"Lucifer's Hammer" - July 2020 BOTM

[Jim]

Rosemarie wrote: "I think that the book is well thought out and I read it much faster than I thought I would due to its length. It was a great read!"

I was also concerned by the length. By the end, I wanted more, though. Wow.

[[deleted user]]

I have to politely disagree with Rosemarie in that I don't think this book was at all well thought out. The first 160 pages or so introduced us to a lot of characters, situations, and scenarios that I think won't arise again and went absolutely nowhere. It looks to me like some of the sloppiest writing in terms of plot I have ever seen. I'll be happy to list the many dangling plot threads in order of importance in my review.

I am now to page 377, almost the two thirds mark, and the plot seems to be starting to coalesce around Senator Jellison's ranch. The central question or theme of the book looks like it's going to be what is man's (I make no apology for use of this gender- specific term because it so far appears to be only men who are making the consequential decisions) responsibility to his fellow men in situations of increasingly scarce resources to share? We have faced this situation before in the Dark Ages of Europe and their answer was the arrangement of society we call feudalism. Were N&P aware and conscious of this as they wrote their book? I wonder to what degree they will arrive at the same answer / arrangement. We had Christianity in feudal Europe too. The command to treat "the stranger" in accordance with Christ's teachings were given as short a shrift in feudal times as N&P's religious representative at Jellison's ranch is also, so far.

There are a lot of Niven experts here, I discovered, when I earlier shared what books of his were available in my county's library system. May I pose a few questions as I meanderingly read my way to the conclusion? If I ask which of the top 100 SF authors is most likely to write a book in collaboration with another author, Niven's name comes to mind as number one. Does anyone know why this is, why Niven so likes to collaborate, as he did for this book? Maybe he has been asked this and commented on it before. Does anyone have any idea which parts of this book might have been Niven written, and which Pournelle?

[Ed]

Kyk wrote: "... If I ask which of the top 100 SF authors is most likely to write a book in collaboration with another author, Niven's name comes to mind as number one ...."

That may be true (though I don't know). Pohl also used co-authors a lot. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore co-wrote almost always; they were a married couple. The hows and whys I have no information on.

Googling for "science fiction coauthors" was useless for me.

[Jim]

I'll agree with Rosemarie, I think the book was very well laid out. The huge cast of characters give a great view of life, attitudes, & motivations at the time then come together very well as the book progresses. I'm not usually a fan of such a big cast, but these were all well enough drawn that I had no trouble keeping them straight, even when they disappeared for quite a while.

I like this kind of book, though. That always helps. Some of my favorite SF books are similar. The book I currently nominated One Second After is almost too similar. I kind of wish I'd nominated something else now. This one was far more up to date than I recalled. It didn't show its age nearly as much as Alas, Babylon or Earth Abides.

I know nothing about how they worked together. IIRC, Niven was an author first & Pournelle came to him. Niven was also independently wealthy, so writing was a love, not really a job.

[[deleted user]]

I took a short break to read Larry Niven's first published story (just four pages long) here in the December 1964 issue of If: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PAlL.... The story is famous for the science mistake made that was the main conceit of the story. I don't blame Niven for that; the error wasn't discovered until late 1964 when the new scientific discovery was made that disproved a tenet of the already written story. His science is sloppy in other places though, i.e. it's the pancreas not the liver that controls blood sugar; and helium as a basis for life? I really doubt it. Helium is so stable--no chance for ionization or electron trading, etc.

The story itself is pretty decent though. It's easy to see the signs of Niven's greatness to come. The two characters, Eric and Howie, are well-developed, unusual, and interesting. Clearly a lot has happened off-camera that I would like to know more about, especially to Eric.

All right. Break over. Back to the monthly read.

[Jim]

Kyk wrote: "I took a short break to read Larry Niven's first published story (just four pages long) here in the December 1964 issue of If..."

That was good, Kyk. Thanks. Interesting in a lot of ways. It was published 5 years before The Ship Who Sang, too.

[[deleted user]]

It's not only Niven's first published story, it's the first story set in his 'Known Space' setting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known_S....

I just ordered The World of Ptavvs, so that I could read the next entry in the series. They say there is a 1965 short story by that name, but the March 1965 World of Tomorrow issue it appears in lists it as a novel and it's 90 double-spaced small print magazine pages long. So I don't think a short story version truly exists.

[Ed]

There is a list on this site. Yours seems longer.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/5022...

I did read "Ringworld" long ago. Maybe the only Niven I've read.

[[deleted user]]

The most complete list of Known Space books is at the bottom of that Wikipedia page I linked to. That's why I removed mine. Why duplicate?

[Oleksandr]

I finished the novel and I liked it. Since I've started reading SF as a teen, I always liked the trope of clever scientist finds way to use their knowledge to improve the situation, which can be traced back at least to Robinson Crusoe and was actively used in SF since at least Jules Verne.

It is also one of the earliest SF with large cast I guess, this became commonplace in fantasy later, but in older SF usually there were a few major characters.

