Lucifer's Hammer

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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. Successful survivors must have the gift of gab…the ability to sell one’s self and trade valuable information for food or protection is vital. Persuasion is a skill worth its weight in gold and the ability to trade and barter, priceless. Be prepared to use what you find The first third doesn’t sound like a SF, more a contemporary fiction with some mention of space program and comets, but nothing out of place. Moreover, most actors are sure that the comet will miss, up to the very last day and if the novel would have been shorter, I’d believe that it is a story about unsubstantiated human panic. Around 80%, Niven and Pournelle pull out all the stops. It's like they figured, "If they've read this far, they're not going to stop now, so we can go all out and pull no punches with what we really think." This final part of the book is almost like a satire of right-wing attitudes - except that it's painfully clear that it's in earnest. I guess that it's a fascinating glimpse into everything that those of a certain mindset really fear? Lucifer’s Hammer is probably the first novel to describe realistically the effects of a comet striking the planet Earth. Rather than a hero story, like the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact , Lucifer’s Hammer is more like a 1970s disaster film, such as The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, or the awful Meteor . In a disaster film, the story begins by introducing a large, star-studded cast of characters, often with varying degrees of likeability or ethics, and then threatens them with death from natural forces. Some characters live; some die; the survivors usually learn some underlying lesson; and life goes on. This is the shape Niven and Pournelle gave to Lucifer’s Hammer, and the book offers lessons for space advocates today.

The story’s title is a name of the comet, which should go right next to Earth in 1977. Originally the comet was named Hamner-Brown Comet by the names of the discoverers, but Hammer sounds so much better! The first roughly third of the novel introduces a horde of characters, quite unusual for the SFF at the times of writing, 41 persons listed as Dramatis Personae as there are few missing! They are different people of different status and profession, from Tim Hamner, a wealthy hobbyist astronomer, who co-discovered the comet to a journalist team that covers the story, to a professional criminal, a sex maniac, a solder, a postman, a congressman, scientists, astronauts and many more.If you can't trust a scientist who in a science fiction thriller assures you that there's no danger, who can you trust? First the positive aspects. The book is still a very skillful large scale epic disaster novel. The middle part (where the comet hits and the characters struggle to make it through the first few days) is probably the best put-together, but even the first third, where we meet all the characters and go through the build-up worked. The last third gives us a battle between our community of civilized people and the evil army of cannibals. It's interesting to compare "Lucifer's Hammer" to "The Stand" when talking about the last third. Pournelle and Niven give the readers what King did not. A big violent battle between the two communities. The Hamner-Brown comet, separately but concurrently discovered by a pair of very excited amateur astronomers, was still a very, very long way from the earth in a typical high eccentricity orbit having barely begun its descent toward the sun. As the world's telescopes are trained on the incoming comet and its orbit is calculated to higher and higher degrees of accuracy, the possibility of an impact with the earth escalates to an uncomfortably high probability. The minute changes in mass and momentum, outgassing and the resulting small changes in the comet's orbit caused by the sun's radiation make it impossible, even up to the moment of actual impact, to accurately predict whether the comet would graze the earth's atmosphere, pass it by entirely or devastate earth with a direct impact.

You can’t open a soup can or wine bottle without an opener or a drain a gas tank without a siphon hose; opportunities may present themselves along the way and some planning and forethought can make a difference. Information is valuable, and organized information is pricelessThere is much more, but consider this: scientists have since determined that an asteroid strike would actually be much worse than what is depicted in Lucifer’s Hammer: massive fireballs roasting half the planet in 500-degree heat; the ozone layer destroyed; acid rain killing vegetation and poisoning the soil. The book only shows a fall into barbarism rather than extinction.

It's a good rallying call. It's the future, scaled down to the bare minimum after trawling the dirt and praying to make it through one winter. It's a far cry from Heinlein's eggs or Clarke's magic. It's realistic, or some might say, pessimistic. Now originally I had this marked as a re-read but do you know, if I had read it, I didn't remember it one little bit so I'm guessing I have really never read this before, which I have to say is very remiss of me, as this is a very good book, that's very good not great. Lucifer’s Hammer is one of the classic works of science fiction; it was nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards for Best Novel. Written by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven and published in 1977, Lucifer’s Hammer is one of the most prominent examples of the post-apocalyptic trope of modern science fiction. Set primarily in California, the story follows a large cast of characters as they are affected by the discovery of the Hamner-Brown comet, its rapid approach to Earth, catastrophic collision and immediate aftermath. It satisfied until the last few chapters, which centered on one of those philosophical debates about moving civilization forward or huddling by our fires in caves. 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). Satisfying ending and all that, but I have the feeling I’ll forget the details in a few weeks.On the other hand, there are quite a few things about it that are still freaking fantastic, such as the science and the emotional impact of the comet strike. Most of the first third of the novel focused on the 70's modern society, with all the strange views common of that time, but that wasn't the most striking feature. I was humbled by the way they could turn so many flawed and normal people into an epic scene of pathos when they died. Whole nation depends on technology. Stop the wheels for two days and you’d have riots. No place is more than two meals from a revolution. Think of Los Angeles or New York with no electricity. Or a longer view, fertilizer plants stop. Or a longer view yet, no technology for ten years. What happens to our standard of living? … Yet the damned fools won’t pay ten minutes’ attention a day to science and technology.

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: Hammer was written before the theory of a space-based “dinosaur killer” became popular. As Niven notes in Playgrounds of the Mind , Luis Alvarez declared, “The dinosaurs were killed by Lucifer’s Hammer!” In the 30 years since the book first came out, the impact theory is now well documented. Lucifer’s Hammer was ahead of its time. It's very exciting stuff, and also fairly realistic in how it approaches both the social and technological challenges of survival in a post-armageddon scenario. I thought the use of a comet instead of an asteroid was much better, but my suspicion was that an asteroid would pretty much destroy the world (and they suggested that all of the asteroids that could hit the Earth have already done so). Also comets are notoriously hard to destroy (not that they could have easily done it in 1977, though they still could have sent a lunar lander out there and planted some nuclear devices similar to what they did in Armageddon). However the thing about comets is that out in the ort cloud they are simply lumps of ice, but as they approach the sun they transform into the object that we are all familiar with (and I also find it fascinating that the comet's tail always points away from the sun).

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. :) Why should NSS members read Lucifer’s Hammer? For one thing, the political arguments in the book haven’t gone away, and if anything we’ve become more dependent on our technology in the last 30 years. We have so much more to lose, even if a “small” asteroid or comet (less than a kilometer diameter) hits us. Lucifer’s Hammer shows us the consequences of those losses and offers plenty of reasons for NSS members to support asteroid defenses and a spacefaring civilization. The alternatives are far, far worse. Talk about books you never forget! I read this in 1982 and I vividly remember reading the comparison of the shape of the comet to an ice-cream cone. 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.