Hmm, quick prediction: The melodramatic or groan-inducing stuff Just Asking Questions mentioned in post #7 which I haven’t read yet, I’m guessing is Harvey’s son Andy comes riding out of the mountains with his scout troop like the Riders of Rohan, saving our hero and his father from certain destruction at the hands of the New Brotherhood! Its sappy, its unbelievable, its perfect!
Maybe the book would have been better if Heinlein had written a 70-page critique of the first draft, as he did for Mote in God’s Eye.
Maybe not.
I had forgotten the bits about the Scout Troop. IIRC, isn’t there a rather oogie coda to their story involving them hooking up with a Girlscout Troop?
The more I am reminded of from the book, due to this thread, the more I am revising my already low opinion of the book downward.
Yes. The stalwart members of Boiskout tribe choose mates from the Grrlskout tribe. I believe the most mature Grrlskout is warming the Boiskout chief’s sleeping roll. :rolleyes:
It’s not just 40 years old. It was written in the seventies. It’s hard to have a high opinion of anything from that decade, especially if it intersects with the mood of that hour that pre-teens and younger teens were small adults entitled to swear, smoke dope and have sex… with their parents’ benign approval, if not WITH their parents. There are a number of movies from that era with kids who’d be paddled, sent to military school or locked up in any other decade.
I don’t get this ire for the boy scouts/girl scouts group conjoining. Societal rules are mostly what prevents stuff like that from happening. Society was severely disrupted.
Obviously, I’m a big fan of the book and rate it as slightly more entertaining than Ringworld and way more so than the droning and repetitive Dune.
It was presented not as an inevitable outcome of societal collapse, but as A Good Thing. Like the scene with the man slapping his son, I came away with the feeling that the authors liked the idea that the comet was destroying civilization. They were grooving on the idea of being able to have a girlscout share their sleeping bags or strike an upset child. I read it in 1977, so there may be more examples but I am not willing to reread a pile of drek that thick just for this thread.
Oh god yes! Anything by John Varley in the “Eight Worlds” series. A very hedonistic series. One aspect is adults physically (but not mentally) regressed to a young age like 6, where they grow up with a “student”, that they teach how to be a responsible adult. This includes having sex with the student.
I think I was a bit squicked out by the implications of that when it was current. Now with modern sensibilities it sounds like “torches and pitchforks” material.
As I recall, the opposing POV was given by Harvey Randall, the father of one of the boys who went up to visit after the merger between the troops.
And anyway, just because a character believes something does not necessarily mean the authors endorse it.
FWIW, I thoroughly enjoyed the book when I read it for the first time in 1987 or so, and I have re-read it several times since.
Alright, finished the book, and reported the thread to change it to open spoilers now. If you want to keep doing boxed, that’s fine, but its probably easier to talk about it openly
<shakes fist at Yog> You can unspoil. But *we *control the discussion!
Can you expand a little why it might not be good to jump into? I’ve heard of Ringworld a lot on this board and I’m interested partly because of that and partly because of Halo. If its a self-contained story, then I have no problems reading it if he explains stuff
I liked Dune! It was a really great book, I can see why its a classic. But it was about a hundred pages too long. Lucifer’s Hammer, in my opinion, would be well served being a hundred pages longer so I can see more of what happened afterwards
From what I can remember about the tone of the Boy/Girl scout coupling, there was really only one guy, the adult in the group, Harvey Randall’s former neighbor Gordie Vance, who was actively happy about his situation or glad to not go back. If you’ll recall, this guy was going to commit suicide while hiking, throw himself off a cliff because of the bad bank deals that he was involved in. He didn’t want to go to jail and didn’t see any way out of it. When Harvey finds them and tries to bring them back, Gordie tells him that he’s not going back with him and expresses worry that if he went back to civilization, to Jellison’s camp, they were going to hang him for statutory rape like the 4 guys they hung at City Hall the week before for some unspecified crime. To the boys and girls, and especially Harvey’s son Andy, he said they were too grown up. Out here, they were men and women in charge of their own destiny. If Harvey took Andy back, he’d be a child to him again. Andy wasn’t very talkative during all this, but they voted not to go back.
