Writing the Future

Remembering Jerry Pournelle, the science fiction author who helped shape technological reality. Writing, Jerry Pournelle liked to say, "is hard work." Not exactly an original observation, but Pournelle, who died on September 8 at the age of 84, strove to make his writerly life a little easier: He was apparently the first person to publish a work of fiction that had been written wholly using a computer.

He spent thousands on the machine in the late 1970s but felt that it had paid for itself within a year by allowing him to write and edit with greater haste and accuracy-which meant he could "make a living at it."

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1933 and schooled in Tennessee, Jerry Eugene Pournelle was just 16 when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1949. He shipped out to Korea and suffered hearing loss as an artilleryman. 

2nd October 2017