Camestros Felapton

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Debarkle Chapter 9: Dramatis Personae – Jim Baen (1943-2006)

The aim of the Dramatis Personae chapters is to introduce major characters in what would become the conflicts around the Sad Puppy campaign for the 2015 Hugo Awards. Jim Baen passed away several years before those events or the political polarisation that would help fuel them. However, as a talented editor and publisher, he shaped a small but significant publishing house (Baen Books) that inspired fierce loyalty among its writers and readers. The role of a subset of Baen Books authors and their perspective of the relationship between Baen and the Hugo Awards is absolutely critical in understanding later events. Would events have been significantly different if Jim Baen had not died an untimely death at 62? That is not a question this chapter or this work can answer.

Most of the biographical details come from two sources and if a factual claim doesn’t have a footnote then it was drawn from at least one of these places:

For this chapter, I am also going to try to maintain a degree of clarity over the name “Baen”. In general, “Jim Baen” will be used in the first mention in a paragraph and then shortened to “Baen” in subsequent uses within a paragraph. “Baen Books” will refer to the publisher and will only be shortened to just “Baen” when the context is clear (e.g. “Baen author, Eric Flint”). In later chapters, when the usage will be less ambiguous, “Baen” will refer to the publishing house.

Editors have a notable place in science-fiction history. Hugo Gernsback and John W Campbell helped shaped two eras of American science-fiction and science-fiction fandom and each have had science-fiction awards named after them[1]. As the genre matured, the capacity for editors to be quite so influential naturally declined but inevitably, people with some degree of control over who and what gets published help shape the direction of science-fiction and fantasy.

Jim Baen’s editing/publishing career spanned from the early 70s to the mid-2000s and included magazines and books. After leaving home as a teenager, a period of homelessness and a stint in the army, Baen worked in a variety of jobs in New York before landing a role in the complaints department of Ace Books. From there he began to pursue a career in editing. In 1973 he became an editor at Galaxy and If magazines, both of which had been frequent Hugo finalists and winners in the Best Professional Magazine category over the years[2]. The commercial fortunes of the magazine were in decline due to multiple factors, including the rising cost of paper. With the merger of If and Galaxy in 1974[3], Baen was tasked with raising circulation.

The Hugo awards dropped the Best Professional Magazine category from 1973, replacing it with a Best Professional Editor category. From 1975 onward to 1978[4] Jim Baen was a finalist in the category. In 1977, Baen was recruited by another highly influential editor/publisher Tom Doherty to return to Ace books to help revitalise the company’s science-fiction line. In 1979 (and again in 1980) Baen would once again be a finalist for Best Professional Editor in the Hugo Awards but this time for his role at Ace books.

Tom Doherty had bigger plans than reviving Ace books. In 1980 he founded his own publishing company Tor with the help of venture capitalist Richard Gallen[5]. Baen followed Doherty to Tor books and began work on the new company’s line of science-fiction, including books under the imprint of “Jim Baen Presents”. In 1981 Bean would once again be a finalist Best Professional Editor in the Hugo Awards but this time for his role at Tor books.

As discussed before, the 1980s were bringing both political and technological change. Thanks to his author friend Jerry Pournelle, Jim Baen bought an IBM personal computer and because the keyboard layout didn’t suit him, commissioned a programmer to develop an application to customise what the keys did[6]. Pournelle also brought Baen into a quite different technology-related venture: the Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy. Initially started as an advisory group on space policy for Ronald Reagan’s presidential transition team, the group would go on to meet several times in the eighties and nineties to discuss space policy. As well as astronauts, scientists and science fiction authors (such as Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Robert A. Heinlein, Gregory Benford, Dean Ing and Larry Niven) it also included members of the military. Pournelle would credit the group with inspiring the Reagan administrations Strategic Defence Initiative (aka “Star Wars”) and would later say “It is my belief that SDI was the final blow that ended the USSR.”[8]

Pournelle would also introduce Jim Baen to the up-and-coming Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich, who Baen had seen speak at the science-fiction convention Balticon[9]. Baen went onto publish the book Window of Opportunity: A Blueprint for the future by Gingrich (with help from the author David Drake) through Tor (“in association with Baen enterprised Inc”). The book mixed technological optimism with conservative politics and excitement about computers and communication.

