Lucifer's Hammer

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Forrester actually has the know-how to be able to do it, but even when he makes it to Jellison's ranch, defending it and the power plant from the New Brotherhood means he has no time to do so at first. Several of those listed begin assembling at a party in Los Angeles: Tim Hamner is heir to the Kalva Soap Company and an amateur astronomer who announces he's just discovered a comet, a dim smear not far from Neptune now known as the Hamner-Brown Comet. Volcanoes and earthquakes are endemic around the entire Pacific basin as fault lines shift in California and everywhere else along the fabled Ring of Fire.

Now, forgive me for nit-picking, but I really don't see the point of devoting endless pages to characters repeatedly insisting the event the book is written around isn't going to happen. I remained unmoved; the last book of The Policeman trilogy achieved a level of profoundness that made this discussion feel like a sixth-graders’ debate (no offense to any sixth-graders who might be reading this). There are also the two Russians who exist to mention how superior the US is to Russia in oh so many ways, and the reformed hippies who have realized that communes are a bad idea. For all Hammer‘s attempts at realism, that seemed a pretty profound psychological hurdle to overcome in a few weeks or months.Later the glaciers come down from the north freezing all nothing can stop these monsters, for the few survivors a new Ice Age too. Later becomes a love square when Maureen’s longtime lover, astronaut John Baker, enters the picture. Hoarding begins and roads clog as the population begins a mass exodus from coastal cities in anticipation of the possible tsunami that would result if the comet landed in the ocean. Mostly uninteresting characters do mostly uninteresting things as scientist endlessly debate how close this big chunk of doom will miss earth by. In print, Niven and Pournelle provide a "program" at the front of their books so you can easily refer back and identify characters in the early going until you have them straight.

But I was a fan of books such as On the Beach – and Lucifer’s Hammer pointed out that not making an effort would lead to societies where ‘rat-catching’ was the prize to be aimed for by the young.

I still think that this novel was the best that either had written, even if I can't honestly say anything about Jerry's work. Bear in mind, the reason to save the power plant is not because destroying the plant could result in a nuclear meltdown which would render the entire area uninhabitable.

The Hammer does fall, having broken up into several smaller comets that land around the world with devastating results, striking parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and both the Pacific and Atlantic. Your citation of Katrina and a puny ice storm in NY (both puny relative to the disaster thatthis book describes) tells me that you really have no idea how savage man could become in a very short time (months that the book covers after the hammerfall) When every day is a struggle to survive, when there is No food, no shelter, no one you can trust.I suppose Niven and Pournelle's defense would be that not all of the New Brotherhood Army is black, and there is a black astronaut who's one of the good guys, and a few black farmers in the Stronghold are mentioned. The story is told from several different viewpoints and the characters all feel real and believable.