are programs that characterize humans as wanting nothing more than money, sex, power over others, and food (in that order). I write them myself, programs with rules of thumb like "if something bad happens to somebody you don't like, you become happier and like the person who did it in proportion to how much you hated the guy you didn't like." The characters in FOOTFALL fall into this simple definition very well, and in that way, this book resembles a Stephen King novel: lots of pointless sex, talking about sex, adultery, and other such basal matters while DEATH DESCENDS FROM THE SKY! You'd think that there'd be more to talk about than human mating rituals when the planet is being taken over by elephants with an attitude. You get some fun scenes, though, like the Kansas division of weekend warriors going off to battle against sky-based weapons, Hoover Dam being shelled from orbit, Zulu warriors hurling spears at bumbling monsters, an alien spitting out its last warning about "thumbs! They have thumbs!" before keeling over from a (assumably) thumb-caused wound, and more from the vast storehouse of guilty pleasures afforded by FOOTFALL. I, too, was a little disappointed by the lack of general mayhem as civilization collapses---it seems like it should collapse, everyone agrees that "Wow, society is such a thin veneer over instinctual needs of food and territory", yet everyone just goes on with business as usual even though there are no phone communications, roadways, or bridges across major waterways. We don't get to hear about bands of looters and other such spoilage of war; I mean, if looting happens after a single evening of riots in L.A., why don't the people rebel when the elephants disrupt the entire continent? And even worse is the idea that the military would find a bunch of sci-fi writers, lock them in NORAD, give them everything they could ask for, and then actually *listen* to them is asking too much. This is the hardest to swallow. All the way through the book, I kept saying, "Oh, get off it," as the President of the United States walks around in awe of these great brains of hard sci-fi who always seem to know the right answer at the right time. Niven's own ego springs off the page and thrashes you senseless, with even a useless fan character who mourns the death of the SF convention (since you can't have a convention without transportation since how can all the neat-cool authors get there?). Sorry, guys; I think that, say, loss of drinking water from all the burst dams would be a slightly larger problem than no more filksongs. Still, parts of it are a good read. I love stories that have evil beings raining death down from orbiting assault platforms and I'm a sucker for human ingenuity getting the better of space-faring races (that's why I still watch "Trek"). A little less sex (and I can't believe I'm saying that!), a little more realism, and less "pat SF on the back" stuff and this would have been a really cool book. As it is, it's just OK. On a rising scale of 0 to 10 prehensile elephant trunks, this gets a solid 3.8. (Sort of 3 trunks and one that was injured in an industrial accident.) Wolff Dobson --- wolff@eecs.nwu.edu *OR* dobson@medici.ils.nwu.edu "Kirk to Enterprise -- beam down yeoman Rand and a six-pack." From rec.arts.sf.reviews Mon Feb 13 18:09:58 1995 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!news.tele.fi!uunet!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: ecl@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper) Subject: FUTURE QUARTET by Bova, Pohl, Pournelle, and Sheffield Message-ID: <9502071606.ZM18745@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Organization: The Internet Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 22:51:51 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 78 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:725 rec.arts.books.reviews:294 FUTURE QUARTET by Ben Bova, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, and Charles Sheffield AvoNova, ISBN 0-380-71886-3, 1995, 294pp, US$5.50 A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1995 Evelyn C. Leeper Well, since the directive given to the authors here was for each to write a "speculative essay" and a story set in 2042, one very pessimistic, one very optimistic, and two in between, it's not surprising that what resulted was pretty didactic and preachy. After all, that's basically what was asked for. It is certainly possible to write stories set in the future that are entertaining first and give the reader a message almost as a side effect--but that was not the path taken here. Bova leads off with "2042: A Cautiously Pessimistic View," supposedly a speech given by the Chairman of the World Council in 2042, and follows with "Thy Kingdom Come" (which has the Chairman as a character). The story has speeches almost at the level of the essay/speech itself, and I was somewhat irked that all the main characters found their common heritage (rather conveniently for the plot, I might add) in the Lord's Prayer. Yes, it's possible, but given that the Chairman is Vietnamese with a Chinese name, it seems contrived (in my opinion). Frederik Pohl's essay, "A Visit to Belindia," is as much a story as his official story, "What Dreams Remain," but again, both spend a lot of time in lectures and speeches by various characters. Pohl says he was chosen to give the most pessimistic future, but even here there much have been a lower limit, as he doesn't postulate any massive nuclear, chemical, or biological wars. And just as Bova MAKES his future "cautiously pessimistic" with his particular story ending, so does Pohl make his pessimistic. The worlds the two of them draw could be swapped, or become optimistic, without much change to the stories, so in that sense they aren't drawing their