Words matter. These are the best Jerry Pournelle Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have more information in one place than anybody in the world.
Somebody’s always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don’t talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.
Because Tom Doherty and people like that are not stupid. If they could have streamlined their operation more to get more money out of it, they would have done it. It’s not like they’re a bunch of idiots.
The Aztecs believe they started up in what’s now New Mexico, and wandered for 10,000 years before they got down into where they are now, in Mexico City. That’s a weird legend.
And that’s another piece of advice I’ll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.
So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it’s just so damn hard to make it look like the future.
One the other hand, the publishing trend is ghastly, isn’t it? Two hundred and something distributors are now down to 10 or 12? And what’s the recruiting drive?
There were probably, what, 300 science-fiction members in the SFWA, of whom probably a hundred were active members in the sense that they were selling something every year, or every couple years.
The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.
I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you’re going to throw away.
In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.
Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don’t join writer’s clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing’s changed.
We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.
You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it’s all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.
