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Lucifer's Hammer

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Lucifer's Hammer

By: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
Narrated by: Marc Vietor
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About this listen

 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. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization.

But 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....

©1985 Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (P)2009 Audible, Inc. Adventure Fantasy Fiction Hard Science Fiction Science Fiction Classics

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Critic reviews

"Take your earthquakes, waterlogged condominiums, swarms of bugs, colliding airplanes, and flaming what-nots, wrap them up and they wouldn't match one page of Lucifer's Hammer for sweaty-palmed suspense." ( Chicago Daily News)
"Massively entertaining." ( Cleveland Plain-Dealer)
All stars
Most relevant
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).

Best-of genre

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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.)

Flawless

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What did you like most about Lucifer's Hammer?

The story kept moving and the various threads set up at the start of the story were woven into a believable whole towards the end.

What did you like best about this story?

A solid and reasonably detailed look at how the earth and humanity would be impacted by a comet strike. A fascinating topic to me and very well written by the authors.

Have you listened to any of Marc Vietor’s other performances? How does this one compare?

No, but his performance was good compared to other readers.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes, but that was pretty unrealistic given the 24.5 hours required for that!

Post-apocalyptic entertainment at its best!

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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.

An Older Story with Current Themes

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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.

Pretty good for a pre-silicon novel.

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