Sometimes you do have to hold a writer responsible; you can’t pretend that widely-read writers don’t have a real impact in the world. I still haven’t seen the movie “Ender’s Game” because Orson Scott Card has turned out to be such a malignant creep. It’s hard to completely separate the author from the work in the real world, and knowing the author is a jerk really can spoil the enjoyment of their work.

But that was a collaboration with Barnes and Niven… And Niven could write a great story!

Niven is a right wing nut as well (Global warming denier and all that) but at least his politics didn’t seem to overwhelm his earlier writing (His earlier works like Ringworld were great) – but he did collaborate with Pournelle in the 90′s on ‘Fallen Angels‘, an attack on environmentalists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle

In a 1997 article, Norman Spinrad wrote that Pournelle had written the SDI portion of Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union Address, as part of a plan to use SDI to get more money for space exploration, using the larger defense budget.[37] Pournelle wrote in response that while the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy “wrote parts of Reagan’s 1983 SDI speech, and provided much of the background for the policy, we certainly did not write the speech … We were not trying to boost space, we were trying to win the Cold War”. The Council’s first report in 1980[38] became the transition team policy paper on space for the incoming Reagan administration. The third report was certainly quoted in the Reagan “Star Wars” speech.
He is sometimes quoted as describing his politics as “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan”.[39] Nevertheless, Pournelle opposed the Gulf War and the Iraq War, maintaining that the money would be better spent developing energy technologies for the United States.
Pournelle is also known for his Pournelle chart, a 2-dimensional coordinate system used to distinguish political ideologies that he initially delineated in his dissertation. It is similar to the Nolan Chart, except that the X-axis gauges opinion toward state and centralized government (farthest right being state worship, farthest left being the idea of a state as the “ultimate evil”), and the Y-axis measures the belief that all problems in society have rational solutions (top being complete confidence in rational planning, bottom being complete lack of confidence in rational planning).

Now they are split into camps that support the Reagan administration`s Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called “Star Wars“ defense against intercontinental missiles, or urge alternatives such as cooperation in space with the Soviet Union.

As befits their status as 20th Century seers, they and their opinions are being accorded careful attention by powerful individuals in and out of government, including President Reagan.

“People are listening to science-fiction writers more than they did,“

said James Gunn, an expert in the genre at the University of Kansas. “An element of soapbox missionary work has existed in science fiction back to the days of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. But today authors like Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein have become credible advocates because, as Asimov says, we live in a science-fiction world and people are just starting to realize it.“

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-05-02/features/8501270085_1_missile-defense-star-wars-authors

Recently the authors Robert A. Heinlein and Jerry Pournelle have been promoting the “High Frontier“ proposed by Army Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, retired, in which hundreds of orbiting battle stations, some manned, would be used to shoot down enemy missiles.

The Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy included Sci-Fi authors: Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Robert A. Heinlein, Gregory Benford, Dean Ing, Steven Barnes, Jim Baen, Larry Niven

Pournelle was popular with some of the conservative Zoners, especially TB, and they seemed to approach him as a sort of cross between Heinlein and Ayn Rand…a guru in a bush jacket. There are people who are mourning Pournelle right now.