Lucifer's Hammer

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This was written in 1977, way before three of the books I mentioned, but that don't mean you should settle. The entire first third is character introduction and buildup to the comet strike, then the second third is the strike and immediate aftermath, and the final section is the extended aftermath, including a kind of quick action climax that seems out of place compared to the general tone of suspense in the rest of the book. Tsunamis ravage every conceivable inch of exposed ocean coastline and upstream for miles along major rivers such as the Mississippi. Book has light bumping at the head and tail of the spine and at the tips of the two upper outside corners. Yamamoto, in her review for the Library Journal, said that the novel was full of "good, solid science, a gigantic but well developed and coordinated cast of characters, and about a megaton of suspenseful excitement".

I do think it will appeal to fans of The Stand, as to me that was also a period piece where women and people of color play very stereotypical roles. Some characteristics include: an insistence on referring to men by their last names only, flat characterization which tends to adhere to sterotypical gender roles, a focus on jobs/career as being a key part of identity, and a predominance of loveless relationships and adulterous affairs. It felt a little disjointed early on, not knowing why certain characters were being introduced and I did feel that possibly a little too much time was spent on the giving some of the less important characters backstory that didn't really seem to matter that much. I was humbled by the way they could turn so many flawed and normal people into an epic scene of pathos when they died. Randall and Hamner separately reach the valley and are allowed in (unlike almost all other refugees).He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962. I don't even think its unreasonable to think that post-apocalypse you would see groups tend to form around lines like race and/or religion, but again, the only non-white group. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival—a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known…. The narration is good, though sometimes the narrator lacks the ability to make voices easily distinguishable, but that's a minor gripe.

Even a joint Apollo-Soyuz mission sent into space to study the comet, now dubbed "The Hammer" by popular media, is unable to confirm or refute its potential collision with earth. In addition, they go to great lengths to describe the effect on the impact on individual characters, some of whom don't survive the experience. Yes its the Earth but he builds a fictional reality in the current time that is completely believable and you live it along with the characters, who you get to know really well through all 600+ pages. 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. Anything in the way is doomed Tim has to share the accolades with a teenage boy though, from Iowa named Brown.If you don't want to see βeta then select 'Always Hide βeta' and the comments will be hidden for you. Yes there was what happened in New Orleans after Katrina, but that behavior wasn't so common in other areas hit by Katrina. To the title page it is signed by both Niven and Pournelle as follows, "For Ed, best wishes, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Westercon, '80. Opposing our Brave Heroes is a diverse rampaging army made up of (I kid you not): Trade Unionists (damn commies! Oh, then there's the part about that cannibal army forming around a group of Black Nationalists who were going on a crime spree when the Hammer fell.

There’s the rich, eccentric discoverer of the comet, a documentary film maker, a senator, his daughter, a preacher, a secretary, a power plant executive, a stalker, the leader of a burglary ring, a mail carrier, various astronauts-in-training (of all of these, there are two black men, two white women and one Russian woman represented, and just guess who the secretary and the burglar represent)… I discovered there was a good reason for a list of characters at the beginning of the book. 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. 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. The finale is a drawn-out, multi-part big Showdown Battle - the opposing sides are: on one side, of course, our brave American ranchers.By the epilogue, the skies are beginning to clear again, though it still rains once or twice every day. Not just me, but my wife and kids have noticed that they've gotten somewhat odd in the past few years. He adapted his story Inconstant Moon for an episode of the television series The Outer Limits in 1996. Niven created an alien species, the Kzin, which were featured in a series of twelve collection books, the Man-Kzin Wars. Niven has written scripts for various science fiction television shows, including the original Land of the Lost series and Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which he adapted his early Kzin story The Soft Weapon.

But the fact that the band of cannibals just so happens to be the black people was quite off-putting. After the End: Unusually for this type of story, the cometary impact doesn't happen until a third of the way in. It weaves through the whole story, pulls you in, and you just ride along on the crest of an enjoyable wave of great writing. Col Rick Delanty, a black astronaut, docking in Spacelab with two Soviet kosmonauts, Pieter Jakov and Leonilla Malik, M.A solid and reasonably detailed look at how the earth and humanity would be impacted by a comet strike. The rest of the novel was all about sheer survival for those who were left, and I was pleasantly reminded of Brin's The Postman that outdid this novel for the post-apocalypse rebuilding, but props should always be given to those who did it first. Tim mentions in the epilogue that Forrester died over the winter, a direct result of those events being higher priority than manufacturing insulin.