Lucifer's Hammer

Rating:
Summary: Not very plausible
Review: As "end of the world" books go, this one is not really up to snuff. (pun intended) The characters are not very engaging or sympathetic and it takes WAY too long for the set-up. Apparently, the idea was to use the first half of the book to give the characters enough back story to make them seem real so the reader would identify more with them when the disaster finally struck. This could have been achieved in about half the pages the writers took to do it, and probably been more interesting for it.
My other main criticism is that, with all the brilliant scientists on the planet, there wasn't one of them who could determine with any degree of certainty if the asteroid would even strike the Earth. In the 70's when this novel was set, it was possible to project the path of a celestial body with a great degree of accuracy. Even hundreds of years ago, astronomers were charting the heavens with a fair amount of precision. Why couldn't these guys?
A far better written, and more interesting, treatment of this subject is Arthur C Clarke's similarly titled "The Hammer of God". Clarke's work also has the added benefit of being much shorter so it doesn't wear out its welcome the way "Lucifer's Hammer" does.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best end-of-the-world books
Review: This book rates among the best along with The Stand, Swan Song and Year Zero. Incredible characters, superb writing about a comet falling on Earth and what happens afterwards. The characters are so good, you care about everything they do. This book is worth getting. It will change the way you think about what's out there in the sky and what trully values in life.

Rating:
Summary: Decent But Flawed Work
Review: I first read this novel back in the 1980s and thought it was great. Gave it another look recently and came up with a different view. Although this is a solid novel, it does have problems.

The story is fairly simple. It recounts numerous people and their efforts to survive in Southern California after the Earth is struck by a comet. Over time, the story focuses on two groups. One is a farming community that has set up a feudal system under the control of a US Senator. The other group is a cannibal army made up of army mutineers, thieves that escaped the drowning of Los Angeles and unfortunates who were captured and brought into the fold. This band is jointly lead by an army sergeant, a former black panther and a televangelist. You could imagine what occurs with these bands of survivors.

Larry Niven is a master of hard science fiction. He does not disapoint us here. His description of the comet are excellent and he describes the impact wonderfully. The portraits of the characters were also very compelling in the lead up to impact and the period just after impact as they try to survive. Two story lines I greatly greatly enojoyed were the scene with the surfers trying to ride out a tsunami and the banker fretting over embezzling money just before impact. Wonderful additions!

There are also weak points too. Niven and Pournelle like to put lots of characters into their stories. Its easy to loose track of the less important characters. Another issue I had with the novel was it fell behind the times technology wise. I also thought the authors had civilization break down waaaay too fast. As best I can tell, the cannibals start eating people about a week after impact. Dont believe it. Still, these are not the worst problems in my opinion.

The worst to me is I beleive the authors focus on the wrong groups. While the cannibals are utterly repulsive, the feudalists are not much better. I could not work up any sympathy for a group that so callously threw people out in the cold if they were deemed useless. In fact, I found my self hoping the cannibals would overrun them and eat them. The two bands I found most intriguing were the nuke plant group and the boy scouts who go wild. While the power plant people get some attention, you see nothing of the "Lord of the Flys" style scout troop. Too bad.....



Rating:
Summary: wow... didn't think it was that bad...
Review: Alright, admittedly it has been a long time since I read the thing, but I really didn't think it was all that bad. In fact, when I read it, I actually thought it was pretty good... maybe it's due for a re-read from a new and older perspective.

Rating:
Summary: Despite a slow start, a great book
Review: It took me a good while to kick-start this book. I started it and went very slowly. There were a lot of characters and the story was not very clear. I almost gave up on it...
The nice surprise came in Chapter 2. All the events described when and after the comet falls were fully absorbing. This book is great entertaining. Its a little outdated (written in the 70s) but it does not matter. Just be patient and "ride" the first couple of hundred pages.

Rating:
Summary: Words can't describe how bad this is.
Review: This is the only book I've ever physically thrown in the trash. It does my heart good thinking of the maggots, worms, and infectious bacteria eating this book in the landfill right now. This, and I didn't even make it to the racist part.

It's unbelievable this has a four and a half star average. Am I the only person who doesn't like being patronized by a writer? Or in this case, two writers? It took two writers to come with something this offensively bad. Am I the only person with intelligence high enough that it is capable of being insulted? I don't even have a private education, and still I am stunned at how pedestrian, contrived, pandering, thin, one-dimensional, and stupid this excrement really is.

This book would have made a great satire of the genre. It would have been great if it was making fun of itself. In fact, it's so bad that I can't bring myself to discount that possibility entirely. But at the end of the day, these writers were actually serious.

I like a disaster flick/book as much as the next guy. I took a guilty delight in Deep Impact. And Armageddon made Deep Impact look like the English Patient. At least the makers of Armageddon never intended to make a good movie. They intended to make a lot of money. I can respect that. The best I can do is give the writers of Lucifer's Hammer the benefit of the doubt and assume that they never intended to write a decent book. If that's the case, they succeeded spectacularly.

I read as far into this book as I could stand, and I thought, as long as there are people who create material like this, and actually think they're doing something good, and as long as there are people who love it and give it five star reviews, oh please God, please send a real comet into planet earth and put us out of our misery.