Lucifer's Hammer is a catastrophe novel about how humanity may not have time to wipe out the planet on its own: "And if I ever hear 'aerosol cans' or 'ozone' again, I will track you down wherever you are hiding and watch you on your knees," Randall declared. Quite a fresh thought even at our age of 21, at 77 it must have elicited a storm of emotions ranging from absolute support to furious indignation.
Laurence van Cott Niven's best known work is Ringworld(Ringworld, #1) (1970), which received the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. The creation of thoroughly worked-out alien species, which are very different from humans both physically and mentally, is recognized as one of Niven's main strengths.
However, according to the authors, the first thing humanity will do on the ruins of civilization is to kill its own kind. Apparently, in order to finish destroying everything that luckily survived. China and the Soviets generally exchanged nuclear strikes. On the sly, as they say. This, I suppose, is the American dream, so that the communists would mutually annihilate.
I will not hide it, disaster novels and dystopias are not among my top ten literary preferences, but the main thing that turned me off this book: the propaganda, rampant and merciless. The only bastion of civilization, of course, is the United States. The Soviet cosmonautics (according to the authors) is a Spanish shame, our cosmonauts are well aware of this and are ashamed of themselves. It comes to the phrase: "Somebody had to bring dinner", - in the sense that neither Soviet equipment, nor Soviet pilots are capable of more.
The second annoying moment - the lingering of events. Seriously, the comet is discovered at the very beginning of the book, and it only collapses in two hundred pages and no one - that is, no one at all - is prepared for the fall. No survivalists, no bunkers, no Cruz-style training. The only public reaction is the so-called "Hammer Horror" - Americans have bought up canned goods and frozen vegetables.
It gets so absurd that two seemingly intelligent people, archaeologists, speculating about the cyclical nature of disasters that wipe out civilizations, go to the most dangerous point on the planet, sit down, sorry, ass on a volcano and watch a comet fall. The comet falls, seismic activity expectedly awakens the volcano, the scientists die. I really have to feel sorry for these two Darwin Prize candidates?!
The politicians remain in place in a valley that is sure to flood so as not to "create panic"-the guys had plenty of time to take action against panic and looting. But the feeling of something native, yes: winter had come suddenly. Even more surprisingly, all the families of politicians and scientists also find themselves in dangerous areas, apparently so that there is somewhere to rush heroically, overcoming terrible obstacles and losing comrades.
No pity for comrades, though. There was not a single hero that I would have regretted, although in general I am very impressionable. Whether the problem is the translation and the simple text, or the characters are too clumsily hammered out with a jigsaw... And the fact that Maureen, the senator's daughter, slept with four men at the beginning of the book, before the comet fell, and remained an honest girl, did not make her a bad character to me, or a good one.
What about Maureen! Sexy maniac and stalker Fred Lauren remained a gray, meaningless image. A slight sense of nastiness, nothing more. And his quick, relatively easy death left only bewilderment. What he was or was not - nothing. But the authors are not too lazy to stick it stamp on the theme: all mental illness comes from childhood. And this very childhood to prescribe, which had no effect on my perception of the character.
I read that the novel was "full of good, solid science." And even that the "pro-tech pitch might alienate some readers." And I hoped that the science would "draw me out" - I wasn't interested in the characters, maybe I'd be drawn to the progression? Alas. Well, what faith can there be in the science described in the book, when an unfinished nuclear power plant unshakably withstands almost a direct hit from fragments of the comet, then the earthquake, tsunami, and then even an attack by insane survivors. It is good to believe in the reliability of nuclear power plants, but we all remember Fukushima.
And books and textbooks, piled in a sewer, which it was possible to find (after the flood and earthquake), pull out and read - this is even more not about science. Books, they do not always survive a collision with the Russian Post, not so much with the Hammer of Lucifer. However, that scarier, of course, full confidence can not be.
But about the cosmonauts, again, I cannot calm down. "Apollo-Soyuz" I understand why they flipped: the role of the Americans in the tandem is not just leading, the Russians in general turned out to be just deliverers of food (and, of course, black caviar). But here's the fact that the two-person Soyuz descent vehicle, according to the authors, can easily bring four people back to Earth!..! Pizza deliverers turn into cabs: why not give good people a ride home? And of course they land where they need to, and of course, no help and rehabilitation is required after landing ... No, son, it's not pro-science, it's science fiction.
Describing the toilet problems of astronauts is from the category of "hear the bell, but don't know where it is". The main problem of American astronauts in reality was not with "pee", but with "poop", and they regularly asked the Russians, because our model of space toilets is more perfect. But neither Niven nor Purnell had the heart to say that, so it came down to some dirty jokes about how a female Soviet cosmonaut pees.
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