Jerry Pournelle

That Buck Rogers Stuff Jerry Pournelle

The year was 1977. Elon Musk was in First Grade. Jeff Bezos was in early puberty just reading SCIFI books, not selling them. The space shuttle was 4 years away and the last Apollo mission was 5 years past. Yet a wonky aerospace engineer and college professor was asking How Do We Get Back to Space and What Do We Do Once We Are Up There?




Here in That Buck Rogers Stuff Jerry Pournelle lays out his fascination with technological solutions for the world's 1978 problems and beyond.

Written on an IBM Selectric typewriter during an Analog time, these predictions will later be fully explored in classics like Starswarm which introduced Artificial Intelligence or The Mote in Gods Eye exploring the societal effects of a 1000 year library as a precursor for cloud computing.