Book Review; Lucifer's Hammer

If you run a Google search for some iteration of "best survival fiction", Lucifer's Hammer by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven is bound to show up somewhere on whatever list you dig up. That means that at some point, my path had to cross with this book because I think I'm on a trajectory to ultimately read every survival fiction book in existence. (That statement may be somewhat composed of hyperbole, but it's close.)

Speaking of trajectories; nice to read a book about the TEOTWAWKI being brought about by something as quaint as an asteroid strike. Nice to see a throwback to simpler, non-biologic end times. Maybe I'm just getting nostalgic for the late 80's, though. 

As nostalgic as I'm getting, this book is truly a throwback. It's set in the late 70's, way before the space shuttle missions, the Challenger disaster, lots of world events etc. This book still holds as being a pretty good bit of fiction, but it's in desperate need of an update to make it viable. It was kind of silly to read about cold-war politics, IBM punch cards, and other errata that have been abandoned well within my life-time. The characters make the black astronaut out to be a big deal! Please, the damned president is black, but that's not impressive to me because race just isn't an issue anymore. (It is to some, but that breed is dying out.) The engineers are proud of their pocket calculators, for pete's sake! This book would jump up 5% in my final review, easy, if it was simply updated.

Perhaps I'm being unfair. We don't ask editors to update Shakespeare, right? True enough, but Shakespeare this ain't, and if we're trying to make a story about how mankind adapts to a global tragedy through reason and scientific endeavor, perhaps it would be best (if you want to make loads more money), to make it relevant to current technology.

The book was otherwise written well, both technically and figuratively. It was nice to see a complex cast of characters with interweaving story lines, and wondering when it was that each character's line would intersect with another's. I do wish that Nivan and Pournelle had a better outlook on marriage, though. The way they describe it, it sounds like a trap.. The type of trap that you might expect to see gnawed limbs still hanging in, from desperate attempts to escape. Not having been married myself, I can't say for sure that this is true, but from my vicarious experiences it sure doesn't seem like it.

Still, it's a good read. I think I liked several other books better than this one, "The Old Man and the Wasteland" is an immediate example, though really only because I read it rather recently. Keeping that in mind, I think that Lucifer's Hammer gets a well deserved 70% on my scale.