The Hammer of God
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hammer of God is a science fiction novel written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1993. (It should not be confused with the popular Christian novel of the same name by Bo Giertz.) It deals with an asteroid named Kali headed toward Earth. Captain Robert Singh of the spacecraft Goliath is sent to destroy it. Kali is discovered by Dr. Angus Miller, an amateur astronomer on the planet Mars.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
A good portion of the book concerns a great deal of Robert Singh's life (including running a marathon race on the Lunar surface and uprooting his life and moving to Mars). Once Singh is sent to move Kali's orbit so it does not strike Earth, his ship is outfitted with a mass driver to place on the asteroid and change its orbit. In the meantime, a religious sect called Chrislam, founded by a female veteran of the Persian Gulf War, believes that they can convert a human being into a few terabytes of computer information. Chrislamists believe that they can send themselves across space to Sirius this way (where they believe aliens reside), and that the asteroid is meant to destroy the Earth. They sneak a bomb onboard the Goliath and destroy the mass driver. Robert Singh's only option left is to use the Goliath itself as a mass driver to move the asteroid.
[edit] Film connection
While filmmaker Steven Spielberg optioned the rights to The Hammer of God for film production, the resultant movie, Deep Impact (1998), bears no resemblance to the book, and Clarke received no on-screen credit for the movie.([1][2] [3] [4])
The only true similarity between the book and the movie is that in both the book and the movie the object is ultimately blown in two by a last-ditch attempt to destroy it, and one of the resulting halves wreaks devastation on Earth.
[edit] Trivia
- Clarke reintroduces the idea of project Spaceguard, which he first mentioned in Rendezvous with Rama as a project to detect near-Earth objects. Clarke also brings in a character similar to HAL 9000: Goliath's onboard super-computer is named David and is very similar to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Quite ironically, the Spaceguard featured in The Hammer of God would seem to be the Spaceguard that exists in the real world inspired by and named after the one in Rendezvous with Rama, as it is remarked to have taken its name from an obscure science fiction novel, and the 9/11/2077 impact that prompted the Spaceguard of Rendezvous with Rama is only mentioned in the book's "Acknowledgements and Sources".
- The book notes that Singh has spent too much time in less than Earth gravity to ever return in health to Earth. This idea is very widespread within science fiction including other Arthur C. Clarke works.
[edit] See also
- Lucifer's Hammer - novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle about a comet strike.
