The Hammer of God

The Hammer of God is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke originally published in 1993. It deals with an asteroid named Kali headed toward Earth. Captain Robert Singh of the spacecraft Goliath is sent to deflect it. Kali is discovered by Dr. Angus Miller, an amateur astronomer on the planet Mars.

Plot summary

A good portion of the book details the life of spaceship-captain Robert Singh (including his running a marathon race on the Lunar surface and uprooting his life and moving to Mars). When it is discovered that the asteroid Kali is likely to hit Earth, Singh's ship Goliath makes an emergency voyage to Kali with a load of thrusters to set up on the asteroid, hopefully nudging the rock's orbit just enough to push it clear of Earth. In the meantime, a religious sect called Chrislam, originally 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, and then transmit this data across space to Sirius (where they believe aliens reside); members of the sect also come to believe that the asteroid is meant to destroy the Earth. They thus sneak a bomb on board the Goliath and ruin the thrusters. While Singh uses the Goliath itself as a thruster to move the asteroid, the world government on Earth rushes to reconstruct one of the planet's long-decommissioned nuclear weapons, hoping to break the peanut-shaped Kali in two.

Literary significance and reception

The Library Journal review said that "In the capable hands of science fiction veteran Clarke, a standard cosmic disaster plot becomes a lucid commentary on humanity's place in the cosmos".^[1]

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

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.^[2]

References or allusions

References to other works

• The book is largely based on a short story of the same title, first published in Time magazine's "Beyond the Year 2000" issue in October 1992.^[3]
• Clarke reintroduces the idea of project Spaceguard, which he first mentioned in Rendezvous with Rama as a project to detect near-Earth objects. 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".
• Goliath's on-board supercomputer is named David and is very similar to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

See also

• Lucifer's Hammer - novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle about a comet strike.

Notes