In 1983 Pocket Books attempted to recruit Jim Baen to set up a line of science fiction books. Instead, Tom Doherty and Baen negotiated a different arrangement. Baen would set up his own publishing company but the distribution of the books would be handled by Pocket Books’ parent company Simon & Shuster. With assistance and investment from Doherty, Baen was able to establish his own company Baen Books.

Tor continued to grow and in 1986 the publisher won its first Hugo Award for Best Novel with Ender’s Game by the up-and-coming author Orson Scott Card, followed with a second win in 1987 by the sequel Speaker for the Dead[11].

Baen Books entered what has been described as a “friendly rivalry” with Tor. Jim Baen brought his taste in book cover art with him, colourful sci-fi art covers with bold text often heavily shaped.

“Even more than had been the case at Ace and Tor, Jim was his own art director at Baen Books–and he really directed rather than viewing his job as one of coddling artists. Baen Books gained a distinct look. Like the book contents, the covers weren’t to everyone’s taste–but they worked.”

http://david-drake.com/2006/jim-baen/

Baen Books recruited new authors, published established authors and reprinted notable books from earlier decades. In 1984 Baen Books published works by authors such as Brian Aldiss, Joanna Russ and Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as works by authors who would become more associated with Baen such as David Drake. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the publisher would promote new talents such as Lois McMaster Bujold and David Weber. Bujold’s Vor Game would win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1991.

Although Jim Baen’s politics were conservative[12] and his major love was military science fiction,[13] his publishing house covered a range of science-fiction and fantasy sub-genres and had authors of diverse political views. In 1996 Baen’s senior editor and partner Toni Weisskopf bought a first novel from the author Eric Flint. A former activist in the ’70s and ’80s with the Socialist Workers Party[14], Flint had turned his hand to writing and in 1992 won first place in the 1992 Writers of the Future contest[15].

Baen Books became increasingly innovative in the field of electronic publishing. The publisher experimented with providing additional books and other materials in bonus CD-ROMs provided with hardback copies of books[16]. The company website allowed users to download some free copies of books, an innovation that helps spur on sales of physical books:

“the give-away program, called Baen Free Library, is a volunteer effort with no overhead costs. But the two programs’ economic value to the company is incalculable. They have spurred sales of the company’s books, which are distributed through Viacom’s Simon & Schuster unit. Mr. Baen is particularly surprised that the electronic downloads have even stimulated sales of the company’s hardcover books.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/19/business/media-publisher-s-web-books-spur-hardcover-sales.html

With science fiction fans often keen to follow a series of books or to engage with works set in a common universe, the strategy of giving away electronic books with low overheads was intended to drive additional sales. It was also a strategy designed to encourage reader loyalty and also meant that Baen books would produce many long-running series, such as Eric Flint’s 1632 series often written using author collaborations.

A further innovation in 1997 was the addition of a chat forum to the Baen Books website. Known as “Baen’s Bar”, the forum became an active community. Baen’s authors were encouraged to interact with readers by discussing their works or issues of the day. Authors also used the forum to post ‘snippets’ — extracts of work-in-progress to generate comments and feedback from readers[17]. Flint’s 1632 series would take this further with the Grantville Gazette, an electronic magazine intended to fill the gap between the canonical books in the series and fan fiction. Stories would be submitted in the Baen’s Bar forum for selection to go in the Gazette [18].

“It is not unusual for authors to call upon fans for help in keeping track of series details, or to solicit technical advice, but this is usually where it ends. There have been some instances in the past of series authors letting fan fiction feed back into the main storyline, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series, and the FanDemonium publishing house for Stargate novels.”

https://grantvillegazette.com/article/publish-461/

The Bar would also be a source of new talent.

“Baen’s activity on the forums actually led to John Ringo becoming a published novelist. Ringo was a longtime participant in Baen’s Bar and had gotten to know Baen by discussing topics like the aquatic ape hypothesis. Although his novel A Hymn Before Battle had been rejected, he mentioned he had submitted it and it had been rejected when Baen told him the manuscript had been lost. Baen took a look at the manuscript, fired the reader who had rejected it, and told Ringo that if he made certain edits, Baen would buy it.”

https://fampeople.com/cat-jim-baen_2

Ringo was to become one of a set of politically outspoken authors recruited in the early 2000s. Along with Tom Kratman and Michael Williamson, they formed a set of writers who had served in the military in the 1990s and who now wrote military-inspired fiction for Baen. Tom Kratman’s works would include A State of Disobedience (about Texas seceding from the USA), Caliphate (a dystopian novel about an Islamic regime taking over Europe) and with John Ringo Watch on the Rhine (a story about ageing SS soldier being rejuvenated to fight aliens)[19].

