Lucifer's Hammer

Author: Larry Niven And Jerry Pournelle

Its anticipated to zip close past Earth, so they send to a space-mission to visit it, and then end up realizing that the damn thing is going to hit us after all; which it does, breaking up into a bunch of pieces that pretty much trash everything. The ensuing panic only aggravates the disaster, with politician and the military superpowers figuring prominently in the cluster-screwups that complete the job of the original impact. The book has a huge cast of characters, though it revolves around the few whose stories extend from the very beginning to the end. Having been battered and nuked back into the stone-age, it's clear survival for humans is not just skill but also a matter of random luck. Most of our past-times, often considered signs of high culture and civilization, are revealed as basically meaningless, with only science remaining as something that might bring us back from this dismal brink. One might see the now-irrelevance of the legal profession as a positive outcome of sorts. Even so, there's no final conclusion as to what is likely to happen, though the book ends on an optimistic note. Why it's on the list: Very cool and believable post-apocalypse; thrillingly told. Ratings: Grimness: 4, Bizarreness: 1, Hope: 3, Fun-factor: 4.