The Best of Jerry Pournelle

By: John F. Carr - editor

Narrated by: Joel Richards

Short stories by a master of science fiction. Includes over a dozen stories by SF legend Jerry Pournelle, and remembrances by Pournelle collaborators and admirers.

For the better part of five decades, Jerry Pournelle's name has been synonymous with hard-hitting science fiction. His Falkenberg's Legion stories and Janissaries series helped define the military SF genre, as did his work as editor on the There Will Be War series of anthologies. With frequent collaborator Larry Niven, he cowrote the genre-defining first contact novel The Mote in God's Eye, which was praised by Robert A. Heinlein as "possibly the greatest science fiction novel I have ever read".

Now, for the first time, all of Pournelle's best short work has been collected in a single volume. Herein you will find over a dozen short stories, each with a new introduction by editor and longtime Pournelle assistant John F. Carr, as well as essays and remembrances by Pournelle collaborators and admirers.

©2019 John F. Carr (P)2021 Tantor

Best of is right

I found I didn't have most of these in my collection and I have been searching for The Mercenaryfor years in audio. Thanks for putting this together. Now I have to finish my collection in audio to put all these sections together

Thank you!!!

Great collection and little glimpses into a truly unique human being.... I loved it!!!

Great Showcase of Author and Man

Way back in 1981, I read a collection of stories called Black Holes which contained a novella by Jerry Pournelle titled “He Fell into a Dark Hole.” Something happened to my copy of the book over the years but I never forgot that story. When e-books started to come out, I started looking for it again and finally came across this The Best of Jerry Pournelle audio book which features the story. It’s not the only good thing in this book, but I’m going to limit myself to talking about three of them.

The Mercenary: Pournelle has a future history in which humanity’s star-spanning empires rise, fall, and rise again. This story takes place during one of the declines and involves a planet that has been given its “freedom” going through painful growing pains. The mercenary of the title has been hired to keep things from blowing up and then handicapped to make the job impossible. It’s a great story with a great ending.

The Secret of Black Ship Island: Set in Pournelle, Niven, and Barnes’, Legacy of Heriot universe, this novella focuses on the second generation of colonists while they are still kids finding out that the world is still very dangerous. I have some problems with this story. It starts with a death in which people who should know better refuse to admit that the death might be caused by a sea creature rather than a reef—even though there is a witness. This sets us up for more deaths the next year and it just rang a little hollow. Other than that, the action is good and there’s a lot of suspense.

And finally, He Fell into a Dark Hole really lived up to my recollections. Knowledge of black holes has been lost in this future as knowledge is suppressed on the excuse that it will keep national governments from creating new weapons of war. As a result, ships are occasionally lost as the gravity of the unknown black hole pulls them out of transit and holds them prisoner.

The protagonist of the story is a naval captain whose life and son were lost on this transit line. When his father-in-law, an important senator, is lost on the same line, a theory is rediscovered that postulates the black hole and a rescue mission of sorts is put together. The mission is successful in reaching the black hole and the survivors have to figure out how to escape again. To complicate matters, the captain’s wife and son are still alive, but his wife has remarried thinking that she and her new husband would be trapped forever in the proximity of the black hole. It’s a great little story, but it would have been even better if Pournelle had slowed down once his hero reaches his family and developed that situation in more detail.

In addition to other stories and one of his science columns, there are truly wonderful passages in which authors who knew and worked with Pournelle talk about the man. If you’ve enjoyed any of his many novels, you will probably enjoy this collection.

from a friend for a friend

worth the purchase, pournelle, carr, niven, and the rest had a beautiful friendship that the rest of us could be so lucky to achieve.

A lot of stuff I missed!

Some of this was Pournelle stories I had read before, but most of it was new to me. Pournelle wrote intelligent SF, and it’s on display here.

Mostly good

I had only read Pournelle's novels, I found these short stories in this book mostly worth the credit. There were some that were not as good to hold my interest, but most were well worth it. The narrator was perfect for this book.

Good Retrospective

This is not Jerry Pournelle's best work. But it is a pretty good retrospective of his life, with some previously unpublished work and essays from a variety of his colleagues in SF writing. If you're a fan of Pournelle's you won't regret having read it. But if you want peak Pournelle, nearly any of his novels would be a better choice.