From PZ Myers:
Pournelle died earlier this month. He (and his writing partner, Larry Niven) were big, popular names back in the 70s, and long ago I read several of his long tomes. I will say this for him: he could write an engaging potboiler, where the plot kept churning along. But in every one of his books, there was a “what the hell am I reading?” moment, followed by a period of introspection in which I had to admit to myself that if I’d been paying attention, I would have noticed that there were clear hints that this regressive conclusion was exactly what he’d been building towards all along. Then I read a few more and realized that you could predict exactly how the story would proceed from the first chapter on: the solution would always be a gushing militaristic/Libertarian fantasy. So I stopped reading him.
Except for one thing: those were also the heady days of the microcomputer revolution, and I read Byte magazine every month. Pournelle had a column in there, that was apparently popular to some people, but that I found plodding, unreadable, and useless. Well, not quite unreadable: I’d hate-read him.