Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

[rachelmanija]

A comet hits the earth, destroying much of it. Hard white men make hard choices in hard times, while women gratefully revert to 1950s-era gender roles and black people become cannibals. Except for the one token black astronaut who only got to go into space due to affirmative action tokenism. But he's not a cannibal, which proves that it's totally not stereotypical that most of the other black people are.

I've been having trouble focusing on fiction while trapped in my apartment, until it occurred to me that maybe I was having trouble focusing on good fiction. So I decided to read a book which I have not read since I was twelve, and which I recalled was not boring but also not good. Plus, it's an apocalypse novel, which is a favorite genre of mine. I thought maybe it would break the spell.

All I really remembered from when I was twelve was that I enjoyed the parts where Los Angeles was destroyed by comet, though I found them sexist even at twelve when I was not sensitive to such things (let me put it this way: I was still happily reading Piers Anthony at that age), but got bored once it moved on from immediate post-comet strike, and also found it incredibly racist though at that age I was even less sensitive to racism than to sexism.

Spoiler: 12-year-old self was right about the sexism and racism. Also, I DNF'd. But not due to quarantine lassitude, due to the fact that I was also right about when it gets boring. However, I skipped ahead to see if I correctly recalled that black people turned to cannibalism. Spoiler: yep!

The first third of this massive book is reasonably entertaining, with a couple legit very good bits. Here's what I liked:

An independently wealthy man, Tim Hamner, is one of the two discoverers of a comet, Hamner-Brown. (Brown is a 12-year-old boy.) All the main characters but four astronauts are in Los Angeles, which is described very accurately according to the geography of the time. We follow them as the comet comes closer and closer to earth, and ends up being nicknamed The Hammer. It eventually hits. This leads to the absolute best moment in the story, when a totally gnarly surfer surfs the most epic wave ever, all the way through Los Angeles, and is totally stoked until his rad ride is interrupted by a skyscraper.

Lucifer's Hammer was published in 1977; you can tell because the ginormous, mostly indistinguishable cast of characters is constantly having sleazy, loveless sex described in the least erotic terms possible.

All the women are always described in terms of their attractiveness to men (always) and breeder potential (post-comet). The two token non-cannibal black characters have no characteristics other than being black, and constantly discuss affirmative action and that they're not like the other, criminal blacks. Except for a few cameo redshirts with names like "the Indian," there are no races other than black or white.

There is an endless bit where pre-strike, a scientist has a TV interview where he describes the comet and the potential of a strike in terms of an ice cream sundae. This is mildly amusing but not actually funny, but all the characters roll around laughing hysterically when it happens and every time it's mentioned, and it's mentioned a LOT. This leads to a sort of meme where the upcoming strike is called "ice cream sundae which is actually Tuesdae;" I totally believe that this would become a meme, but not that people would continue finding it hilarious every time it's mentioned.

The main thing that's interesting about the book, because it's an idea that informs so much apocalypse fiction and also how a lot of social issues are discussed, is the idea of hard men making hard choices in hard times. Here's the premises, which Niven & Pournelle exemplify but did not invent:

At all times but especially during disasters, resources are zero-sum. If you give something to others, you lose it yourself. Generosity and sharing are luxuries which are dangerous to indulge in and must be abandoned in hard times. This is a virtue and shows your strength.

Kindness, equality, and nonviolence are bad. They are also a luxury of the Before Time. Showing kindness to others will cause them to attack you for your resources. It is now fine and in fact essential to beat children and subjugate women, because this is necessary now that times are hard. (Not shown: why it's necessary.)

Only a small circle of people, such as your own family and possibly your chosen group, deserves life. Life is also zero-sum. Attempts to protect non-group members will cause your own group to be harmed. Non-group members will harm you, either deliberately or by consuming your zero-sum resources. They must be driven off, kept out, or killed.

Empathy is zero-sum. If you show it to non-group members, you have less for your group and are actually harming your group.

