Lucifer's Hammer

Product Information

From my perspective as a long-time fan of classic sci-fi, LUCIFER'S HAMMER gets only three stars. Others, less concerned about the science will doubtless rate it higher. I recommend that you read it and judge for yourself. You'll enjoy the book no matter which genre your tastes favour. I did carry one caveat, though. He should have saved Dune. Stories are just as important as scientific texts. I can only pray that later generations would carry it forward after conquering California and finding any intact libraries. Of course, this was written only a handful of years after Dune, so the authors hadn't realized the weight of the public's imagination by that time... but they did when it came to the commune filled with LoTR characters. :) At first I thought this book was awesome. In fact as I was reading it I thought the book was so good that I was surprised that they haven't made a movie starring Dwanye Johnson: Next door, a good set of carving knives. They’d needed new kitchen knives for a year. He also bought a sharpening stone and a hand-operated knife sharpener.

Talking about the end here, so - hiding... but really, I'd recommend reading this spoiler instead of the book): The authors do, however, make a good case for situational ethics, especially when dealing with such issues as biological warfare and slavery. As one character puts it, “A civilization has the ethics it can afford.” Even if I found it hard to believe, it did make me think about how our ethical standards might depend on the condition of our society, and it made me appreciate the society I live in. But I do have a few complaints, mostly with the third part of the book. This was written in the 70's and the 70's attitude toward women was still prevalent. Women were to be protected, took subservient roles to the men (housewives who volunteered, secretaries, accountants, cooks). What really got my goat was for one small group trying to survive, when the current leader died (predicted to happen anytime in the next "year") the new leader of the valley would be determined by whomever his daughter married. Three guys were posturing for her "attentions" while she was sneaking off to sleep with a fourth. Gimme a break! Destruction of California aside, this was a really good book. Tim Hamner discovers a comet, which upon further investigation will be moving through Earths solar system in the immediate near future. Chances of it hitting are a million to one…nope, better make that 100,000 to one. Oops! Slight miscalculation, 10,000 to one. Wrong again! 1000 to one. Oh, drat! It hit in 6 places!of the book takes place before the comet strike. One of the thing that always interests me is how very angry people get towards Hamner when they realize a strike is likely. They blame him for inventing the comet! It's absurd but at the same time I can see it happening. I feel like Niven and Pournelle cover just about every possible option for the types of communities and groups that spring up. They do a really great job showing people trying to survive the initial strikes, and all the horrors that go along with that. It does follow a pretty huge cast of characters but they all converge over the course of the book. I think it works well. Still, this started out in the three-star range, and stayed there for about the first 40% of the book. For that section, I was strongly reminded of Neal Stephenson's 'Seveneves,' to the point where I suspected (and still suspect) that Stephenson read this book - and wanted to do it better. (Stephenson succeeded, if that was the goal.) Of course, the difference is that in Seveneves, we're getting hit by moon bits and in Lucifer's Hammer, by comet bits, but the setup is very similar: We see the discovery of the phenomenon, the media reaction, and start glimpsing the effects on the daily lives of a wide range of people, including politicians, experts, and average joes. There's also the crew up in Skylab. There's a huge cast of characters, which meant for me, in this book, that I didn't feel emotionally invested in any of them, and for a while, the book dragged a bit. (The way the many characters were handled reminded me a bit of Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Mars' books - but those are better-written (sensing a trend here?)) To top it all off, there's a Great Battle to Save the Nuclear Plant from the Mixed-Race Horde. 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. Noooo... this is a VERY SAFE nuclear plant, and that could never happen due to all the Safety Features. No, it becomes a symbol of the Light and Hope of All Future Technology-Based Civilization, which is driven home in a luridly purple death scene, in case the readers missed it. After a dedication to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ("the first men to walk on another world") and the astronauts who died trying, the novel begins with a 47-character dramatis personae. 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. "Brown" is a kid in Iowa who reported the smear at the same time Hamner did.

The scientific community assures the public that a collision with Earth is extremely unlikely, but the comet's nucleus breaks apart and the pieces strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. These result in volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis, destroying major coastal cities around the world, killing billions and initiating a new ice age because of the massive quantities of water and debris flung into the atmosphere. The thing with comets is that they are made up of millions of chunks of ice so even if the comet doesn't hit the Earth but the Earth still passes through the coma (the area around the comet) it still has the ability to have a huge impact (and as the authors suggested create an extinction level event, which also suggested that the Brown-Hamner comet was what wiped out the dinosaurs). Their portrait of what would actually happen when the comet passes by the Earth was also interesting since it didn't just cause huge tidal waves but also resulted in numerous Earthquakes and causing pretty much all of the volcanoes to erupt. The massive amounts of water that went up into the atmosphere would also result in almost perpetual rain – I sort of wondered whether the story of Noah's Ark is a report of such an event. Good grief, reading hasn’t been such a chore since Professional Nursing Practice Foundations and Concepts. And in the fiction world, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. So perhaps you should take my review with a grain of salt, since plenty of people love Strange (unsurprisingly, no one admits to loving Practice Foundations). Niven and Pournelle start with a great idea, a since tried-and-true staple of the disaster genre–Earth facing an impending meteor pass. My first encounter with this phenomenon was Night of the Comet, a fabulous, campy film released in 1984 about two sisters who survive the Earth passing through the tail of a comet. My second-to-last encounter was The Last Policeman Trilogy by Ben H. Winters, a marvelous exploration of ethics and choice in the face of certain doom. (Technically, of course, Hammer was my last encounter with the genre). Hammer and Policeman represent two different approaches to disaster, one macro, one micro, and just guess which one I liked better. Of course, Hammer was released in 1977, and Policeman in 2012, so there is that little issue of societal norms shifting, but I didn’t let that stop me… honest. So, woo-hoo! The battle is won. It is pointed out repeatedly that one should not regard ones' enemies as human; they're just ants. Technology will be rebuilt, but until it is, it's gonna be "A Man's World." People will work hard in a manly way, accompanied by their strong yet womanly women. They will be cooperative, but not in a communist way. Justice will be harsh. And as the cherry on top of this fantasy, slavery is reinstated. (Yes, really!) Woo-hoo! A U.S. Senator from California is one of the heroes of the story when he takes on the executive role, comparable to that of a Governor, when all other government structure fails. Even though he is hampered by a heart defect, he maintains the respect and loyalty of the group of people that gravitated to him. As a natural leader, he steps up in a crisis to do what he does best. Be careful who you trust

The right vehicle can save your butt

It's smart. There is a lot of science peppered throughout, real facts and knowledge written well, so it felt like part of the story while still teaching me quite a bit. This really felt like the granddaddy of the specific genre "long, epic disaster porn." (contains no actual porn, though some refreshingly modern views on sex and relationships). Lucifer's Hammer is fine plot-wise. In fact, I'd say Niven and Pournelle always do very well with the plots and the hard SF. This is an end-of-the-world post-apocalypse adventure, and I love those like candy. So I enjoyed it despite groaning every now and then at the authors', ah... issues. If you can't trust a scientist who in a science fiction thriller assures you that there's no danger, who can you trust?