So looks like I was wrong about a lot of my predictions. No Andy coming back, no Jellison dying before the big battle, no George Christopher taking over (honestly, that part about Marie Vance essentially choosing him for influence and power came out of nowhere), and the Stronghold is safe as ever and stronger. Our hero’s kind of make it
The epilogue was way too short though, and set too soon after the events of the rest of the book. Sure, we saw the jet, but I want to know who’s in charge now. They hinted that Al Hardy wasn’t going to make it past the winter, they didn’t tell you what happened to him. Neither George Christopher, or Maureen and Harvey.
One weird thing I noticed, during the epilogue. They mentioned prisoner island, and how Comrade and Hooker were teaching the POWs how to grow stuff and be useful. How the hell did Hooker end up there? He was commander of the New Brotherhood! He didn’t get caught in the mustard gas battle, did they pick him off during the defense of the nuclear plant later? And I was sad that Alim Nassar’s last act wasn’t to stab Armitage in the neck, I had a tiny bit of hope that he would, being lectured to while he was dying.
Overall, I’m satisfied with the density of stuff that’s happening in this book. Like I mentioned somewhere else, this book could have been a hundred pages longer and told us what happened. But at least every one of its pages was packed with people doing stuff, or stuff being done to people. There’s no long, spacious passages where nothing happens. I guess with the end of the world, you don’t have time to just sit around.
It’s entirely self-contained. You get a little more “richness” if you read Neutron Star first, but nothing even remotely major. Although it does give you some more detail and some of the “Why”'s" you might have about things at the start of Ringworld.
I liked Lucifer’s Hammer, but I thought Footfall was awful. The self-indulgent idea of science fiction writers as the world’s saviors made me want to hurl. But more than that, it’s just boring compared to Lucifer’s Hammer.
Crimoney, I forgot that bit from Footfall. I read Lucifer’s Hammer and Footfall both at my brother’s urging, as he was a fan. Footfall made me swear off the authors for good, and nearly drove me away from science fiction. Luckily, Gene Wolfe saved me.
Per the OP’s request, I changed the thread title from “Boxed spoilers” to “Open spoilers” – go nuts!
Favorite scene, now rendered particularly stupid by recent real tsunamis: the surfer.
Yeah, I mentioned that above by the rather elliptical final phrase of the passage. Since we’re now completely spoiled, I’ll spell it out:
The surfer dude catches an enormous wave from part of the comet-fall and manages to be the last rider standing as the wave crest carries him further and further inland towards LA.
Until he sees the skyscraper coming at him “like the world’s biggest flyswatter.” Heh. There’s a visual you’ll carry with you… the movie wouldn’t even have to show the conclusion. Just the surfer’s O Shit face would serve.
That’s how I and pretty much everyone I have ever discussed it with envisioned “tidal waves” until we saw what they’re really like… It’s certainly a fun visual though.
Surely it depends on the amplitude of the wave. I’d think that a large impactor could in fact produce something surfable.
I read this book for the first time a few months ago and generally enjoyed it, but then I’m easily pleased so take that for what its worth.
My favourite of this genre though is The Hermes Fall by John Baxter, though I read it probably fifteen years ago there are still scenes and imagery that stick in my mind and its almost poetic in places.
One of the astronauts sent to emplace a nuke on board in an attempt to divert the asteroid stays behind to set the device off manually, he only succeeds in nudging it from a direct hit on the continental United States into an impact in the Atlantic, with horrific consequences…one of the more memorable moments depicts him suddenly having a flip of perspective from gently floating up towards the Earth to dropping towards it at terrifying speed, the book was full of neat little touches like that
Regarding Lucifer’s Hammer I remember thinking while reading the build-up to and the final battle scenes that there aren’t many ‘causes’ that would make me take up arms but defending technological civilisation and ‘progress’ were one of them, I was surprised at how deeply and viscerally I felt that actually.