This page is for site visitors to post remembrances and thoughts at the time of Dr. Pournelle’s passing (8 Sep 2017). Your thoughts can be added using the form at the bottom of this page. Comments that are not related to words of encouragement or condolences will be removed.
Dr. Pournelle’s family appreciates those that have taken the time to send condolences and well wishes.
For those that are interested in Dr. Pournelle’s books, please see the e-books page or the Amazon page . Here’s a list of all of Jerry’s books: All The Books.
Jerry’s last post is here. The text of the eulogy given at the memorial is here. Site news is here. – Editor
Dear Jerry,
I checked out your site only after some while today – what frightening news to hear about your stroke.
Your column was the reason why I subscribed to BYTE magazine in the 80s/90s, a horribly expensive thing to do in Germany these days. Your column was my most important source of information. There was somebody else on this planet who faced similar problems and mishaps as I did, and I really found myself in your descriptions of the plot. Every little incident turned out to be some “micro” thriller/SF novel of itself.
I really hope you recover fast and will be well again very soon – as I can’t wait for your stories to continue.
Oh – and I’m still recommending Starswarm to people – a masterpiece for kids of age 8 to 88 …
Best wishes from Germany,
Peter
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I am very glad to hear your recovery is going well. You don’t know me, but like many thousands of others, I am and have for many years been a great admirer of your work. I have no idea how many times I have read The Mercenary, but even now, some 20+ years since I first read it, each time I read it, it inspires me.
Please accept my best wishes for a continued speedy recovery.
Warmest regards,
Peter
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
I am glad to hear you are doing well. I’m currently in grad school in New Orleans to become a occupational therapist and will one day work will people who have experienced strokes. I have read you for years, from your novels to your blog and can’t express properly how much your words have moved me.
Craig P
Jerry, I wish you the very best in a speedy recovery.
I’m not a doctor, but my dad has had several strokes over the past 14 years, each of them ischemic (clot-type). If that’s the type you suffered, I would guess that you’re on a blood-thinning medication such as Warfarin. I encourage you to “take ownership” of your ProTime/INR numbers as soon as practical; maybe even purchase a tester for home use. No matter how caring and professional your doctor is, in the end there’s no consequence to anyone else should your blood become too thick.
Your column was always the first thing I read when my issue of BYTE arrived in the mail. Good luck in your recovery process, and God bless.
John
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
I don’t know if it is your favorite saying, but, “Despair is a sin” is one that I always associate with you. As I have mentioned before, if that is indeed the case, I am among the damned. However, your recent trials and tribulations have reawakened in me the spirit of that quote. Fighting despair is not some vague, Pollyannaish veneer of cheer put on every day life. Rather, it is practice for when the choices are reduced to despair or life. Thankfully you have practiced well and faithfully. I wish you all the best and a speedy recovery.
Sincerely,
A.S. Clifton
Dear Jerry,
We are grateful to hear you are recovering. Doug and I were very concerned to hear about what happened. My own stroke taught me never to take the simple things in life for granted. Recovery will come in time. Some days you will make more progress than others. One day at a time, my dear.
Mary Lu
Glad to hear you are doing well.
Very glad indeed.
Have been away and only today found out about this.
Wishing you a speedy and peaceful recovery and sending good thoughts over.
Jerry,
It’s been a LONG time since we worked together at BYTE (about 20 years I think) but I remember you with fondness and a meal at the Hong Kong Flower Lounge in San Francisco in particular. It is great to see and hear that you are recovering and my thoughts and best wishes are with you.
Owen
Dr. Pournelle let me add my prayers and happy thoughts to your continued recovery. I recently discovered I have diabetes. It bothered me more than I expected, and I confess to a tad bit of sinful despair. Then I read about your stroke. I looked in the mirror (I speak quite literally) and said: “quit whining.”
So to all the other wonderful things you’ve given me both here on Chaos Manor and in your fiction writing, I now add one more item: personal inspiration.
Thank you and be well.
he is an international treasure,,really.
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
My prayers are with you during your recovery. You are one of those few authors who have an immeasurably profound impact on individual’s lives. In my own case, I am retiring from a 28 year career as an infantry officer, which career owes itself in no small part to John Christian Falkenburg. This story might amuse you.
I was a “Fish” at Texas A&M University in 1986. I was doing a paper on nuclear arms for my Political Science class when an academic inspection team burst into my room. I got hammered for reading “science fiction” during study hours. Of course, I was using several articles from “There Will Be War” – which articles were duly cited in the paper – but, well, you know how small minded upper classmen can be . . . 🙂
Again, my prayers for a speedy recovery.
Sincerely,
Eric D. Henderson
LTC, IN
U.S. Army
I join with literally thousands and thousands of readers in wishing you a speedy recovery. Like many, I started reading your work as a young man in the earliest days of the computer revolution. Come to think of it, we were both young men in those days. Since the demise of Byte, I have learned much about you from your writings on this site. Not that I always agree, but I always respect your opinions. Contrary to popular belief, some liberals do appreciate Chaos Manor.
You, sir, are a national treasure. May your road to recovery by smooth and swift.
Dear Dr. Pournelle
I am so very glad to hear that you are recovering.
