Hammer even invites the kid to stay at his mansion , all expenses paid of course by the millionaire and see the local attractions.

The last third gives us a battle between our community of civilized people and the evil army of cannibals. Another "nuclear" option shows up in the climax of the book when the main characters resort to homemade poison gas to stop the cannibal army.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.

Stereotypes, clichés, overwrought writing, and some real interesting ideas about race, men and women. The Night That Never Ends: In addition to the dust and debris thrown into the upper atmosphere, the massive amounts of water vaporized by the ocean impacts cause a perpetual 100% cloud cover (at one point in the book, it rains for a month) and thus a perpetual twilight. But still, this is a book that you will enjoy if you like the premise and don't pay much attention to subtext, but will probably annoy you if you do notice things like all the black people become cannibals! You end up caring for these people and following their tales which all interweave, and it is this connectivity that is the backbone of Niven's good, oh ok great Novel. So on one level it's still a very readable and engrossing book, but there is no getting away from the political and social ideas that have caused such a fuss.

Although using the perspective of many allows for the reader to understand the largeness of the scope of disaster, it makes emotional connection with any one character almost impossible. Never mind that billions of people are dead and the good guys have effectively organized themselves into a feudal holding. Several of the New Brotherhood's leaders (including Armitage and the cannibalistic Sergeant Hooker) survive the final battle. He has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect, which are unusual in comic books. The remnants of a United States Army unit, commanded by Sergeant Hooker, resorts to cannibalism to survive.

I neither read nor watched – I’m sure they were well done, but the subject matter wasn’t one I want to embrace – there’s plenty to read out there. Sci-fi fans will probably think the book relatively weak in this area and would have hoped for much more depth in the science. Tim mentions in the epilogue that Forrester died over the winter, a direct result of those events being higher priority than manufacturing insulin. It got a bit tedious - and quite sexist (repeated mentions of man's 'natural instinct' to 'protect the female' coming out, and how 'women's lib' is now defunct), with a few dashes of racism.The experiential timeline is compressed, and within a relatively short amount of time, a section of the population is reduced to cannibalism. But I was a fan of books such as On the Beach – and Lucifer’s Hammer pointed out that not making an effort would lead to societies where ‘rat-catching’ was the prize to be aimed for by the young. Forrester actually has the know-how to be able to do it, but even when he makes it to Jellison's ranch, defending it and the power plant from the New Brotherhood means he has no time to do so at first. The gigantic comet has slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high.