We were informed two days ago about the death of another kibbutz member (that's four in less than two months); I think that I've had only one conversation with this man, ironically when we both visited a bereaved member a few years ago. It turns out that my wife had no small amount of contact with him via gardening, so she very much wanted to go to the funeral yesterday (I was in the north of Israel at the time).
I discovered a few hours later that Jerry Pournelle, science fiction writer who also wrote about computers, had died - albeit a few months ago. I think that I came across Pournelle first as a novelist - "Lucifer's Hammer" was a book that we passed around at the beginning of the 80s. But it was in Byte magazine (from about 85-95) that I really became acquainted with Pournelle with his "Computing at Chaos Manor" column, where he used to write about all the equipment that he received for review. The columns were entertaining, albeit fairly useless practically speaking, as the general Israeli computer nerd was several years behind with respect to equipment.
I did occasionally read Pournelle's blog but this turned more and more to internal American politics which don't interest me very much (especially when Pournelle described himself as being "to the right of Genghis Khan"). There were a couple of good books - "The mote in God's eye" and its sequel, as well as "Footfall" - but I also remember some which seem to have been knocked off in order to pay the bills ("King David's spaceship").
So, two more people who were peripheral to my life have passed away.
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