However, military science with overt right-wing politics was only a subset of what Baen was publishing in the early 2000s. Baen was also publishing authors such as Catherine Asaro and Mercedes Lackey. Baen was also taking a stand against the increasing use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) for electronic media. Convinced that DRM was an obstacle to readers. According to Eric Flint:

“It is my opinion, and Jim Baen’s, that on top of everything else DRM is just plain stupid, even from the narrow economic standpoint of most of the people who advocate it. And, since the issue has a direct impact on the work and lives of authors, I will spend a great deal of time discussing the practical realities of DRM, as well as the various alternative economic strategies that some people and companies, Baen Books being foremost among them, in science fiction and fantasy have been adopting in its stead.”

https://ericflint.net/information/salvos-against-big-brother/

Although Baen books were a significant presence in American science-fiction, the distribution deal with Simon & Schuster as well as the regional nature of book publishing, meant that Baen as an imprint was hard to find outside of North America. With the USA involved in two active wars in the 2000s, the company did maintain links with the US military to ensure people in service could access them[21], as well as providing free books for disabled readers to mark Veteran’s Day[22].

In March of 2006 Tor announced that it would follow Jim Baen’s lead with e-books and begin publishing their own e-books without digitial rights management.

“We’ve tested a lot of e-book waters, including various cockamamie schemes involving overpriced e-books laden with DRM. Oddly enough, a lot of those “books” didn’t even sell enough copies to pay for their file-conversion costs. Meanwhile, it hasn’t escaped our notice that Jim Baen has been doing something that works, that people like, and that makes money. I’m delighted to be doing this pilot program; I think Jim has been clueful on this issue for a long time, while almost everyone else in publishing has been staggering around on stage hitting one another over the head with inflated pig bladders.””

Patrick Nielsen Hayden quoted here http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004052.html

In June 2006, Jim Baen suffered a stroke and went into a coma. A day later he had died. In his career as an editor he had acquired a personal fandom was well as wide ranging professional respect as an editor. Baen Books though, would continue…

Next time: A Baen Sweep of the Hugos?

Footnotes

camestrosfelapton

49 responses to “Debarkle Chapter 9: Dramatis Personae – Jim Baen (1943-2006)”

  1. “In 1979 (and again in 1980) Baen would once again be a finalist for Best Professional Editor in the Hugo Awards but this time for his role at Ace books.”

    I am convinced that a key part of him getting nominated was Destinies, which ran from 1978 – 1981.

    Liked by 2 people

    • I am also 99.9% sure of this. Ace, meh, but “Destinies” was a DAMN good publication. I had just about all the issues. It was a delightful magabook, with great variety of content, both written and art.

      It was The Cool Thing With Buzz, so I’m sure that’s why he was nominated, and deserved it.

      I was sad when it ended.

      Liked by 2 people

    • It’s kind of odd that Baen was on fire for Galaxy and Destinies but neither New Destinies nor Far Frontiers seemed to click.

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      • I associate in my head Baen with Niven/Pournelle, and a kind of a new, fresh version of a relatively old style of sf that did well in the 70s and 80s in the Hugos and then drifted away from popularity

        Like how Oasis in the 1990s could present themselves as a new thing in British music by drawing from the Beatles. There’s a point where the new version of an old thing just begins to blend with the old thing.

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      • When I think of a “new fresh version of a relatively old style of SF” I’m more likely to think of David Brin. I encountered Niven (and Pournelle in collaborations) in my teens – and read a lot of them, and maybe that’s why. If I think a bit more I’d jump to Iain Banks. And then to Donald Kingsbury’s Psychohistorical Crisis.

        Liked by 1 person

        • True – I mean, it’s a statement that works for most writers other than Mary Shelley and H G Wells 🙂 With Brian and say, Orson Scott Card a similar dynamic. At the time what feels foregrounded is the difference from the past, and the background is what is similar to the past. Overtime, that foregrounding fades, and the work feels older than it is

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  3. some typos:
    “fortunes of the magazine where in decline” – were, not where
    “lates 80’s and early 90’s” – late, not lates
    “Baen’s author’s were encouraged” – authors, not author’s

    This is really interesting. True, Baen covers are unmistakable – unmistakably horrible. Only one reason why I replaced my Bujold hardbacks with her e-versions.

