Yes, it's a bit dated, but it's also the first book of the comet/asteroid as the end of the world genre. With a memorable band of characters, a doomsday clock ticks down along with the explanation of the odds of the comet hitting the earth and shows these odds increasing at a steady, terrifying rate. So much effort went into making the impact of the comet hitting the Earth so tangible and believable, that I sat on the edge of my seat reading well into the night for a solid week.

The story is told from several different viewpoints and the characters all feel real and believable. Col Rick Delanty, a black astronaut, docking in Spacelab with two Soviet kosmonauts, Pieter Jakov and Leonilla Malik, M. Another "nuclear" option shows up in the climax of the book when the main characters resort to homemade poison gas to stop the cannibal army.The novel is Crichton-nesque in its foundation in real science and level of detail; they carefully build the story and it teaches you a lot about comets/meteors and the havoc they can cause. In Lucifer's Hammer, the only surviving nuclear power plant becomes potentially the salvation of civilization. I'm also a lot more inclined to be forgiving of certain attitudes in a 1959 book than in a 1977 book. However, I believe it is fundamentally an exciting thriller and a very impressive extended essay on the psychology and anthropology of humanity's behaviour in the face of global tragedy. A group of teenagers becomes this after taking over a farmstead, shooting dead another farmer in the process (and nearly killing Harry).

I am aware that the novel was written in the mid-seventies and aspects of it were in reaction to the changes that had swept through the United States in the previous fifteen years. 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. By the epilogue, the skies are beginning to clear again, though it still rains once or twice every day.

So there was a little bit of awareness there, and yeah, it was written in 1977, but still, one gets the distinct impression that when the Senator's aide reflects smugly to himself that one of the few good things about Hammerfall was that it put an end to "Women's lib," he's kind of speaking for the authors. After the strike the second story begins, and it is as riveting as the telling of the strike and preparation for it are.