Policy Involvement
According to author Michael Moorcock, in 1967 Niven was among those Science Fiction Writers of America members who voiced opposition to the Vietnam War. However, in 1968 Niven's name appeared in a pro-war ad in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.
Niven was an adviser to Ronald Reagan on the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative anti missile policy, as covered in the BBC documentary Pandora's Box by Adam Curtis.
In 2007, Niven, in conjunction with a group of science fiction writers known as SIGMA, led by Pournelle, began advising the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as to future trends affecting terror policy and other topics. One of his suggestions as a member of SIGMA was that hospitals stem financial losses by spreading rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants, in order to reduce illegal immigrants' use of emergency rooms.
Read more about this topic: Larry Niven
Famous quotes containing the words policy and/or involvement:
“Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality,—that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate,—who is invariably the devil,—and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity,—who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It may be tempting to focus on the fact that, even among those who support equality, men’s involvement as fathers remains a far distance from what most women want and most children need. Yet it is also important to acknowledge how far and how fast many men have moved towards a pattern that not long ago virtually all men considered anathema.”
—Katherine Gerson (20th century)