I guess the long 'pre-fall' part was an attempt to interest general fiction readers - it is intentionally not extremely SF, so to hook people from outside the genre

[[deleted user]]

There was a trend in the 1970s in the USA for disaster movies. The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, The Andromeda Strain, Earthquake, The Hindenberg, Airport, Airport 1975, even Meteor (1979), and others I can't remember. This book looks to me like an attempt to cash in on the genre, not that making money is a bad thing. I just think Niven's Known Space series is where he put his real intellectual effort.

The Soviet characters were treated as caricatures, weren't they? The refusenik who is critical of the regime, and the party loyalist who all but sings "Mother Russia Forever" at every opportunity. I'm surprised the stereotypes pass you by without comment Oleksandr. It's not only the Russian characters that are 2-dimensional either, come to think of it. How about the African American gang/tribe who join the cannibals at the first opportunity? (The one good thing in my life, Has gone away, I don't know why.--Wait, not those cannibals.) Or our very self-conscious first black astronaut? Helpless trophy wife homemaker Loretta who gets herself ax-murdered within minutes of Hammerfall?

[Oleksandr]

Kyk wrote: "I'm surprised the stereotypes pass you by without comment Oleksandr. "

I'm used to stereotypes and I was more interested in say breakdown of the USSR: "Well, too much of Great Russia was under the strike. What will be happening now, as the Ukrainians, the Georgians, all the subject people, realize that Moscow no longer holds their lives?" If you look at real life, for many experts the national nature of breakdown was a surprise.

As for stereotypes/roles, I highly doubt this book unchanged could have been written today: role of women, blacks, mocking environmentalists...

[Jim]

I'm not sure disaster movies were much more prevalent in the 70s than any other time, but don't forget "The Omega Man" (1971) another end of the world movie based on I Am Legend from the 50s. It was also done as "The Last Man on Earth" starring Vincent Price in the early 60s. That was the best version, IMO. We won't discuss the crappy movie Wil Smith did.

I thought the caricatures helped with the large cast of characters. It made them easy to remember & allowed the authors to show the various reactions in a way that made sense, but also didn't get weighed down by a lot of extraneous explanations: 2 Russians & 2 opposing points of view. It got the point across in an entertaining, succinct way.

The black gang only joined the cannibals when they could because they were desperate. They had planned to avoid them until they saw an in through Hooker & that seemed a lot better than starving & being whittled down by a surprisingly hostile & well armed country side. Their grand plans of power were crushed, so they went with what they could find.

[Jim]

Oleksandr wrote: "As for stereotypes/roles, I highly doubt this book unchanged could have been written today: role of women, blacks, mocking environmentalists..."

I think it could, but it would be blasted by bad press. People don't want to look at reality, but at what they think should be. That was as true in the 1950s as it is today & probably every other age. Right now, the intellectual climate of political correctness is as stifling & ridiculous as the ideas of eugenics were a century ago.

[Ed]

Jim wrote: "I'm not sure disaster movies were much more prevalent in the 70s than any other time ..."

I think they were. It certainly felt like a fad. But I don't feel like doing a big investigation on it.

There have been Sci-Fi stories about an asteroid or comet causing widespread disaster going way back to the early days. But almost all of those that I can think of involved only a handful of survivors. The 70's movies tended to have large casts where we could watch different sorts of people reacting in different ways to the disaster.

(The one really old planetary disaster I can think of with a large cast is In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells. In that one, the tail of a comet passes through the atmosphere causing all the nitrogen to convert to some sort of happy gas causing people all over the world to embrace peace, polyamory and socialism.)

[Dan]

You can't forget The Wanderer, which also focuses on survivors mainly in California during an expected planetary body, though in Leiber's case it's an alien-controlled "rogue planet" disrupting gravity as it tears our moon apart.

Initially, Niven indicated Lucifer's Hammer was about how aggressive aliens would use a comet to soften up the planet's defenses but cooler heads prevailed and they dropped that whole angle because the novel was already too lengthy. If that had been the case, the similarities to Leiber's novel would have been stronger. Between the two, I believe N&P do a much better job at creating the tension and exploring the catastrophe; Leiber's treatment suffers from some really dated and odd stereotypes.

[Carol]

Lucifer's Hammer was a very enjoyable and exciting read. It was kind of dated in it's portrayal of women and African American's, but it is a product of it's time.

[Jim]

It was kind of ahead of its time since, except for one flight by Valentina Tereshkova, neither group went to space until the 1980s.

[Carol]

It was ahead of it's time in a way. It was a product of it's time in a way because it brings me back to the days when men and women were at war about "Women's Lib." You could not even walk through a door back then without either women getting mad at men for holding the door for them, or men not holding the door and giving a speech about why they were not holding the door. These days we just walk through the door and don't worry about it.(It's a real time saver.) I had to laugh when one character said "Women't Lib is dead and I'm glad." In an up to date version of this novel the women would be more mixed in as engineers, leaders, etc and there wouldn't be an emphasis on gender. It seems like the authors might have been sneaking in their views on that whole battle of the sexes thing that was so big back then.