    Liked by 3 people

  5. Minor complaint about a footnote: Jim Baen did not invent the military SF sub-category, that’s a silly quote. The sub-category was firmly established in the 1950’s. Jim Baen did help with the expansion of growth that the sub-category had in the 1970’s, but you can’t ignore Pournelle’s influence there as well.

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    • So, while there were sf stories about the military in olden time SF (Mid-March 1961 being a good enough line between fresh and modern and the unspeakably ancient), I don’t think the tropes accreted into the modern subgenre we all know and love until the mid-1980s*. I’d be inclined to credit Pournelle more than Baen, what with Pournelle’s various anthology series, but Baen gave JEP a soap box.

      See Ngram, for example:

      https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Military+SF%2C+MilSF%2C+Military+Science+Fiction&year_start=1965&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true#

      Liked by 1 person

      • Military SF as an identifiable subgenre existed all the way back to the 1940s at least, though it wasn’t codified until the 1980s and Baen and Pournelle did play a role there. Ditto for urban fantasy. Weird Tales and Unknown were full of what we would now call urban fantasy, but the subgenre didn’t get a name until the mid 1980s. Sword and sorcery is another example. A product of the late 1920s and 1930s (with a few forerunners), but didn’t get a name until 1961.

        Come to think of it, Jerry Pournelle was a bad influence on both Jim Baen (who was editor of the progressive Galaxy and If of all mags) and Larry Niven.

        Liked by 2 people

    • I agree – it’s hyperbole and I wouldn’t have included it in the main text. However, it says a lot about how is role in the genre is perceived. Also, there’s this thing with Baen Books were if you’re not seen as a fan of the publisher then you can’t make generalisations eg if I was to say “Baen is known for their MilSF” I’d get multiple counter examples of Baen books that aren’t. The quote from Toni W cuts around that – Baen publishes lots of stuff but they really are associated with that sub-genre and it is a valid generalisation and one used (to the point of exaggeration) by an unimpeachable source

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      • Well that’s part of what you are looking at — the deifying and villainizing of certain people in the Puppies’ Debarkle, so in that sense the quote is a good example. And certainly deifying Jim B. had a role in the Puppies’ efforts. He was a guy who reportedly had good and bad traits, like us all. He supposedly did not like some of the underhanded stuff that Ace pulled on authors and that’s one of the reasons he followed Doherty to Tor and then had his own house he didn’t then sell to one of the big houses. He was influential during several decades. But giving him guru status has been relatively recent.

        The 1980’s did have a lot of deifying and hyperbole, which was in a sense coming out of the New Wave SF, feminist SF, Afrofuturism and other movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s into an expanded market and in another sense from the macho-posing, war machine posturing of 1980’s Reagan era culture that was reactionary towards what happened politically and socially in the 1960’s and 1970’s and the on-going Cold War. Military SF got established as a sub-area in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the wake of WWII and the Korean War and with the Cold War and it came into its own more in the 1970’s than the 1980’s, due partly to the inspiration in the U.S. of the Vietnam War. But Baen was editing in the 1970’s so obviously had a hand in that in the U.S. But Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai series was really the one that I would say was the biggie and that was in the 1960’s. Dickson also edited popular military SF anthologies like Combat SF in the 1970’s.

        Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which the Puppies also deify, was also key in solidifying military SF as a sub-category and that was in 1959. H. Beam Piper’s Uller Uprising (1950’s,) Poul Anderson’s The Star Fox (mid-1960’s,) Norman Spinrad’s The Men in the Jungle (mid-1960’s,) Barry Malzberg’s “Final War” (late 1960’s,) Haldeman’s Forever War (1970’s) — those all solidly established military SF as a sub-category before the 1980’s. They weren’t scattered titles to SF fans and they were backed by regular military SF anthologies and stories in magazines. They established the regular elements that 1980’s and 1990’s military SF would play with, so much so that Harry Harrison made fun of them with his Bill, the Galactic Hero stories all the way back in the 1960’s.

        Pournelle’s Janissaries in 1979 and his earlier military SF and David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers also in 1979 certainly kicked off 1980’s military SF and Baen seems to have been well-involved with Drake. But this in fact points out the problems that the Puppies had. They started saying that the Hugos went off the rails “15 years ago” and proclaiming that earlier 1990’s fiction was the bomb. When it was pointed out to them though that the 1990’s SFF was hardly only nutty nuggets, they went back to the 1970’s, big mistake, and had to keep going further and further back in time, trying to find a utopia when everything was X way.