society to order--they're meeting their goal only in how they end their story. Charles Sheffield's "Report on Planet Earth" would lead the reader to believe his future was to be the most optimistic one, yet his "Price of Civilization" is not what I would call a positively portrayed future, but rather a fascist one of superior and inferior classes, secretly enforced anti-miscegenation policies, and so on. Whether Sheffield realized what a negative picture he was painting is not clear, since superficially his characters seem to be the best off of those in any of the four scenarios. And finally there is Jerry Pournelle's "Democracy in America in 2042" and "Higher Education." This is the "cautiously optimistic" scenario, but it reads like a lot of other science fiction: rookies being trained in the dangerous job of asteroid mining. And true to what one friend predicted, it has a character who explains it all to the young newcomers. This book might work as a catalyst for discussions about the future in a high school classroom, but even there one can find better stories to trigger discussion. These are merely preachy, and not at all satisfying. %A Bova, Ben %A Pohl, Frederik %A Pournelle, Jerry %A Sheffield, Charles %T Future Quartet %I AvoNova %C New York %D February 1995 %G ISBN 0-380-71886-3 %P 294pp %O paperback, US$5.50 [1994] -- Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | Evelyn.Leeper@att.com "No one is ever fanatically devoted to something they have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They *know* it is. Whenever someone is fanatically devoted to a set of beliefs or dogmas or goals, it is only because those beliefs or goals are in doubt." --Robert M. Pirsig From rec.arts.sf.reviews Wed Mar 3 16:11:43 1999 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.gtei.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!usenet From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan and Trevor" Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: REVIEW: "Starswarm", Jerry Pournelle Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 25 Feb 1999 13:41:18 -0500 Organization: Vancouver Institute for Research into User Lines: 68 Sender: wex@tinbergen.media.mit.edu Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: Reply-To: rslade@sprint.ca NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2263 Starswarm by Jerry Pournelle Review copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999 "Starswarm" is a book of juvenile science fiction. As can be expected, the plotting is fairly simplistic, the ending abrupt, and the characterizations pretty much glossed over. However, in the introduction, Pournelle notes, and attributes to Robert Heinlein, the idea that in juvenile fiction one can do more teaching than in adult fiction. The book postulates an ecology based around, and run by, intelligent entities formed of aggregate creatures. An interesting means of communication is proposed between individual creatures. (It makes sense in the case of those confined to lakes, but less so in the case of ocean based forms of the same ... species?) Environmentalism is a weak subsidiary theme. Some explanation of the complexity of ecological interactions is given, but a number of opportunities for fuller development are abandoned. Most of the plot turns on the existence of an artificially intelligent program, and on communications. In these areas, the book is extremely weak. First there is data security. The AI program has presumably been designed by a very able computer scientist. However, once running, it manages to evade detection for at least ten years. True, it is hiding in plain sight, as it were, masquerading as a virus protection program. (You don't update your antiviral in more than ten years?) Then again, having successfully hidden for ten years, the first time anyone suspects something is wrong, the program is identified almost instantly. There is a backup on Earth, but in ten years the program has not managed either to penetrate security monitors (which it must have had access to at a fairly high level originally) nor copied itself to other local machines for greater protection against detection. Ultimately the detection is made because of a single transmission, picked out of what has to be an enormous number. While this detection is improbable in itself, there is no recognition of differences in bandwidth that could have allowed the transmission to be made with almost no chance of detection at all. Dealing with the alien entities is also problematic. While the entities have been under intense scrutiny for more than ten years, a chance observation of flashing lights not only reveals their nature, but also provides a translation of their language, all in one go. The aliens themselves are phenomenally intelligent, being able to dissect an object to the molecular level, understand its purpose, and replicate an improved version within hours. As everyone reading this series knows, it is unrealistic to expect technical accuracy from fictional works, let alone juvenile fiction. However, it seems that Pournelle's thesis is equally divorced from reality. %A Jerry Pournelle %C 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 %D 1998 %G 0-312-86183-4 %I Tor Books/Tom Doherty Assoc. %O U$23.95/C$33.95 pnh@tor.com www.tor.com %P 349 p. %T "Starswarm" rslade@vcn.bc.ca rslade@sprint.ca robertslade@usa.net p1@canada.com Find virus, book info http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm Mirrored at http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade/rms.htm Linked to bookstore at http://www97.pair.com/robslade/ Comp Sec Weekly: http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/computer_security Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses, 0-387-94663-2 (800-SPRINGER)