Review 6: Lucifer's Hammer

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

I was disappointed in this, expected some great classic apocalyptic book. Instead it was meh. None of the characters really stuck with me, none whom I cared what happened to them. And the sexism, oh geeeze. I know it's old, written a while ago, but 1977 not the 40's or 50's. There was even this line: "...the only good thing about Hammerfall was women's lib was dead milliseconds after Hammer strike." Hammerfall was the comet that crashed into earth ending civilization, well they called it Hamner-Brown.

There were some good parts, and occasionally it got interesting. And all the focus on sex too...I mean really? Yes, this was seriously dated. It was also long, too long. I've read other books from this era, and I can accept that things were different, but this one seemed out of touch. Maybe it's the sci-fi aspect? Or the writers really didn't like women on equal footing with men, I don't know.

There was also a major aspect of the black power. This one main character was very anti-white, used honkey as a pejorative. This part seemed very fitting for the 70s. I kept with the book, hoping there was something post comet smash, something with the rebuilding of society. I will leave that for anyone who wants to find out, but in the end there was a little there, but not enough to redeem the book for me.

Book rating: 2.5

Note on Audio book narration: This was the first book I listened to that was narrated by Marc Vietor. At first I did not like his narration style at all. It seemed like there was no differiantion between characters. As the book progressed I got used to his narrating style and there were some characters that had a different sounding voice. Still throughout some of the main characters seemed to sound the same and it did cause me to have some trouble to remember which character was whom, for a couple of them. By no means does my impression of writing style and my overall rating of the book was not affected by the narration. I separate those out in rating.

Narration rating: 3 out of 5 stars