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: Niven and Pournelle really outdid themselves with this one. I went on to read the rest of Niven after plowing through this novel, but I never did read any of Pournelle's solo work. I still think that this novel was the best that either had written, even if I can't honestly say anything about Jerry's work.

A producer of television documentaries named Harvey Randall sees an opportunity for a series of prime time specials about the comet, with Kalva Soap as sponsor. Senator Arthur Jellison, the VIP of the party, sits on the Finance Subcommittee for Science and Aeronautics. His daughter Maureen Jellison has inherited a passion for the sciences from her father but struggles to forge an identity of her own.I even had to set down the novel because the tears prevented me from reading through the meteor crashes or the tidal waves or the mud falling from the sky for weeks.

And that, I discovered, was the most significant problem with the story. 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. In Policeman, narration is provided first person, and although many of the projected responses to impact are exactly the same in both books, experiencing it through one man’s journey is far more profound and moving.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. 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. As Lucifer’s Hammer progresses, comet survivors look to existing remnants of government to guide them. The lesson? Strong politicians and their supporters will have more influence over what happens following a disaster than they did before the disaster. Face time with politicians at all levels or campaign contributions before the disaster go a long way. Adversity Forces You to Grow Up Fast Despite the abridged feeling I got toward the end of the book, there were many more aspects of Lucifer's Hammer that I loved: