Jerry Pournelle (1933–2017)

I'd heard this was a classic of the post-apocalyptic genre, so was pleased to finally nab a copy second hand.

The book starts with the discovery of a comet and revolves around the humdrum lives of a bunch of LA locals, tending toward the wealthy socialite class. At first predicted to narrowly miss earth, the comet's odds of hitting escalate steadily the closer it gets to Earth.

The build up to Hammerfall is suitably suspenseful and the impact itself seems to be handled realistically from a scientific point of view. Now our intertwined point-of-view characters must escape the collapse of society, floods and tsunamis to find safety in a world in which the thin veneer of civilisation has been suddenly torn away.

Personally I'm not sure that the immediate reversion of society to violence, rape and cannibalism in the wake of Hammerfall is realistic. When real-life disasters hit people seem to band together for a short time at least. On the other hand, the formation of the cannibal cult coalition seem to parallel the formation of ISIS in a land that has lost all semblance of power structure remarkably well.

My criticisms are similar to other reviewers. The approach to race and gender is ham-fisted. Hammerfall wipes out women's lib (as one character gleefully observes) and women are simply trophies who seek out the strongest male to protect them, and sex appears to be the only tool available to them. Outside the relative civilisation of our protagonists' valley a life of rape or sex-slavery awaits. There's a range of characters who are given point of view in this book but only two are women and neither are the unlucky sort, say for example the girl scouts who have been turned into sex slaves. I guess that while this book is a darker take on the apocalypse, the authors didn't want to go quite that dark.

And that is one point of difference in this book. It's a dark take on the apocalypse that includes that part that most post-apocolyptic works conveniently skip: the End, with all its death and horror and messiness. The characters face some hard moral choices: do they sentence people who do not conform to their new society (teetering on the brink of collapse) to death, do they use horrid chemical weapons against the attacking cannibal army, do they re-introduce slavery?

Unfortunately, all to often they seem to lean on the side of ruthlessness. On one hand, it demonstrates the harshness of the new world, but on the other it feels too much like the authors have an unsavoury agenda to push.

My favourite character was the diabetic scientist who decided in the face of the apocalypse to save books and knowledge for the survivors.

A worthwhile take on the end of the world with its scientific believability and dark themes, but marred by outdated ideas and strange authorial agendas.… (més)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/two-books-i-didnt-finish-drawing-boundaries-and-...

This was one of the infamous Puppy submissions for the Hugo ballot in 2016, a collection of essays building on a previously successful series from the 1980s. I read the first four pieces and then gave up because there was really too much racism (and also the obsessions of the alt right in 2016 turn out not to be what actually happened in 2022).… (més)

Wow, it is a long time since I read this. You can't cross the same river twice. But it is still a 600 page apocalyptic epic, covering just before, during, and the first year or so after a comet wipes out nearly all life on earth.

There are bits to love, bits to hate, bits to just boggle at, and lots of bits you can't put down.

The book has a huge cast of characters. The main hero (in that the book ends up with him Getting the Princess and Leading the Survivors) was never all that interesting to me. A kind of cheerful every-man who made movies, he made a number of weak willed mistakes,(being financially overextended, cheating on his wife, going completely catatonic when she was murdered), in a way that just made me gently uninvested in his happiness.

Some of Niven/Pournelle's women are completely awesome though. Which is not that the book doesn't have the usual problems of old sci-fi and women (some very gratuitous sexual assault scenes, lots of the point of civilisation is to protect young women, lots of gender role stuff, women broadly sleeping their way into advantage, men can fall over in earthquakes, but women fall over and their skirts ride up suggestively around their hips) but Eileen is awesome, with her driving along the railway line and organising the entire Stronghold, Marie Vance is also excellent, with her hiking boots her cynical but clear thinking scheming to end up with a man of power, and her solitary almost crazy bravery standing against the entire army, and even Maureen, who exists mostly to be the Senitor's Daughter and the Prize for the Winner TM with flowing red hair is pretty interesting, dealing with her own depression and trying to work out her role in the new world.

I must say, this book has far too many characters whose names begin with H. It's unhelpful. Harvey, Hardy, Hamner, two people called Harry, other letters are also available...

You have to love Dan Forrester, even if he is a complete stereotype of a precocious academic, physically weak but full of learning, as he throws every last ounce of energy he has into saving civilisation, whether by saving a library of knowledge or reinventing weapons of mass destruction.

I think it is fair to say this book is pretty racist, or at least it is writing about a country with some very racist attitudes many of which are presented as we go along. Scenes like 'should we let people in who are fleeing the floods', 'they'll be city n*ggers, whining about equality' feel very very ugly now. The fact that over 90% of the black characters we meet in the book are thieves, murderers and cannibals doesn't help either, nor the fact that the 'we must smash everything up and eat people' army gang is also the 'we want to rebuild an equal world and not just the oppressive status quo from the beforetimes' people.

And oh, this book is depressingly convinced mankind gravitates towards war, and surprisingly myopic in who the good guys are. Straight after the comet strike, Russia and China throw a huge pile of nukes at each other. Everyone of any interest post-Hammerfall has a gun and is ready to use it. And of course, the set pieces at the end of the book are giant battles man against man, where the only way to save civilisation is to turn all the fertilizer into poison gas and use it against other 'less civilised' people again. I mean, yes, the people they are fighting are Actual Cannibals who are going to kill them and eat them, but it is still pretty depressing. And there is no real nuance of the awkward tension between the good guys doing 'these kids have shacked up in this ranch and probably killed the owners and won't join us and share their food, so we are going to attack them and capture them and hang them all' and the cannibals doing 'these rich people have shacked up in a valley while all of the city people starve'...… (més)