I didn’t particularly like LH, nor did I hate it. I didn’t remember that it was the biggest SF novel released until Otaku brought it up, but now I recall thinking when I bought it (when it was first released in paperback) that it was the size of something Stephen King would write. I did enjoy Footfall and Mote better, though.
One thing about LH that I remember to this day: a woman (who’s name I cannot recall) gets killed in a particularly grusome way, and then has a speaking line about a hundred pages later. Brought me right out of the story, and I don’t think I ever got back into it again after that. I was looking for more glaring errors throughout the rest of the book.
Think Objectivism: on one hand, you’re supposed to be accountable only to yourself, without idolizing or following anyone else. On the other hand, you are supposed to worship at the feet of Ayn Rand and her coterie (as evidenced by her apologists.) If you don’t agree with her philosophy, you are automatically one of those mouth-breathing degenerates who couldn’t be trusted to tie your shoe laces…not that anyone else should be responsible for tying anyone’s shoelaces but their own, of course. :dubious:
What I get from Pournelle is a deep distrust of social government (yeah!) combined with a dogmatic instistence of living by some set of inviolate principles defined by the author(huh?). More specifically, Pournelle (and Heinlein, and Rand) like to present strawmen that are everything they object to, and then insist in applying a dichotomy; either you are in agreement with the author or with the obviously incorrect position of the strawman. A classic example is the oft-repeated Heinlein quote, “An armed society is a polite society,” as an argument for a personal right to possess weapons. I’m comfortable around firearms and an advocate of the US 2nd Amemdment (and most of the rest of the Constitution) but even I have to acknowledge that the free presence of weapons in society doesn’t guarantee any such politeness. An yet, it is generally taken that disagreeing with logic of the statement is an argument against gun ownership. :rolleyes:
Or maybe I’m just resentful that I once spent the time and effort to slog through 1400+ pages of Atlas Shrugged only to get to the end and realize it was just one long, pedantic pitch for Objectivism. She and L. Ron Hubbard must share the same orthogonal extra-aeonic dimension and enjoy discussing how gullible people can be. “They may be pink, but their money is green.”
Mmmm…that’s pretty harsh, I guess, and if Objectivism (or Scientology) works for you, more power to you; but please, don’t hit me over the head with your philosophy and insist that it is the only way to interpret the world and define ethics and morals. That reminds me of a line from Donnie Darko:
“On the Life Line there is only Love and Fear.”
Stranger
“I’ll tell you what he said. He asked me to forcibly insert the Life Line exercise card into my anus.”
I thought Lucifer’s Hammer was in the genre of “bestseller” type book, rather than straight sci-fi. It’s got the format of a disaster movie like “The Towering Inferno” or “Airport” where you meet a wide strata of characters all involved in different aspects of the disaster to add the “human element”. I saw it more as a movie script than a novel…
Another thing about LH- toward the end, it becomes more overtly racist. We have the token black astronaut, but all the other black characters in the book are basically criminals who want little more out of life than to get over on the honkies and to get their fair share of the limited supply of pussy. Either that, or they’re entheusiastic cannibals.
I’m almost to the point that I’m reading it for the same reason I’ve read 11/12 of the Left Behind Saga- if a SF-loving friend ever mentions it, I can give a brief summary, and spare them the agony of having to read it themself (I have arrived at the conclusion that they/them is acceptable as a gender-neutral singular pronoun).
Which character was that? I’m curious now to see who it was. That would have jolted me out of the book too if I’d noticed it. I enjoyed Lucifer’s Hammer in the same way I enjoy movies like Deep Impact or Independence Day–I’m a huge fan of end-of-the-world books/movies. "Suspend your disbelief at the door "kind of stories are okay as long as they are entertaining in the process, which I found LH to be.
Bingo! Even moreso true of The Legacy of Heorot; it was a pastiche of action movie/space opera cliches (and for interstellar colonists, man were those guys armed for bear.)
The thing about most movie scripts is that they are terrible reads (scripts by Charlie Kaufman or Douglas Adams are rare exceptions), even in the initial draft or script treatment. Trying to write a novel like a movie script gets you something like Lucifer’s Hammer or the lesser of Steven King’s output. Together, Niven and Pournelle would make a decent team of hack screenwriters for the Sci-Fi channel.
Why wouldn’t they be? It’s not like they could whistle up the Marines to bail their sorry butts out of a jam. I found them kinda underarmed myself. If I was moving to a new planet across the stars, I’d be packing nukes for sidearms!
