Lucifer's Hammer

I really loved this book with some major reservations. Overall, the story was thoroughly engaging. I have always enjoyed Niven's somewhat dry style. The Earth is struck by an almost world ending meteor. We see the lead up to the strike and then the slow recovery of civilization in one small area (Southern California). The major flaw is that the only group of black characters in the book just happen to become a roving band of cannibals. It's not unreasonable to think that some people might resort to cannibalism, but to make the only black characters the only cannibals... If you simply make this group a mixed group it in no way changes the overall story but makes it far less racist.

I probably would have spent less time on the characters' romantic entanglements, which bloated the book and added little if anything to the narrative. However, overall a thoughtful look at how we would cope with a drastically altered post-apocalypse Earth.

WHAT
The everyday life of the people that will eventually survive a cataclysmic event. They go to parties, reflect about love, life, work... yawn!

ANALYSIS
This books actively tries to be the most boring possible novel for me. Imagine you reading about me describing one day of my life, about every exciting thing I'm doing and seeing, like talking to my mom and driving to work. Then I would call this a science fiction novel. That's how I felt about this book.

I didn't even got to the part where the comet would threaten Earth, it was 3 hours of nothing. No conflict, no action, no mystery, no fantasy, no fiction, no anticipation.

I strongly agree with the following comment:

“... reading hasn't been such a chore since Professional Nursing Practice Foundations and Concepts. And in the fiction world, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.”
Carol


Read 2:41 / 24:31 11%

The first half of this book was fairly good - Niven did a good job of setting up characters, and the looming threat of a giant comet strike is handled in a believable, realistic way. After the comet strikes, though, the book kind of devolves into right-wing wank fantasy.

To start off, everyone who's not in the American South either dies off immediately, or is not worth spending any significant time on - the Soviets and Chinese start a nuclear war with each other immediately after the comet strikes; Europe is entirely washed away over the course of a single page; the Israelis and Palestinians find each other to mutual destruction within a paragraph.

Even looking within the parts that do survive, the same sort of devolution is shown - women are treated like property and married off for political considerations, racism is completely socially accepted, and in one bizarre moment Islam is equated with cannibalism.

The only redeemable things about the book by the end are two of the characters: Tim Hamner, the playboy amateur astronomer who becomes a hero, and Harry the Mailman, who refuses to let a little thing like the end of the world keep him from his duty of delivering the mail.