Disillusioned - Larry Niven (one of my favourite sci-fi authors) was/is a raging racist POS

[hunter]

13. Pournelle was no prize either.

He and I had some interesting conversations back in the day.

I'd had plenty of practice. My grandfather was a similar character, but thirty years older, which made Niven's and Pournelle's bigotries seem sort of stale from my perspective. My grandfather had joined the Army Air Corp before World War II to escape rural Montana and Wyoming, and was an Army Air Force officer during World War II. Along the way he'd mysteriously acquired a knack for metals like titanium that were then considered quite exotic and was later an engineer for the Apollo Project.

Fortunately for my grandpa, all his woke family, friends, and diverse people he worked with constantly challenged him so he was forced to evolve. When my wife and I announced our engagement my grandpa had a fit because men in his family simply didn't marry "Mexican girls" (as he'd called my wife), but to his credit he got over it. He'd been much more disappointed when I changed my college major from engineering to biology.

I'm not so sure Niven and Pournelle, collaborating with one another and traveling in the largely libertarian "hard science fiction" communities, always enjoyed the same opportunities for personal growth that my grandfather had.