Kenneth McKinley's Reviews > Lucifer's Hammer

A classic in the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic sub-genre that has been sitting on my TBR shelf staring at me for way too long. This 640 page brick is a beefy tome with many slow-burn threads that play out, interweave with each other multiple times. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a story this size written in the late 1970s.

A comet discovered by amateur astronomy enthusiasts is headed this way in what promises to be a close fly-by of earth and one heck of a display in the sky. As it gets closer, the scientists calculations show that the near-miss is going to be more and more narrow. As a reader, you already know what’s going to happen. Where Lucifer’s Hammer shines is how the characters/society reacts.

Lucifer’s Hammer is all about how humanity handles the impending crises they’re about to thrust into. Watching a vibrant and diverse society wiped out on a global scale and the few stragglers left try to pick up the pieces when all the odds are against them slowly ratchets up the level of dread, despair, and hopelessness of this new world. As a reader, I continuously questioned what I would do if I were put in the same situations. How would I react to amount of death and destruction, the lack of basic supplies, and the inability to improve my situation past that of the Middle Ages. In a story of this size and magnitude, I’m sure there are some liberties taken with the science, or inaccuracies that you might expect from 1977 knowledge. None of that bothered me. If I had any knocks on the story, it would be that too many characters were too similar, and I found myself having to continually ask, “Okay. Who is this person again?” But, all in all, I can see why Lucifer’s Hammer is considered a must read for fans of apocalyptic fiction, and I would agree.


4.5 two-hundred foot tsunamis out of 5