        Liked by 3 people

      • @Kat:
        There’s a lot of ‘patriotic’ stuff in the U.S. that has actually only been around for a bit over fifty years.

        In particular, what with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about ‘kneeling during the national anthem’… my understanding is that the requirement for players to be out on the field, standing at attention during the anthem, was only added in the late 1960s because the then-head of the NFL was a big booster of the Vietnam War and imposed the requirement in order to show how ‘patriotic’ football players were. Before that point they would sometimes still be suiting up in the locker room when the anthem played.

        Liked by 2 people

      • Now I need to re-read some Bill, the Galactic Hero.

        It really can’t be over-exaggerated what a Big Deal Dickson’s “Dorsai” stories were. Popular across the board, con security guys dressed as them — he was Drake before Drake. And he won TWO Hugos at the 1981 Worldcon.

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  6. “In 1981 Bean would once again be a finalist…”

    I suspect in writing this substituting Bean for Baen is going to be outdoing teh for most typoed word and without spellchecking or autocorrect to help.

    Liked by 3 people

      • Perhaps the high typo rate in Baen books is due to someone turning off all spell checkers so they don’t keep flagging Baen as a misspelled bean. It’s easier than adding a new word to the spelling dictionary.

        And just now I find that Baen has misspelled Lavie Tidhar’s name (as “Tindhar”) on a blurb on the front cover of the mass market paperback of Forced Perspectives by Tim Powers. I guess that’s not as bad as the times they’ve misspelled the name of a book’s author on the cover (I have seen Robert Aspirin and Sarah Pinkser from them) but it’s not a good look.

        Liked by 2 people

    • @Mr. D: On the rare occasions I read a Bean Bane Baen book, I’m taken aback by how many typos there are, including ones that could be fixed by spellcheck (having no other, similar words to the errors that would get ignored).

      They literally don’t care enough to run spellcheck on the final ms.

      Liked by 1 person

      • I enjoyed Weber/Zahn’s A Call to Vengeance – but every time the word “Travis’s” (the main character’s name is Travis) appeared, it appears in bold. At first I thought this was emphasis, but I gradually realized it was just some sort of mistake (one of the two authors disagreed about whether to use “Travis’” or “Travis’s” and bolded the word – intending to come back to fix it? Bizarre.

        Liked by 2 people

    • I do admire the stuff that Baen did for ebooks – the free library, a DRM-free store, and CDs of free content (that led me to buy some hardbacks back in the day)

      Liked by 1 person

  8. So we really CAN blame Jim for those god-awful covers.

    They were tolerable in the 80s, but now they’re so screamingly awful that I think “Baen” is the most-used publisher tag on Good Show, Sir! (.co.uk)

    (Nope: it has only 20 pages worth, Ace has 24 — but some of Ace’s were Jim’s fault too and it’s been around longer.)

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  9. My eyes have always rolled at Pournelle’s claim that he personally ended the Cold War with a pew-pew laser plan everyone knew couldn’t be achieved with 80s tech.

    They rolled again today.

    Is it shame or poetic justice that his last work was under the imprimatur of a racist, sexist, homophobic Neo-Nazi grifter?

    Liked by 1 person

    • SDI did nothing except waste money and time. Everybody except maybe Ronald Reagan (and he was suffering from dementiaat the time) knew it wasn’t viable. The Soviet Union sure as hell knew.

      Just as the US in general did nothing to bring about the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. What caused those regimes to collapse were the protests by their own citizens, reluctance of politicians and the military to crack down on said protests with violence and Mikhail Gorbachev (who celebrates his 90th birthday today) reluctance to send troops to prop up the leadership of the various Warsaw Pact states. Ronald Reagan and his Cold War rhetoric were a hindrance more than anything.

      Any SFF author who was involved with the committee that came up with SDI is on my “If you must buy them, buy them used” list.

      Liked by 2 people

      • I remember buying into at the time the idea that the US bankrupted the USSR by means of SDI. I am far less sure of that idea now. I especially didn’t know about “Able Archer” and, for as terrifying the early 80’s were, just how close Reagan’s bellicosity got us into a shooting nuclear war

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      • Events did rather vindicate George Kennan’s containment theory – as long as the USSR was contained, all the US had to do was sit and wait for it to collapse under its internal contradictions. Space lasers not required.