I honestly can’t remember her name (like I said, I read this when it first came out in paperback, shortly after the earth cooled and just prior to the dinosaurs crawling out of the sea.) But she was the wife of one of the burly good guys, and she was decapitated in an accident when something went askew on the treadle. “Susan”, for some reason, comes to mind (but that is probably wrong.) I wouldn’t be surprised if it was caught and corrected in later printings.
Well, I’ve finished it. There was actually some exciting stuff near the end, with, like, battle scenes ‘n’ stuff, and of course, the obligatory epilogue where a big ol’ honkin’ asteroid gets slung into the inner solar system with a couple dozen comets in tow, just in case these two decide to write a sequel.
Generally, I feel the same way about this book as I did a lot of Stephen King’s stuff from about the mid '80’s to the mid-to-late '90’s (I call it his auto-pilot word processor phase, I guess he was doing a lot of really heavy drugs). It was three hundred pages of story in a six hundred forty-odd page book. And, hell, at least King is a good enough writer that even his most overly-long stuff is more than passably readable.
I was actually fighting off an urge to take a black Sharpie marker and go through the book and blot out the excessive adjectives, use some Liquid Paper to turn unnecessary exclamation points into periods. Or better yet, mail a copy of the book to my English Composition instructor at CCSN and let him have a go at it. He’s a rabid SF fan, but more than that, a lover of good writing, and a harsh grader.
I’ve been fairly aggravated at Niven ever since I pissed away twenty odd dollars and a few evenings on Ringworld’s Children. Compared to that, LH is coherent and well-plotted. And don’t get me started on Destiny’s Road – what an incoherent waste of time that was.
Of course, if you want to read a SF book that has even less meat/volume than LH, you can always read David Weber’s last Honor Harrington book (whose name I’ve blocked from memory). 700 pages of stilted dialog, tedious politics of non-existent star systems, and embarassing attempts at humor, and the payoff was about 50 pages of decent space battles which are the only things he writes well.
I wouldn’t call Lucifer’s Hammer a great book – and I’m a Niven fan. I read this book in one day (I had a lot of time on my hands then), and haven’t felt the need to pick it up since.
Thi was, I suspect, Niven and Pournelle’s try for a broader, non-genre audiece. The paperback was published by Fawcett, not one of their SF houses like Ballantine/DelRey. When it first came out there were full-page ads in The New York Times book section, something I have’t seen before or since with any of their books. I get the distinct impression that the were trying to come up with someything to counter Stephen King’s The Stand, too. Niven and Pournelle are technophiles to King’s technphobe (compare the relevant section of the two books on nuclear power).
But having read it the once, I don’t fee like I have to go back to revisit, unlike others of their works. This realy isn’t much like anything else of theirs, so if you don;t like this I think you might like The Legacy of Heorot or its sequel Beowulf’s Children (both of which hooked my non-hard-sf-reading wife Pepper Mill) or The Mote in God’s Eye, or Inferno.
Just another endorsement of The Mote in God’s Eye. Also, A Canticle for Leibowitz is the best post-apocalyptic novel out there. YMMV, of course, but then, you’d be wrong.
Really?? I read that one, and it seemed to make sense to me. The rise and fall of technology on a world as you get further and further out from where the rockets landed. All tied together by the rocket trail and the sprinkles that everybody had to eat. Interesting premise in theory. In practice, that clean a gradient from Dark Ages to near-spacefaring tech came across as too allegorical for me to really want to go back and reread it.
For wood-pulp-wasting abominations that I’ve mercifully blocked from my memory, there was a cookie cutter fantasy I picked up from the used bookstore on grounds that the outside reminded me of the Thieves’ World books… unfortunately, it earnestly, *earnestly * screwed every fantasy cliche that you can think of clean over without benefit of lube. And didn’t even crack a snicker.
I’m just surprised that someone thought it’d be good enough to spend the money to publish it.
[…]
…I can’t believe 10 people liked it enough to write an Amazon review. Let alone say the author’s name in the same breath with Tolkien and Cherryh. :eek: This is the one book that I literally threw across the room, and I’m generally a stubborn enough reader that I’ll wade through almost anything.
Ha, that’s funny. I finally rented that movie last week (50 cent rental) and gave up about 2/3rds of the way through. Finishing it before it was due back would have meant staying up late on a weeknight and it wasn’t that interesting. It wasn’t as bad as people said, either, though. Maybe if it’s on cable…
Claudia J. Edwards. And it was Eldrie the Healer. I was about fourteen at the time I read it, which isn’t much of an excuse, I’m afraid – I was already elbow-deep in the great SF classics by that point, including other authors who wrote strong female characters much, much better.