Guns are essential. Everyone must get as many guns as possible. All interactions with non-group members must begin by threatening them with your guns. If you don't do this, they will interpret it as weakness and attack you.

All human relationships are transactional. Women and children are men's property. The only way an outsider can enter your group is if they possess either male-coded useful skills (ability to shoot, being a doctor, being an architect) or as a possession.

The book ends with the central group having defeated the black cannibals and enslaved them, because they have no other choice but to enslave them, kill them, or let them go and then have them return to attack the group again. Hard white men make hard choices, such as owning slaves.

It was very interesting reading this book now, because you can see how these premises are affecting the US right now. Again, this book didn't cause or invent these premises! It's just an example of them.

For instance, if you believe in zero-sum resources, then you do not want medical care for everyone, only for your own group; any medical care going to others reduces the medical care available to you. Also, if you believe in zero-sum, then any action which increases the safety or saves the lives of a non-group member is actively harming you, by reducing your safety or endangering your life. Better grab and display as many guns as you can carry!

In particular, the idea that showing non-group members empathy or kindness actually harms your own group explains a lot, IMO.

Leaning into the premise: Excellent. It promises a comet hitting Earth, and it's about a comet hitting Earth.

Lucifer's Hammer: A Novel

ETA: Just now noticed that it's a "a novel." LOLOLOL.

Comments

[sartorias]

Ah, yes. I remember going to a meeting of LASFS where this novel was being discussed, praised fulsomely, and suggested would sweep the awards because of its total awesomeness. There was just enough of the content described to make me decide 1) not to touch that book even with fire tongs, and 2) not to join LASFS.

[rachelmanija]

Both excellent choices!

[jadelennox]

I read a lot of apocalypse SF at that age, when I, too, was reading far too much Piers Anthony, though I never read much Niven or Pournelle. I can't remember if Brin's The Postman was an exemplar of the theme that you are describing here, or an overt and explicit reaction to it. In my memory the hard men making hard choices which involved a lot of sexually subjugated women, and racism, and forced labor, turned out to lose in The Postman, because the good cooperative people will always win if they try hard enough. But I'm very afraid that is a false memory, and I don't want to go back to the book to find out. I do recall it was fairly grim reading.

in any case it's entirely possible that reading too much of that 1980s post-apocalyptic hard men with hard choices SF is not only why preppers are the way they are, but is also why I've always had zero desire to survive an apocalypse. If your formative reading says that a world like that is what will happen after the apocalypse, then your choice, even if you think you CAN survive something like that, is that you would have to be willing to survive under those circumstances.

(also I stayed up past my bedtime to sneakwatch When the Wind Blows, which as I recall also had a formative effect on my unwillingness to survive and apocalypse.)

[rachelmanija]

I re-read The Postman relatively recently, and it's more of a reaction against it. The racism and forced labor and female subjugation is all done by the bad guys, not the good guys. The book as a whole is explicitly pro-community and is actually fairly cheerful apart from the bits in the bad guys' camp.

See, I would argue that the apocalypse does not have to be like that, and that in fact, the people who believe in zero-sum are likely to do worse than the community-oriented people. I don't think it's an accident that right now, there are exceptions but overall the countries taking community-oriented approach to public health are doing better than the ones taking a "hard men make the hard choice to let the weak die" approach.

[crystalpyramid]

Wow, i read this book once and nothing stuck with me at all but i don't remember hating it. What was wrong with past me??

Your summary is awfully wonderful.

[rachelmanija]

Oh nothing! I didn't remember any of the rape from A Spell for Chameleon.

[sabotabby]

Thank you for reading this so I don't have to.

[grayduck]

seconded!!

[sovay]

Here's the premises, which Niven & Pournelle exemplify but did not invent

I have liked quite a lot of things by Larry Niven, even though my favorite book of his (The Integral Trees, 1984) is also where I first encountered the don't-want-to-die-a-virgin trope; I have never liked anything by Jerry Pournelle.

