Four different trade paperbacks, from three different sources, one signed.
Posts Tagged ‘Jerry Pournelle’
Library Additions: Four Trade Paperback Originals
Monday, August 1st, 2022Library Additions: Signed Firsts of Niven & Pournelle’s Burning City and Burning Tower
Saturday, February 6th, 2021Here are a couple of books I always planned to pick up and have Larry and Jerry sign for me, but life had other plans.
Library Additions: Four Paperbacks (Brunner, Pournelle, Powers)
Monday, October 21st, 2019Two bought at Half Price Books, two at a small used bookstore in South Austin called Good Buy Books.
Library Additions: Four Books From Half Price Books, Two Signed
Tuesday, November 13th, 2018No theme, except for the place I bought them and picking them up really cheap:
Library Additions: Two Signed Books
Monday, April 30th, 2018Two signed firsts I picked up cheap at the same auction:
Jerry Pournelle, RIP
Friday, September 8th, 2017I just got word that Jerry Pournelle died today.
Pournelle was most famous for his collaborations with Larry Niven, and justly so: Lucifer’s Hammer is a great novel, and Inferno and The Mote in God’s Eye are, at the least, very good. But he was a strong writer on his own as well.
Pournelle lied about his age to get into the army in the Korean War, where he served in the artillery, which gave him life-long tinnitus. He had a widely varied carrier before becoming a science fiction writer, working in the defense industry, then on the successful Los Angeles mayoral campaign of Sam Yorty. He was also a notable advocate of SDI and a prominent columnist for Byte magazine for many years.
He had a long and successful career as a science fiction writer, winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, but never really received his due, for a variety of reasons, some aesthetic (he did a lot of work in Military SF, a subgenre held in low critical esteem), some political (he was an unapologetic conservative and disciple of Russell Kirk), some personal (Jerry rubbed many people the wrong way, and reportedly had a drinking problem in the 1980s). He edited a number of anthologies over the years; when he finally received a Hugo nomination for that, Social Justice Warrior bloc voting made sure he finished below No Award.
He was 84.
Edited to Add: A personal remembrance by Borepatch.
Hephaestus Books: A Different Kind of Ripoff
Friday, November 4th, 2011Jerry Pournelle and C. J. Cherryh have been among the first to report on the nefarious activities of Hephaestus Books, which seems to be publishing omnibus editions of hundreds or thousands of books which they haven’t bothered to obtain the rights for. I say “seems,” because a closer look shows that Hephaestus Books does seen to be ripping people off, but it’s the readers and buyers rather than the authors.
Since Jerry helped sound the alarm, let’s take this collection, titled Novels By Jerry Pournelle, including: The Legacy Of Heorot, The Mote In God’s Eye, The Gripping Hand, Footfall, Inferno (novel), Fallen Angels … Starswarm, Higher Education over at Amazon as an example. The text description reads:
Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on Novels by Jerry Pournelle.
The fact that the book length is a mere 82 pages should confirm that all the novels listed in the title are not in fact present.
So: They’re content scrapers, grabbing anything they can grab off the Internet (it looks like most of their content is scrapped off Wikipedia) and slapping it between two covers as a print-on-demand (POD) book. This is bad and dubiously legal practice, but their primary sin seems to be false advertising, since their “book” titles deceptively suggest that you’re buying an omnibus edition of fiction rather than a collection of stuff you can read for free on the Internet.
Personally, if I were in charge of Amazon or Barnes & Noble, I’d pull all the Hephaestus Books titles due to their dishonest tactics and customer dissatisfaction anyway. (I don’t think even my insane Jack Vance collector friends will be picking up this.) But from my cursory glance, it’s readers, not authors, who are the ones being ripped off.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)