I have been an ardent fan since I first encountered your writing in Galaxy in the early 70’s. I have admired and respected your talent ever since. Your comments on technology and politics have always been entertaing and often useful. Unfortunately, I can only place you third among my most favorite fiction authors – immediately after Heinlein and Asimov. Just about the highest praise I can think of!
Please keep on with the great writing for at least another 40 years. My prayers go with you and your family.
Ad astra
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Hearty greetings, meant with the goodwill of frontier folk waving at fellow travelers out in terra incognita. The brain injury journy is a long, strange trip, in which you are glad for the company, yet wish none of you were there. I’m in the neighborhood, to abuse the metaphor further & very glad to hear that you are doing OK. I had a stroke, was mostly dead, came back, got out & etc.
Congratulations on your progress. It is interesting but not surprising that you’ve heard from Mr. Ellison about strokes. He is correct. Really, just don’t. We have all learned, however (If I may include myself in this company), of the help that shows up when you can’t help yourself. Who knew? I have revised my opinion of medical practice upward. That said, they know what they know, way better about acute and even symptomatic care. Next on my list is access to a world-class medical library (again) because as recovery exits from the acute they have less to tell you, and less time to do it.
I suspect there is an analogy in life adventures to Heinlein’s joke schema (actually Manny & Wyoh Knott, from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress). Some adventures are funny once: Leaving home. Being booted out of the nest. Confronting who you have denied you are, good and bad. What do you do when you discover that your Madonna is a whore? Get a reciept, but that’s something to learn one time. If she’s demanding cash up front, maybe not pure in the way you’d imagined.
So, one stroke may be happenstance or miscalculation. Doing it again if its avoidable is perverse. I’m learning that real people – the grown-ups – do what they can and work the odds without indignation or regret. Also, that doing this matters in stroke recovery. Your recovery is your own to own, and manage, and especially manage yourself in doing this thing that matters.
Respecting “funny once” I’ll wind this up. Poor Mr. Ellison was abused in the guise of well-wishing with the long-pondered fan letter I’d never quite written him for, well, nearly forever in my subjective time. I’ll offer what I’ve learned out here in terra incognita, when you are and are not you.
– The biggest thing is that you are and are not you. I like the guy I was left with, when I didn’t have a lot left. He’s OK, surprisingly. Now, I have to live with that. Meanwhile various capacities aren’t what they were.
– The other biggest thing is that what you do about it matters. How you approach it is the biggest part of what you do about it.
– The function comes back, or can, much more than was thought not long ago. You can also do tremendous things with “less” function. It is amazing how much strategy, effort allocation, awareness and calibration are part of what you can do.
– The real game is what will you choose to do with what you’ve got, different from before. That’s the same as every moment, really, just more so. Getting whacked in the brain reminded me of that.
– Find the place, the mindset and approach, that’s home for you. Me, it’s a great big science project & I choose right off to be fascinated. “Wow, that hurts. I wonder what that means?”
Me, I’ve kind of gone half-Stockdal, of The Stockdale Paradox, disseminated by Jim Collins. Paraphrasing: “Never shirk from the realities of your situation, while maintaining the absolute conviction that you will ultimately prevail.” That was Admirla Stockdale’s answer when asked how he survived as a POW. That’s a half-Stockdale becuase I haven’t gotten to the second part: “Indeed, come to recognize this calamity as the defining experience of your life which in hindsight you would not give up.”
Nope. I’m not there yet. I curse the lesson but bless the knowledge, indeed. Yet, shallow still, I’d still forgoe the knowledge to avoid the lesson. And yet again learning must be a powerful metaphor, as another bit of borrowed wisdom says: “You’ve paid the tuition. Might as well take the lesson.”
It is my great privelege that sharing somewhat a common experience lets me presume to write to you (& Ellison, but don’t tell him that.) Thank you for your work.
My last observation to offer is that brain-damage metaphors in casual speech will make people twitch. “So, he said blah, blah, blah and my head just exploded.” OK, don’t do that. It weirds peole out. Also “whack with the clue stick”, “rattling around between the ears” and the rest of them.
Onward…
– Jim
P. S.
Stockdale from Collins’ site
http://www.jimcollins.com/lib/goodToGreat/ch4_p83.html
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
– jb
Jerry,
Welcome back. You are needed. Stop scaring the crap out of us.
Don
Jerry,
Glad to hear and see(!) that the therapy is coming well. Something for your consideration: I have been told by therapists that the very best ones have a small touch of sadist in them. This allows them to push the patient to achieve more than they thought possible. I was never 100% certain they were kidding. 😉
Alan
Pournelle is at his keyboard— candela ardet in deserto.
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I have been reading you since your BYTE days when I was 15 years old (I am 35 now) and I wish to keep reading you for another 20 years. 🙂
Get well (very) soon.
Sincerely,
Gorazd Titizov
IT Project Manager and MBA
Skopje, Macedonia
Dr. Pournelle,
As a long time reader of your science fiction, your computer related work and this blog, I wish you a rapid and complete recovery. It is heartening to read that you are already back into writing.
You may also be interested in another blogger who is going through this. Clayton Cramer, a well know gun rights advocate, historian and software engineer had a stroke a few months ago with similar issues. His blog is at http://claytonecramer.blogspot.com/ .
Best Wishes!