[edit] This leads to the absolute best moment in the story, when a totally gnarly surfer surfs the most epic wave ever, all the way through Los Angeles, and is totally stoked until his rad ride is interrupted by a skyscraper.

Please enjoy: The Little Girls, "Earthquake Song."

[oracne]

I remember Jerry Pournelle from my early days on the SFWA bulletin boards. I avoided that man like the plague.

[rachelmanija]

Let me take a guess: he didn't like immigrants, black people, or women.

[ursula]

I haven't read this novel, but I have read the Niven short story with the surfer riding a tsunami. Having the best part of the novel be a short story and the rest an elaborate excuse for sex scenes is pretty classic Niven. (I had a Larry Niven phase when I was also about twelve, but I had been spooked by one of the co-authored Ship Who Sang sequels and had decided not to trust jointly authored novels, even if they were by writers I otherwise liked.)

[rachelmanija]

I had no idea it started as a short story! That would have been better than the novel.

[havocthecat]

That sounds like...nothing I would ever want to read about an apocalypse.

[marjorie1170]

Oh dear.

I read SF here and there growing up and in my 20s. But in my 30s, I became an avid reader (also wanted to write SF but never succeeded on that front). Anyway, decided I needed to be more widely and deeply read in SF, including the classics. So that meant reading Larry Niven's Ringworld.

I can't remember anything about the book now. I assume there must have been rings around a world. All I remember is this heavy feeling of dread that this was the kind of book I was supposed to read. (Perhaps it was not nearly as bad as Lucifer's Hammer. At this remove I have no idea.)

[minoanmiss]

Ringworld was actually a world that *was* a ring, a gigantic flat surface big enough for atmosphere, etc. An interesting idea, but what Niven did with it was *not* interesting at *all*. UGH.

[princessofgeeks]

I too read Lucifer's Hammer as a teenager when it first came out and all the horrible stuff you mention went RIGHT BY ME.

Strange how it took me so long to get a clue.

[ethelmay]

Reminded slightly of (ugh) Farnham's Freehold.

[rachelmanija]

I'm not certain but it's possible that sf written by white men of that era may have possibly had a race problem.

[skygiants]

I read this book in grad school as research for a paper! "You should probably only read the bits that pertain to your paper," said the friend who lent me her copy, "I've helpfully marked them for you and everything, PLEASE DON'T READ THE REST." (Obviously, I read the rest.)

[rachelmanija]

Hahahahaha. Which parts pertained to your paper?

[twistedchick]

I am reasonably sure this was one of the books that I pitched across the room against the side of the piano, back in the day. The piano has survived that, Cujo, and several other bits of dreck.

[swan_tower]

In fairness to Stephen King, I believe Cujo is the book he admits that he doesn't remember writing -- he only remembers his heart going 800 beats a minute and cotton swabs stuffed up his nose to stop the coke-induced bleeding.

[starlady]

My only exposure to Niven is the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode he wrote where he put serial numbers onto one of his original works, featuring an alien species whose females were literally brainless. It was more than enough to convince me to stay far away forever.

ETA: Actually, you know, it reminds me of that one critique of "The Cold Equations" that gets to the heart of the whole thing--you don't write "The Cold Equations" because it's a plausible story about plausible spacecraft design or spaceflight protocols. You write "The Cold Equations" because you want the excuse to throw a defenseless girl out an airlock and call yourself a hero for doing it. Same here: they didn't write this book because it was a realistic depiction of postapocalyptic society. They wrote it because it's the kind of society they wanted to live in, and this way they could get called brilliant visionaries for doing it.

[lilacsigil]

I love your icon!

[lilacsigil]

I think most of the post-apocalyptic fic I read as a young teen (in order to give myself lifelong nightmares) was British or Australian, and focused a lot more on how most people would die horribly and the few survivors would be sad and weird. My dad tried to help my angst about nuclear apocalypse in particular by pointing out that we lived in the middle of four major power plants, so we'd definitely be a target and die quickly. Thanks, Dad!

