The first third of the book is of course the lead-up to the impact. So, in this book, Niven and Pournelle take out the planet with a comet.

Just bring on the end of the world, baby! I liked The Stand and The Passage and Swan Song and I Am Legend (all of them, even the Will Smith version). In another respect, Lucifer's Hammer is a great story that, unusually for science fiction, doesn't show its age much where technology is concerned, if only because after a civilization-ending comet strikes the Earth, 1977 won't look a lot different than 2013. But this is serious White Dude sci-fi, steeped in sub-Heinleinian 70s tropes. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are hard SF writers, and I have read quite a few of their collaborations, from Footfall to Fallen Angels, and enjoyed most, with reservations. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle aren't that bad, but they definitely used the opportunity of a comet striking the Earth and destroying global civilization to kill off a few other bugbears of theirs as well, like women's lib and environmentalism. There's this attitude I see a lot among the more hard-core survivalists or 'preppers,' sometimes thinly-veiled and sometimes barely concealed at all: They talk about how bad it's going to be and how terrible and tragic TEOTWAWKI will be, but they obviously can't wait for civilization to fall so they can start shooting people and collecting wimmins. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization.īut 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. Cities were turned into oceans oceans turned into steam. The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high.

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven