Lucifer's Hammer

Disaster fiction at its best. Lucifer's hammer spends exactly the right amount of time building toward the cataclysm, and then continues to grip the reader all the way through. A page turner, so to speak, which I find rare for a book of this length.

(Also, personally, this satisfies my itch for post apocalyptic fiction, too, with the added fun of seeing how the 'apocalypse' happens.)

The advantage of a lot of sci-fi and fantasy is that, as it is set outside of it's own time, it usually dates well. This book however feels very much like a product of the early seventies and this is really apparent in the attitudes of the characters and the roles that women play. The pace is slow and the characters are not particularly interesting. After five hours of listening I decided that I didn't care if any of these people got squished by a comet and hit delete.

Science fiction does not usually age well, and this epic written before mobile phones, internet and laptops is strange and hard to get used to initially. But read in the same way as H.G.Wells or other historic science fiction it does pretty well. The introduction of the characters is somewhat long winded, but once the action starts it's a rip roaring listen. I liked the ideas behind the post apacalypse survival stuff suggesting how quickly humanity could return to the laws of the jungle. It has a few holes in the plot, but not enough to affect it in any great sense. Recommended.

The first third of this book is pretty boring. Once things start to happen then the next third starts to become interesting as they realise what's going to happen and deal with the initial impact.

It's the final third which gets good.

This a story of the time! Tsunamis and earthquakes, whilst triggered this time by a meteor shower, gives a powerful image of what would happen. It's scary stuff, because it is based on scientific facts and we can all see just how devastating such an event would be. Scary also is how soon people revert to looting, violence and the law of physical might. It is survival of the fittest all over again. You cannot help thinking that we really have not moved very far forward in our evolution. It will make you think about much we rely on technology that is fragile and useless when fuel is not available. How good would any of us be in building from scratch? Where would the raw materials come from? What would you do with the raw materials anyway?
I certainly want to read more books from this legendary duo and luckily Audible has them available.

I enjoyed this book very much, I liked the way it plays out in the end, it wasn?t a happy end or sad but I could imagine it happing this way, worth getting.

I saw this book and the narrater and knew it must be good. The many strands are woven together in unexpected ways. It is not until the last page that it all comes together and it leaves you wanting more. My kind of book. Not the armeggedon you are expecting.

I keep coming back to this book again and again. It's brilliantly written and a pleasure to read. The story is told from several different viewpoints and the characters all feel real and believable. The disintegration of society and way people's lives change after the hammer are well done. A little 1970s-ish in places, but not in a bad way. I expect I'll be reading this again (and again).

Lucifers Hammer is an absolute classic in the "end of the world" genre. Dark, gritty, occasionally sexy and funny. Well drawn characters struggle with the destruction of the world they know and the affects this have on their accepted morality. Action packed, but also a book that challenges the readers ideas of right and wrong

Compelling stuff.

It seems a storyline that was killed by Hollywood with some pretty poor movies. But this book is much more entertaining than those well known dodgy movies with similar storylines, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. It has been emulated many times since published in one way or another, but in the disaster survival setting this book follows, it is a very good entertaining story. - Was interested to see that Arthur C Clarke published a book 20 years later called "Gods Hammer" about a comet strike on earth - wonder if they are similar in other ways - would like to get that on Audible... Recommend if you like "end of civilisation" stories with bad guys and heroes.