[marjorie1170]

I had a great love of two post-nuclear apocalypse novels that I read as a teen! I already had anxiety about nuclear fallout, so perhaps it was a strange kind of consolation to see teens with psychic powers in these books. Anyway, they were British (John Wyndham's The Chrysalids and Canadian (Phyllis Gottlieb's Sunburst). I reread them in my teens and revisited them in my 30s and found they held up for me. (Although the ending of The Chrysalids was weak.)

Teens with psychic powers was clearly a favorite of mine.

[ndrosen]

It’s been years since I read the book, but let me point out that the cannibal army wasn’t all black, but a racially integrated gang of murderers. Also, the good guys were not all white, even if you want to mutter “tokenism.”

That said, I don’t expect LUCIFER’S HAMMER to be remembered among the immortal literature of the world.

[rachelmanija]

I don't think "Lucifer's Hammer is not racist" is the hill you want to die on. Seriously, read it again. The fact is, most of the black characters are cannibals or violent criminals or both. A few exceptions don't disprove the overall rule, and the rule is really unpleasant. Especially given that the happy ending is the overwhelmingly white heroes enslaving the mostly black cannibals.

Here's the sort of thing I mean:

The violent black criminal is also a welfare sponger. Once the honkies had poured bread into the ghettos, bribes to stop riots, and Alim had taken his share.

A prisoner is describing the cannibal leaders: "A big black Army man..." "There are other black leaders..." "I never got to talk to the top bosses--mine was a black woman named Cassie..." "A black city man named Alim Nassor..."

A gang of blacks had been terrorizing the south valley, and now they had linked up with the Army cannibals.

"There's probably not another black woman other than the cannibals for a thousand miles."

[grayswandir]

I remember that I bought a copy of this book from a thrift store when I was about 15, because at the time, I was trying to write a novel about Satan, and I figured I should start by reading every novel I could find that had already been written about Satan. For some reason, I expected Lucifer's Hammer to be a book about a hammer that belonged literally to Lucifer. When I got around to checking the summary and realized it wasn't that, I lost all interest, and I don't think I ever even read the first page. It sounds like I definitely didn't miss out on anything. :/

(Also, yeah, that sounds like a level of sexism and racism where even people who are generally pretty clueless, as I certainly was at 15, would be like, Wow. D: I'm not sure if it would have been better for me to have been exposed to more of that kind of stuff at that age, and thus been made more aware of how much sexism/racism still pervaded the culture, or if it would have been bad because it would have contributed to my impression that when people are sexist/racist, this is what it looks like -- i.e. really, really dumb and obvious, and not subtle or complicated at all.)

By Grabthar's hammer!

[rachelmanija]

That is HILARIOUS.

[merit]

Occasionally I think, maybe I should read some classic SFF. There's a lot I haven't read, especially American, but I think after reading your review this one will be immediately eliminated.

The zero-sum works being described as 'realistic' has always irked me. Is it?? Not necessarily!!

[rachelmanija]

Definitely don't bother with this one.

I think it's rarely realistic. To get actual zero-sum situations, you have to either construct unlikely fictional circumstances, or else highly controlled actual ones. In most real life circumstances, including disasters, it's more survival-oriented to not act like someone just made you Hitler.

[eglantiere]

this just makes me thirst more for the post-apocalyptic books that focus on re-engineering the world from scratch using knowledge, resources and cooperation - a-la pratchett's nation. or the grandfather of the genre, the mysterious island, before the annoying pirates show up. i just want my build-things-to-build-things minecraft competence porn without all the rape and zero-sum bullshit, how hard can it be??

[rachelmanija]

Me too!

We've got an honest-to-goodness global catastrophe going on right now, and the vast majority of people are protecting each other, growing gardens, baking bread, shopping for people who can't leave their homes, making each other masks, etc.

