rcmnd

A Step Farther OutBook

by Jerry Pournelle

Who uses, recommends or left A Step Farther Out, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky is as afraid as you could possibly be.
recommended

well um one thing that shaped me as a little tiny person of like age nine or so was a book by Jerry Pornell called A Step Farther out. A whole lot of engineers um say that this was a major formative book for them. It's the technopile book um as written from the perspective of the 1970s the book that's all about asteroid mining and all the mineral wealth that would be available on Earth if we learn to mine the asteroids.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-eliezer-yudkowsky.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2025-10-15·youtube.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

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