Hammer of God - Arthur C. Clarke

Oh how the mighty are fallen! It takes just a lump of rock (albeit a rather large one) to wipe out millions of years of dinosaur existence. It takes a couple of hours to read a book by one of the most esteemed science fiction writers, and come to the conclusion he has fallen at a similarly small hurdle - he thought too much of the present. The Hammer of God conerns an old stalwart of sci-fi, something that Arthur C Clarke admits has been in novels several times before, that of asteroids and meteors impacting on Earth. Of course, almost immediately after this book came out in 1993 we had a pair of blockbuster movies on the same subject. With their kinetic ...

The Hammer of God, Arthur C. Clarke Clarke in the 1990s wasn't as good as he had been earlier. His books written then are still very readable, but he was starting to parody himself in some ways: more and more delayed mini-denouments, more and more nagging senses of familiarity and déjà vu experienced by his characters. This 1990s book was about an asteroid called Kali, which is destined to destroy the earth, and the efforts of mankind to destroy it before it could. Clarke was writing about this danger as far back as the 1973 and *Rendezvous with Rama*, and it's a tribute to his prescience that the real official organization now working to publicize it is ...