I seem to have missed the passing of SF writer Jerry Pournelle. This may have been because I was out of the country and not on the internet at the time.

He was apparently the first author to have used a word processor to write a subsequently published piece of fiction.

Apart from an anthology he edited and one novel the works of his in my SF collection were written in collaboration with Larry Niven.

In general I found his military SF and right wing politics not to my taste, but if I recall correctly one of his novels echoed the beginning of Robert Graves’s I Claudius (I cannot at the moment check the book concerned as it is in the garage – to where most of my paperbacks were consigned after our house move) but he was a prominent figure in the genre.

Jerry Eugene Pournelle: 7/8/1933 – 8/9/2017. So it goes.

Astronomy Picture of the Day for 31/1/12; this is the Helix Nebula in three colour infrared light.

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Astoundingly like an eye, isn’t it?

I’m reminded of an SF novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.