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      • I’d never even heard of the “Ronald Reagan and his SDI program caused the Warsaw Pact states to collapse” claim until I got on the Internet years later, because having lived through 1989 (albeit on the other side of the fence), it was blatantly obvious to everybody how the collapse of the East European regimes came about. And indeed, what infuriates me most about the “Ronald Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact states” claims is that it erases the many brave protesters who took to the streets, even though there was a very real chance of being arrested or killed.

        Also, I suspect few Americans have any idea how disliked Ronald Reagan was in most of Europe. He was a loose cannon, a former cowboy actor who fueled tensions with aggressive Cold War rhetoric. There were mass protests, some of the biggest ever seen since WWII, in the early 1980s against the NATO Double-Track decision and against stationing US nuclear warheads in western Europe.

        There was even a protest song called “Sonne statt Reagan” (sunshine instead of Reagan), which relies on the fact that the German word for “rain” and the name Reagan sound almost the same. You can see it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1ugBlAxbF4

        And yes, that’s Joseph Beuys, world-famous artist. He’s not much of a singer, but you can’t fault him for his earnestness.

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      • Gorbachev declining to send the army out (unlike Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956), plus his restructuring of the government to take power from the ministers was what did it.

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    • (Following is not intended to endorse anyone’s claims of 1980s Cold War tactical brilliance, nor anyone’s worldview, etc., just description of a years-ago encounter, in case it casts light on this subject. Obviously, this is from memory, so the reconstruction of that conversation is on a best-efforts basis with no notes.)

      In normal times, my wife Deirdre and I attend LosCon in L.A. on each year’s Thanksgiving weekend, and Dr. Pournelle as a prominent LASFS member/supporter was a frequent and worthwhile panelist — as were and remain Larry Niven and Fuzzy Niven, of course. One year, I stuck around after a panel Dr. Pournelle had been on, caught up with him in the corridor afterwards, and politely asked him to clarify his point about Cold War strategy and SDI, as what he’d alluded to briefly during the panel was new to me and seemed odd. He generously elaborated — being, I hear, always glad to spend time talking to fans.

      I don’t recall him speaking to the subtopic of whether SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) technology was truly practical, but what he said was that the unofficial military-science braintrust, of which he’d been a part, had urged Pres. Reagan to deliberately goad the Soviets into haemorrhaging money to close the Space Gap, so to speak, knowing that burning kilodumptrucks of money would be necessary on both sides but that the Soviets would bankrupt themselves first. I believe he said that the Afghanistan War had finished the job, but that countering SDI spending had broken the back of the Soviet economy before that.

      I thanked Dr. Pournelle for clarifying, and went off to other con events, classifying what he said as unconfirmed but maybe, I guess plausible, and, if true, kind of brilliant. Challenging one’s adversaries to a contest of wealth-destruction in order to destroy them (more/faster than yourself) is a tactic that had never occurred to me.

      I’d love to have time with some modern-day Bernard Baruch to ask whether that’s really a fair summary of the SDI programme’s effects. For now, it’s just a claim I heard, and a striking memory.

      Liked by 1 person

      • It’s not an original proposal, of course – the first time I heard it mentioned, it was in Len Deighton’s novel “Billion Dollar Brain”, where General Midwinter declares that “we must double our military spending now”, on the grounds that if America does it, the Russians will have to match it, and they can’t afford it.

        Of course, as I’ve said before in another context, General Midwinter is both fictional and barking mad, so his opinions are probably not to be relied on…..

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      • I think Pournelle was aggrandizing his and the SF consultants’ role there. He was just saying that continuing the Space Race of the Cold War bankrupted the Soviets.

        But military spending in the Soviet Union was continually raised from the 1970’s onward and SDI — which never even developed — did not cause any significant spending jump on the Russians’ side. The bogging down of the war in Afghanistan made the Soviet military more of a drag on the political system and the economy. The Soviet Union (and Russia still today,) wagered too much of their economy on producing oil and natural gas. When oil prices nose-dived in the 1980’s, that combined with the inflation in the Soviet Union was probably a main collapser. Nuclear power might have made up for some of it, but the Chernobyl disaster weakened Gorbachev’s political control. The bringing in of more free-trade-ish policies and interaction with Western European countries also allowed satellite states to start pulling away from an economically weakened SU and created more protests and unrest.

