Surprised, but not really not that surprised.
Unfortunately, his SF output commenced at right around the time I was losing interest in SF as a subject for reading. Someone gave me a copy of The Mote in God's Eye when I was in college; I started it, but didn't have time to finish it.
I used to read his Chaos Manor column in Byte magazine, but I found him too self-referential for my taste. Still, he was interesting, and I couldn't resist reading the first few paragraphs of every column.
His Chaos Manor accounts of his computer travails were supposed to show the "human side" of working with computers. Instead, they often showed that Jerry had failed to RTFM. I read them anyway.
I loved "Mote in God's Eye," and still want to see it made into a film.
Jerry Pournelle is a National Treasure. He managed to humanize the dreaded learning curve at a time when those of us with far less understanding of logic and systems were also climbing what, to us, was a steep curve.
His fiction isn’t always to my taste, but it is well-structured and entertaining. I don’t ask for much more from popular science fiction.
For an elderly man battling pneumonia, he grasps the issues, understands the timeline and presents it all concisely. May he continue a long ndfruitful life. Readers are lucky to have had him.
I think of liberals like the brownies in the book. The brownies were always tinkering, and often would seem to improve the devices they were playing with. But they would never stop tinkering, and eventually would destroy everything they touched. Just like liberals.
Pournelle is a fascist, and he made me believe that all sides are just as fascist as the other.