Put very simply, Lucifer's Hammer is a book about a comet hitting Earth.  The book takes 640 pages to do this; there’s a lot of detail to the story.  The first couple hundred pages are all pre-comet and set the stage, introducing all of the characters.  (There’s a dramatis personae at the beginning of the book; I found myself referring to it frequently to see which characters were which.)  The strike itself occupies about another hundred pages, with the balance of the book dealing with the aftermath.

As might be inferred from the spacing of events, the book proceeds at a somewhat slow pace, ramping up so gradually that I didn’t notice the tensions in some scenes until I had to put the book down and realized that I was nearly breathless wondering what would happen.  The aftermath is where the meat of the conflicts occur, but the preceding half of the book is pretty necessary to lay the groundwork for later developments.

The science in the book is also good.  Niven and Pournelle spent a lot of time working out the details of a comet strike such as the one presented in the book, and it shows; the science is very thorough and believable.  This was somewhat surprising given how long ago the book was written:  1977.  Much other SF from that far back tends to be very dated, a fate Lucifer's Hammer seems to have escaped, for the most part.

There were some instances where I was reminded that the book was taking place three decades ago.  Racial tensions in the book are a lot higher; while the civil rights movement had succeeded, many people still weren’t accustomed to it, and a couple of the black characters have to deal with some uncomfortable situations.  The technology isn’t as good as that which we have today; while I can’t remember any specific examples, there were some things that I noted would have been different if the story had taken place in our present.  And someone makes reference to NASA’s perfect record of not having any deaths during their missions, a record that, sadly, has been broken a few times since then.

All in all, it’s a very good book, especially for fans of either SF or disaster stories.

Postscript: The copy I read was one I got from a used book store.  It’s the third printing of the Ballantine Books paperback edition, printed in 1985.  The inside cover has the following written on it:

Dec. 21st, 1990

To: Mr. Senior
After I saw that film on meteors I remembered this book.  You can look it over during the holidays.

Best Wishes,
Bob Vandervoort

I haven’t found any more information about who the people named are.

Yes, it’s true.  I hates software.  (Though, as of yet, not very much.)

Yep, get ’em all out of the way in one common place.

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I hope that’s all clear now.

I recently tried to set up a new account on Verizon’s web site.  In order to do this, you have to choose a login and a password.  Reasonable enough.  The page says that the password must be “Minimum 6 characters with at least 1 number”.  I run my password generating script (dd if=/dev/random bs=1 count=6 | uuencode -) and get VB3:Q-0".  Seems reasonable, so I enter it.  No.  “The password should contain one number, only three repeating characters, no spaces or email addresses and no other special characters.  Please try again.” Grrr.  So I run the program a few more times, get a password that’s just numbers and letters, randomize its case, and enter it.

And go on to create my account?  No.  Verizon’s is also one of the many websites that refuses to acknowledge the validity of the plus sign in an email address.  When submitting my email to a site, I usually use asciipip+sitename@pobox.com, just to track usage of that address.  Many stupid sites don’t like that.  Bah.  And the page was SSL, so I couldn’t easily mess with the parameters to see if they put their trust in client-side validity checks.

Now, of course, I’ve attempted to log in and the page is sitting at a “please wait” box.  Probably only works with IE anyway.  I’ll have to go through the site and try to find a contact email address to yell at.

Verizon sucks.  (Like everyone doesn’t already know that.)

Times Without Number is a time travel story set in an alternate-history Earth.  (Yes, the implications are pretty obvious.  I won’t comment on them until after the spoiler barrier.)  The book was originally three separate short stories.  For this publishing, Brunner reworked the stories to create one narrative from them.  Nevertheless, the book breaks easily into three different sections, each following a particular event in the life of “Don Miguel Navarro, Licencate in Ordinary of the Society of Time”.  (The alternate-history is that the Spanish Armada successfully invaded England and Spain, instead of England, became the colonial empire of the West.)

The setting seems reasonably well-thought-out, if a bit chauvinistic.  Women are second-class citizens, though that’s generally presented as a bad thing.  There are slaves, which exist and are never commented on.  Native Americans are all referred to as Mohawks, though some do express indignation at this.  Time travel is the sole dominion of the Catholic Church; the creator of the original device didn’t think anyone else would behave properly with it.  This book is probably not for anyone who would get offended at any of this.  (It was written 1969; the original stories are from 1962.  All well before political correctness came into vogue.)

Within the story are some reasoned explorations of various aspects of time travel.  The Society has strict rules governing the use of the technology; naturally, the stories tend to hinge on the breaking of various of those rules.  For me, this is the main reason to read the book.  There isn’t too much here that hasn’t been explored in other time travel stories, but this one probably predates most others.  Beyond that, the writing is decent, but not excellent, and it feels a bit dated.

Spoilers

Okay, so the obvious happened.  Someone went back in time to change the outcome of the Spanish Armada’s assault on England.  I did find myself hoping that such would not be the case, but I suppose the setting preordained it.  As I read the last bit, the final events did surprise me.  I had expected Don Miguel to go back in time and become the Earl of Barton (who was, after all, a “man about whom almost nothing was known”).  Oh, well.  The part about entering the “real world” wasn’t too bad.