OPINION NATURE|Vol 453|26 June 2008

In Retrospect: Lucifer’s Hammer Oliver Morton recalls how the first major science fiction novel to depict an impact event conjured the thrill and the horror of natural cataclysm — and even inspired some researchers.

Lucifer’s Hammer the earth as a useful softening-up exercise. had been paid to such things. When the book by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Their editor told them to forget the aliens emerged, it encouraged more of that atten- HarperCollins: 1977. 494 pp. and concentrate on the asteroid. They did so, tion. “Lucifer’s Hammer killed the dinosaurs,” making it the centre-piece of a disaster novel said US physicist Luis Alvarez, saluting the Everyone remembers the surfer. carefully fashioned for best-sellerdom, with a authors when, a few years later, they attended When fragments of comet large cast and a heft that promises to take up his lecture on the geochemical evidence he Hamner–Brown strike Earth a a lot of beach time. In the process they con- and his son had found of a massive impact at third of the way into Lucifer’s verted the asteroid to a less predictable but the end of the Cretaceous period. Hammer, the surfer is floating more spectacular comet, with doubts about For all that, the book isn’t about the comet. on his board off Santa Monica, California. its trajectory allowing a tension-building It is about the enervating fragility of civili- The flash in the sky and the fiery cloud on introduction to their disaster-movie-ready zation. Pre-comet, Los Angeles is already the horizon warn him what’s coming. He cast of Angelenos. perched on the cusp of disaster, as always; paddles out to face his death — a tsunami The novel works well, still, as an airport in the city’s Cielo Drive, Charles Manson has that lifts him to the sky and turns him to the read. (It is better than the alien-invasion novel already proved civilization “neither eternal land. He rides the end of the world into the the authors finally wrote almost a decade later, nor safe”. “Nothing silly about being ready Los Angeles basin like a Hot Tuna Valkyrie, although to be fair, Footfall (Del Rey, 1985) for the end of civilization,” opines a wise biker locomotive-fast and skyscraper-high, imag- camping off Mulholland. There’s a period pall ining for a moment that, despite the unbear- of sweaty paranoia and doom that gives the able strain in his legs and the weight of an impact an almost cleansing feel. At times, ocean at his back, he might still survive to tell the thrill of destruction and survival seems his story: “a surfing movie with ten million to totter into glee at the settling of scores. in special effects!” Feminism does not outlast the cataclysm, The surfer is remembered because he and it is not much missed. Woolly-headed provides the novel’s most enduring taste of pinko environmentalists eat their enemies the sublime — a simultaneous evocation of and each other, as do most of the book’s black terror and wonder, immediate danger and characters — a development with disturbing cognitive distance, common to disasters echoes, to say the least, of George Fitzhugh’s imagined and real. As The Times column- 1857 antebellum tract Cannibals All! or, Slaves ist Matthew Parris put it, writing with dis- Without Masters. turbing honesty about the mixed horror and The authors’ main theme is that, comet or thrill he felt contemplating the Indian Ocean no, a civilization has the morality its machin- tsunami of 2004: “A minor but insuppressible ery allows it to afford, and that saving the part of me has almost relished — yes, relished last nuclear power plant is worth a war if it — those huge numbers. As the newspaper avoids a return to serfdom and slavery. Pangs headlines spoke greedily of the numbers of of survivor guilt and a nostalgia for lost nice- dead “approaching” twenty, then fifty, then ties cut across the suspicion that some of the eighty, then a hundred thousand, some- protagonists like the Hammer-scourged world thing undeniable twitched in the back of my a bit too much. The sacrifice of the scientist brain ... as though some great auctioneer of who devotes his last winter to making poison calamity were taking bids from the media gases for the power plant’s protection, rather floor, and I was willing the bidding to carry than insulin that would save his own life, is on upwards ... . When the gods themselves manipulative. But it is plausibly and effectively strike — then I believe a new depth to our so. And the richer crops that grow where the fascination opens.” gas pooled and corpses fell are a powerful Published in 1977, Lucifer’s Hammer was the does have a magnificent space battle at its symbol of good from ill. It is hard not to feel a first major science fiction novel to try to deal finale.) And Lucifer’s Hammer is distinguished sense of uplift as, on the last page, emblems of realistically with the planetary emergency of by its thorough and informed imagining of industry and trade — electricity, an IOU and, an impact event. It plumbs those depths of fas- a broadly plausible cataclysm never before most beautifully, an aircraft’s contrail — herald cination on an epic scale, rewarded at the time described. Niven and Pournelle went out of returning life and dignity. ■ with sales far beyond the normal expectations their way to make the impact and its attend- Oliver Morton is Nature’s Chief News and of the genre. ant horrors — tsunamis, earthquakes, climate Features Editor. He is author of Mapping Mars and Authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle change and crop failure, wars for the best Eating the Sun. originally outlined a story in which aliens, remaining farmland — believable at a time planning to invade, drop a small asteroid on when remarkably little scientific attention See Editorial, page 1143.

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