A brief review of Outies: A Guest Review By Carlos

Not having finished Outies yet, I asked Carlos if he would like to review Outies, JR Pournelle's sequel to Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand. This is the result.

I'm reviewing the paperback edition of Outies by Jennifer Pournelle, published by New Brookland Press, a copy of which I obtained from Amazon. Is it a print-on-demand press? The book is solidly bound and well-printed. There is a slight cutting glitch on the bottom edge, but it's not noticeable in handling the book. The cover art is not unattractive, and it pertains to the subject matter. A small depiction of various hands appears on the binding, and a bitmapped version is used to separate sections within chapters in the book. (If possible, this probably should be changed to a vector graphic version for less fuzziness.)

Outies is a sequel to The Gripping Hand, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's unfortunately weak sequel to their classic space opera/first contact novel, The Mote in God's Eye. Because of its status as a science fiction classic, I will assume everyone here has read Mote, or at least its description in Wikipedia. There's not much to say about The Gripping Hand. It brings to light more of the Muslim and Mormon cultures within the Empire, and it shows the Empire of Man coming up with an analog to the birth control pill for Moties, something that in humans was done with Studebaker-era technology.

Outies is an intellectually richer book than either The Gripping Hand or Mote. One of Niven's major talents was to simplify complicated biological or physical ideas and push them to a breaking point. One of, er, JEP's major talents was to simplify political and social ideas in the same way. At the peak of their powers, it made for strongly and forcefully drawn caricatures that hinted at depths below the surface. At other times, well. Mote was written at their joint authorial peak, but it relied on their simplified biological and political models of the universe for its effects.

Jennifer Pournelle reintroduces complexity to the basic setting with Outies, while still being faithful to The Gripping Hand, Mote, King David's Spaceship, and JEP's CoDominium mercenary stories. [*]

Some SPOILERS.

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Excavations (expanding on a comment in the review)

Carlos mentions a book of poetry in his review of Outies. That is likely to be
Excavations: A City Cycle

Poems unearthing the strata of human conflict and hope buried across time and place

Selected by Rigoberto Gonzales as the winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Excavations is the first collection of poetry from Jennifer R. Pournelle. Set in different cities over fifteen years of peace and war, the collection explores the hidden similarities of these locations' seemingly different landscapes and cultures. She begins in Vienna with the renovation of Saint Michael's Square, then to a just-reunified Berlin, onward to Spanish-influenced San Diego, ending in the midst of the sectarian conflicts of Baghdad. Through vivid explorations of place, Pournelle's narratives bring to the surface defining historical events from these sites and their host cultures as the poems reveal how events rooted in these locations ripple outward to affect the world beyond. A career soldier turned environmental anthropologist and archeologist, Pournelle is deeply attuned to visions of loss and destruction as well as the promise of rebirth and rediscovery. Her poems voice her individual experiences abroad as she sifts—literally and metaphorically—through layers of turbulent history and harsh present circumstances in search of promise of future recovery for all that has been lost.

Purely out of interest in the hobbies of the rich and powerful

Does Ruport Murdoch own a yacht?

Interesting timing

News of the World phone hacking whistleblower found dead

IT'S LIKE DARIEN AND POYAIS HAD A BABY. AN UGLY, UGLY BABY

But what makes it worthwhile to travel back to the Moon at all? The biggest goal for commercial Moon landings is believed to be helium-3, the isotope of the inert gas that could be a useful fuel for nuclear fusion because, unlike the most common form of fusion in research, which forces the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium together, He-3 does not release a neutron when it fuses with hydrogen. Extremely rare on Earth, the main source of He-3 is from maintenance of nuclear weapons. But the Sun produces large amounts of He-3, sending it out into space in the solar wind. Earth’s atmosphere prevents it from reaching the surface of the planet, but the Moon has no such protection its surface has been absorbing the element for billions of years.

Pictures or it didn't happen!

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned the first close-up image after beginning its orbit around the giant asteroid Vesta. On Friday, July 15, Dawn became the first probe to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

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