Lucifer's Hammer

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Depopulation Bomb: The tidal waves caused by the initial cometary impact wipes out most of humanity. And it is to a degree: the world is forever altered after a comet enters the earth’s atmosphere and breaks apart, the huge pieces slamming into the West Coast. I suppose Niven and Pournelle's defense would be that not all of the New Brotherhood Army is black, and there is a black astronaut who's one of the good guys, and a few black farmers in the Stronghold are mentioned. It resolves itself by the end: Baker is killed defending the nuclear plant, and Christopher is wooed by Marie Vance, leaving Maureen and Harvey together. BookTrackr highlights the books you've read, your favorites, what you're reading now and what you want to read next.

as a sadistic recruiting tool, since cannibalism "indelibly marks a person, on their soul," making said persons permanent pariahs to any "decent" folk. Go on and be good peasants, safe peasants, superstitious peasants — or have worlds to conquer again. They get along quite well with the Americans, and for the most part, the four of them are more loyal to each other than to anyone else.I'm a Humanitarian: They started doing it just because they were starving and there was nothing else to eat, but eventually the New Brotherhood starts using forced cannibalism as an Initiation Ceremony. If you can't trust a scientist who in a science fiction thriller assures you that there's no danger, who can you trust? I kind of thought the people eating made more sense at the end of the plot line (as a ritual) than as a food solution, but, you’re right, it was bad. Early Niven/Pournelle collaboration about the physical and social aftermath of a giant meteor slamming into the Earth. Their expansion is blocked by the Stronghold, which is also their only serious rival in numbers and strength.

Later the glaciers come down from the north freezing all nothing can stop these monsters, for the few survivors a new Ice Age too. Malik points out there's already a mushroom cloud above Moscow, but Jakov is the one to notice that the Soviet missiles are headed to China, which actually launched first; the USSR requested, and received, an alliance with the US against this unprovoked attack, and dialogue indicates the alliance persists past the very short war. Cult Defector: Hugo Beck, who is forced to join the New Brotherhood Army after being ejected from the ranch community, eventually manages to flee — though not without having to kill his lover in the process. This final part of the book is almost like a satire of right-wing attitudes - except that it's painfully clear that it's in earnest.It felt a little disjointed early on, not knowing why certain characters were being introduced and I did feel that possibly a little too much time was spent on the giving some of the less important characters backstory that didn't really seem to matter that much.

A solid and reasonably detailed look at how the earth and humanity would be impacted by a comet strike.The rest of the novel was all about sheer survival for those who were left, and I was pleasantly reminded of Brin's The Postman that outdid this novel for the post-apocalypse rebuilding, but props should always be given to those who did it first. 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. When an amateur astronomer discovers a comet headed for Earth, the novel follows him, along with many other different storylines and characters, including astronauts who see the devastation from space.