I saw this brief notice at Instapundit last night and shared it with my Facebook friends:
ALEX POURNELLE TEXTS:
Hi
I’m afraid that Jerry passed away
We had a great time at DragonCon
He did not suffer. Please feel free to post this news.Rest in peace, Jerry. You will be missed.
I met Dr. Pournelle at SF conventions a couple of times, but you can’t say you knew someone on the basis of fleeting contacts like that. We did have a few minutes of discussion at one convention on the topic of why Harrison Ford’s portrayal of Indiana Jones was/was not a faithful characterization of how most people viewed archaeologists … which was highly entertaining. Although I enjoyed his SF writing, I actually thought of him more as a computer journalist, as I was a huge fan of his Chaos Manor columns in Byte magazine. As with George Orwell’s “As I please” columns, Pournelle didn’t let himself be limited to just bits and bytes and the range of topics was sometimes far outside the normal range for the magazine.
Here is his Wikipedia page.