        The reality is that in America, most Americans considered SDI a joke and a lot of the ally countries were split about it. It was a pet project of conservative hawks and helped wrack up the federal debt that sunk H.W. Bush’s later presidency, but Reagan’s late shift to diplomacy efforts with Gorbachev probably were more effective in helping dismantle the Soviet Union than threatening them with speculative space lasers.

        Liked by 2 people

  10. @stevejwright, thanks. At the time, I was boggling at this idea of deliberately and tactically wasting kilodumptrucks of taxpayer (i.e., my and your) funds, just to bankrupt the other guys — but carefully avoided saying what I thought about Mutually Assured Stupidity.

    Much less was I willing to voice in front of LosCon’s esteemed panelist my estimation of the SDI effort’s technical merits, i.e., as “big dumb con job”. He didn’t ask; I didn’t say.

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  11. Cora wrote:

    Also, I suspect few Americans have any idea how disliked Ronald Reagan was in most of Europe.

    A lot of us here in California weren’t exactly thrilled with him, either. When Pan Am posted Dad in 1966 to its new operating base in Kowloon, Hong Kong, RCC, and he and nearly all of his fellow pilots had come from the S.F. Bay Area, he put a movie poster of Reagan in Confederade Army uniform (probably from the 1951 film “The Last Outpost”) on the back of the staff lunchroom door, with the caption “Our Leader”. (Dad had a fundamentally gentle but puckish sense of humour.) Mr. Reagan had just been elected governor, appalling my parents that the citizens of California had been bamboozled by Union Oil, General Electric and other moneyed interests into making a third-rate actor with a somewhat dull and erratic mind the state’s executive officer. This was particularly galling after the admirably competent example sent by his predecessor in office, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, Sr. (Jerry Brown’s father).

    Later in life, Mom said one of her chief regrets in life was having not registered Republican so she could vote against him eight times, instead of merely four.

    I will say one significant thing in Mr. Reagan’s favour: He actually learned from the economic and military blunders of his first Presidential administration: In his second term, he gave up on supply-side economics, and worked with Gorbachev to try to avoid blowing up the planet rather than ratcheting up brinksmanship (after learning how NATO’s Able Archer 83 exercise had very nearly caused WWIII). Naturally, the ongoing Saint Ronald iconography of many right-wing Americans is based on the first-term Reagan who hadn’t yet learned, rather than second-term Reagan who had.

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    • Yes, Reagan did get better in his second term, though considering he already had beginning dementia at that point, one has to wonder how many of those decisions were truly his.

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  12. @Kat Goodwin, quite so. It’s been enough years since my hallway-track conversation with Dr. Pournelle that I confess to being vague on some specifics of what he was saying on that occasion, and tried to qualify my remarks accordingly. I think I remember him tying the subject to the earlier drain on both the Soviet and US economies posed by the war in Indochina — but might be conflating that with other half-remembered conversations with (different) folks.

    Someone in those days, perhaps Dr. Pournelle, perhaps some other convention panelist, ran some numbers on what was mostly a proxy war (Indochina), but noting that, in the aerial dogfighting over Vietnam, the MiGs’ pilots were often seconded Soviet officers, and saying that a tremendous amount of Soviet materiel, supplies, and personnel came down those railway lines from south China into Hanoi, enough to seriously burden the Soviet system to support it. I think I remember the claim that a specific “outspend the Soviets so they go bankrupt first” tactic in the 1980s emerged from observing that 1960s trend and thinking “Let’s get them to do more of that” — with results more than a bit hard on the Afghans, Central Americans, Namibians, Chileans, etc., of course, as it had been on the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians before them (if that notion is even acknowledged to be policy).

    And (speaking of acknowledging vagueness on specifics): To correct my upthread statement, I seem to recall that Dr. Pournelle’s claim of what had economically exhausted the Soviets, as a deliberate goal, was not just SDI but a posture of provocative military-expenditure escalation overall.

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  13. @Lurkertype:

    “It really can’t be over-exaggerated what a Big Deal Dickson’s “Dorsai” stories were. Popular across the board, con security guys dressed as them — he was Drake before Drake. And he won TWO Hugos at the 1981 Worldcon.”

    My wife got me a collection of “X Minus One” episodes as a present, which I’ve been listening to during my commute. Today’s story is by Dickson – a Dorsai tale called “Lulungomeena”

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