[davidgillon]

I read a lot of solo Niven and Niven and Pournelle at the time, and sadly was pretty much oblivious to all of this. OTOH I've had pretty much no desire to go back and read many of them, so maybe some of the issues did percolate through. OTGH I do seem to recall giving up on them in disgust after reading Niven, Pournelle and Flynn's 'Fallen Angels', which is basically an attack on environmentalism, global warming and anyone who isn't part of the resistance to these things (the resistance is naturally centred on fans).

My impression is that Pournelle dragged Niven further Libertarian-wards than he would have gone on his own. His own books are fairly Heinlein-ian, but they kick up a gear whenever Pournelle's involved.

I did read a few of Pournelle's solo works. I quite liked "King David's Spaceship"/"A Spaceship for the King", in which a planet's best chance for a reasonable standard of freedom under its impending annexation by the galactic Second Empire is if it can show it is spacefaring. This is a problem given its currently roughly ACW level of technology. So they arrange travel to a neighbouring system that is even more technologically regressed, but has a surviving technological archive from the First Empire. Of course to access the archive they must first defeat the barbarian hordes who are besieging it. And then travel back and build a spaceship, which has such a low cargo fraction that the only one who will fit is the sole female character. Unfortunately its lasting message is that successful governments are run by thugs, and that every woman needs a good thug to protect her.

[jack]

I love reading your descriptions of books :)

[qian]

Huh, this explains a lot of what Ursula Le Guin says about SF as a genre. I mean, I took it on trust that she was right about it being obsessed with Manly Men and war etc etc, but since I never bothered reading what she was reacting to I didn't have a sense of the details. Now I do!

[azara]

I read this long ago (probably the first UK edition). I remember not only the racism and sexism, but a whole swathe of anti-environmentalist stuff as well.

One of the big plot gotchas is about the nuclear power plant, where because of green protests, the company have built a large berm to hide it from view, and this manages to protect the nuclear plant from the tsunami that would have otherwise destroyed it. Keeping this nuclear plant going is the basis for their bright technological future. There may also have been some gloating over napalm making good fertilizer. There was certainly a viewpoint that all Greens are ignorant Luddites, and not a smidgen of an idea that green ideas and really advanced technology could go hand in hand.

[rachelmanija]

Right! I remember thinking, "Does he have any idea how big a nuclear power plant is?! That's one hell of a berm!"

I also find it implausible that a tsunami and earthquakes would take down all power sources EXCEPT nuclear, and furthermore that the nuclear power plant would not have any sort of Fukushima-like event.

I believe it was actually mustard gas that makes excellent fertilizer. It was eye-opening to see totally non-bitter, non-ironic gloating over how well the crops would grow now that they've been fertilized with mustard gas and corpses.

[carbonel]

This was a guilty pleasure for me back when. I knew it was problematical, but it also had the "I want to keep reading this" characteristic.

The interesting thing (to me, anyway) is that Niven's (and Niven and Pournelle's) books stopped having that at some point. I don't think it was me, because the early ones stayed readable. But somewhere in the 1980s, that stopped being the case. Footfall was the last one I remember enjoying reading. It also had huge problems (it's a very similar plot to LH except with an alien invasion instead of a meteor strike), but kept me reading into the wee hours.

I don't know if I was the first person to use the term "brain eater" to describe the unfortunate degradation of new works by formerly favorite writers, but I do know that Niven is the first person I thought of in those terms.

[subjunctive]

Personally, I think anyone who wants to write post-apocalyptic Hard Men should be compelled to read Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell first.

Lucifers hammer

[lordruss]

It just occured to me after reading this that there are similarities between lucifer's hammer and 'the Turner diaries'. Lots of similarities. I wonder if the Turner diaries was inspired by lucifer's hammer and wad just a dumbed down version of it with tbe science replaced by more open pro Nazi origins to the collapse that bead to the far right male dominated new order.