First published in 1977, Lucifer's Hammer offers a terrific story built around a comet that strikes the earth. The nucleus of the Hamner-Brown Comet breaks up as the ice binding the rocky material together melts off in its pass near the sun. When the massive shrapnel that remains hits the Earth, it triggers all the stored-up sesimic stress around the world, the Pacific ring erupts with volcanic action, dams collapse and flood cities and country, Soviet Russia and Red China exchange missiles, thousand-foot tsunamis from ocean strikes sweep across coastal areas and destroy the major cities of the world, and millions are killed. In fact, very few areas in the United States remain intact, except for a rural section of California where US Senator Arthur Clay Jellison has a ranch that becomes a safe haven.
The major characters include Harvey Randall, the television documentary reporter whose career disappears along with wife and home when the comet hits; Timothy Hamner, the amateur astonomer who witnesses what follows his finding of the comet bearing his name; Harry Newcombe, who doesn't abandon his mail route, even with the end of the world; Dr. Dan Forrester of the Jet Propulsion Lab, who arrives late on the scene to become Jellison's Merlin; General John Baker who witnesses the comet strike from space and brings his partner and two Soviet cosmonauts back to Jellison's ranch, just in time for war; and the Reverend Henry Armitage, who leads a crusade by a homicidal mob of cannibals to whom he offers absolution as long as they help him rid the world of the remnants of civilization and bring on the end times. The one image that stuck with me from when I first read the book a few decades ago is of a young surfer who finds himself riding a thousand-foot wave across downtown Los Angeles as other surfers drop off beside him, leaving him alone, aching from fatigue, thinking that he might make it when he slams into a building taller then the wave.
This is an outstanding story, a well-executed novel aimed at a mainstream readership with multiple storylines, and an eloquent appeal for a space program that will ensure the survival of the human race.
