January 28, 2009 Episode

Jerry Pournelle (author, journalist, editor, technology columnist, and military textbook writer) is today's featured guest.

Topics include: Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven and other authors he has been friends with; how the downfall of the Soviet Union was an engineered event, planned decades in advance, which worked exactly as planned (and specifically what that plan was); how he orchestrated the political campaigns of Barry Goldwater, Jr., and Sam Yorty; his friends and involvement in the Survivalist Movement, and his being editor of the magazine Survive which was closely allied with the magazine Soldier of Fortune; political stories from The Cold War and Mutual Assured Destruction; a few words about his and Larry Niven's new novel Escape from Hell; the difficulties of his chemotherapy; the good news that he is now cancer free.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the January 28, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 65 minutes]

Doctor Jerry Pournelle has written more than thirty novels and at least thirteen books of non-fiction. More than a dozen of his novels, he coauthored with his friend Larry Niven, including The Mote in God's Eye, Lucifer's Hammer, Footfall, Inferno; and their new sequel to Inferno: Escape Fom Hell.

Novels, however, have been only a portion of Jerry Pournelle's work. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he acquired Master's degrees in both experimental statistics and systems engineering, and Doctorates in both psychology and political science. He cowrote a military textbook called The Strategy of Technology which was required reading at West Point and the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He helped to write a portion of Ronald Reagan's State of the Union Address concerning a missile defense system which the media at the time enjoyed making fun of and calling Star Wars, since they believed the technology needed to shoot down incoming missiles with our own missiles was impossible. He worked in operations research at Boeing, The Aerospace Corporation, and North American Rockwell Space Division. He was founding President of the Pepperdine Research Institute. And he was a columnist for Byte Magazine beginning in 1982.