veryone wants to live forever, no less Tim Hamner. But Hamner's chances are better than most. A serious amateur astronomer, backed by a serious family fortune, Hamner catches the tiger by the tail when he spies a previously undiscovered comet. Hamner is an instant celebrity, for this big dinosaur-killer is hurtling post-haste towards Earth. Estimates as to how closely the comet will pass Earth collapse from a million kilometers to thousands then to hundreds then...
Although governments and scientists won't let on, it's clear that the comet will hit. Many of the commoners don't need confirmation. Doomsday instincts kick in and folks start to stockpile guns, food and medicine.
The comet, now called "the Hammer," divides into many deadlier pieces just before it pummels the planet. Europe is gone entirely, the U.S.S.R. mostly, and tsunamis lay waste to all major coasts. The Soviet Union, with a little assistance from the crippled U.S., launches a tactical nuclear strike against China, which retaliates in kind.
The world is now silent and dark. Communications, electricity, law and government are gone. In their place: water, wreckage and wraiths, as inland seas are formed over continents, and everywhere the recently civilized wade through the boneyard of the old world. Tim Hamner, comet astronomer, has survived, now not a celebrity but a death-bringer. His tiger swallowed and spit him out more or less intact, but this new, half-dead world can kill him just as quick. Already aldermen, housewives, mechanics and preachers are reaching to superstition and brutality for comfort and security in the wastelands.
A slow beginning
In the foreword of this reissue, authors Pournelle and Niven state their aim was to populate their doomsday opera with real people. Sadly, character description and development are not in evidence at all. The dramatis personae (and there are many) are as flat and sterile as 1908 Tunguska topsoil, indistinguishable from one another.
Because the handling of the novel's characters is clumsy and ineffective, the first third of the novel is rather boring and difficult to traverse. The characters are also afflicted in no small way by stereotyping. There are shallow, macho-types laminated in testosterone; a black-led, rag-tag, fugitive fleet of martial cannibals; and female-types who define themselves mainly by the men they sleep with (or wish to bed). In a rapture of originality, the one patently strong female character is described as "one cold bitch." These dinosaurs sorely need an Armageddon-asteroid.
Readers who have the patience or masochism to trudge through this muck will be reimbursed, albeit not in full. Once the comet hits, the novel starts to move, and things actually get interesting. One of the novel's stronger suits is its illustration of the breakdown of civilization: the dispossessed gather into marauding enclaves, huddle in fragile strongholds, or lose themselves in the diaspora. The many descriptions of survivalist mentality (fill the pool up with fresh water; buy up all the roast beef and turn it into beef jerky; safekeep important books like The Way Things Work in plastic baggies and squirrel them away) do more to convey the profundity of aftermath than anything else.
