Just Finished Reading Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn

Fallen Angels is a 1991 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn...none of whose works I had read before.  Its premise is intriguing: at some time in the not-too-distant future, society has turned its back on scientific and technological advancement in favor of pro-green environmental extremism and pseudoscience.  In the process, the space program is abandoned...literally: there are two space stations stuck out there in Earth orbit, with no ability to land and resupply.  Meanwhile, with a man-made ice age quickly advancing over the land, the "aliens", as they are now derisively called, become the scapegoats as they send ships from time to time into the atmosphere to "scoop" needed nitrogen from the air.  On one such mission, Alex and Gordon, both conditioned to living in the free-fall zero gravity of space, are shot down by a missile from the ground and crash land on the advancing ice glacier, somewhere in North Dakota.  An underground science fiction fan club..."underground" because interest in science and technology is now considered antisocial and psychologically aberrant...undertakes a rescue operation.  So a whole cast of characters gets introduced as well as those from the various factions of government vying against one another to be the ones capturing the "alien enemy".  The rest of the story traces the quest to find a way to return Alex and Gordon safely to their home in space, but its main theme is a discussion of the merits and shortfalls of different viewpoints concerning how science and technology have affected our environment...with the authors' prevailing judgment coming down in favor of pollution and global warming.  For, you see, their contention is that Earth has been in an ice age for millennia and the only thing that has been holding back the glacier advance has been humanity's development of fire, agriculture, and civilization...thereby causing a heating effect and impeding the ice.  An intriguing idea, I might say...but it's easy to be right when you're writing a book of fiction and, presto, there are the advancing ice sheets after man-made pollution has been thoroughly eliminated.  But I happen to live in the real world, and the ice around the poles is in fast retreat, not advance...

Although some of the assumptions expressed in Fallen Angels sound dubious to me, I greatly appreciated how they paid tribute to the great science fiction writers of the past...names like Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith, Clifford Simak, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury, to mention just a few.  I also liked how Gordon would speak things sometimes half in Russian...after all, the space station is a joint Russian-American project.  And the idea of society "helping" those who hold what it sees as deviant opinions by confining and drugging them is not all that far off from being real: watch the movie A Beautiful Mind to get a hint of what I'm talking about.  But let's not take this all too seriously, and just about every story has its own built-in flaws: if their authors didn't publish them until they were perfect, we'd never have anything to read...