Oath of fealty
by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle · first published 1981
14% recommend86% neutral
(Back cover) A few years after tomorrow, above a ruined Los Angeles where crime, violence, pollution and poverty still rule the streets, a Utopia rises. Todos Santos. A thousand-foot-high single-structured city. The perfect blend of technology and humanism, offering its privileged dwellers everything they could want in exchange for their oath of allegiance and their constant surveillance. But there are those who would see Utopia destroyed. Those who would tear down the hope of tomorrow in violent act after violent act. And they have just entered Todos Santos.
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Larry Niven - Ringworld (+ Ringworld Engineers), The long Arm of Gil Hamilton, Oath of Fealty (Oh man! They had instant messaging wetware! ...And a diving board!). Robert Heinlein, Joe Haldeman, and Issac Asimov are some other heavy hitters in this space.
on “Ask HN: What things do you wish you discovered earlier?” ↗…what is the total stored in Rand's directory? 23,567,892 BYTES "Good Lord. Art, that will take hours to print out---" "Yeah, that gives the cops a hobby." [1] [1] Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Oath of Fealty. New York: Pocket Books, 1981. ISBN 0-671-82802-9, pp. 287--8.
on “Lavabit founder turned over the private SSL keys as an 11 page printout” ↗…of science fiction of that general era is this assumption that the information source would be this curated centralized repository--Encyclopedia Galactica in Asimov's case but also see Niven/Pournelle Oath of Fealty, etc. Instead we have Wikipedia, the web more broadly, etc. You see this assumption of centralization, world government, etc. in a lot of other SF contexts as well.
on “How Isaac Asimov shaped robotics and space exploration and predicted the Internet” ↗…general, what science fiction authors tended to miss was the democratization of both access and content. See Encyclopedia Galactica. Knowledge is centralized and curated. An even better example comes from Oath of Fealty (Jerry Pournelle). There's this central knowledge repository but only some people can access it--or at least have some sort of mental Tier 1 access. Wikipedia it ain't.
on “The Predictions of Robert A. Heinlein, from the Cold War to the Waterbed” ↗A character in Footfall (or was it Oath of Fealty?), by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, composted the inconvenient body of someone he had murdered. I've wondered if that was practical and this article says affirmative. But for purposes of hiding a corpse…
on “Washington state lawmakers approve human corpse composting” ↗IIRC there's a jail-break plot twist involving them in Oath of Fealty by Niven and Pournelle…
on “Exploring the Elizabeth line, one of the world’s largest construction projects” ↗…mobile almost always connected world might have been something I might have imagined in some form as futurology but would probably have take different forms. See Pournelle's version of not-Wikipedia in Oath of Fealty for example.
on “Mary Quant, ‘60s designer who invented the miniskirt, dead at 93” ↗There are tons of examples of course, but one that jumps to mind is Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle where one of the plot points is an implant that gives the chosen few access to an encyclopedic database. Of course, today, a smartphone with cell access provides that (or at least a…
on “Phone numbers for use in TV shows, films and creative works” ↗>Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven!
on “Phone numbers for use in TV shows, films and creative works” ↗…running a free service he was abusing. The poetic justice: JGA suggested the account termination message should read "Think of it as evolution in action" - Pournelle's own Social Darwinist catchphrase from Oath of Fealty. KMP's assessment stands: "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright…
on “Usenet Personality” ↗