[rknop]

That's sad.

Mote in God's Eye has at times been my favorite novel. (Right now, I typically list A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge as my favorite novel. Unsurprisingly, it bears some similarities in theme and tone to Mote in God's Eye.)

Back in grad school, I went on a Pournelle kick and read a lot of his stuff. (I also had an Asimov kick and a Niven kick.) Around the same time, I would sometimes hang around on the message boards on GEnie, one of the online services alongside CompuServ and such that would within a couple of years become irrelevant thanks to the Internet and the Web. (Now, of course, we've come full circle to the Internet being just the platform for massive all-encompassing walled gardens like Facebook. It's so sad.) There was a "Jerry Pournelle" area on GEnie, with a handful of message boards there that I was active on for a little while. He was an interesting man.