Lucifer's Hammer

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Even the "good guys" quickly realize that they can only survive by ignoring or turning away most of the people who need help. Volcanoes and earthquakes are endemic around the entire Pacific basin as fault lines shift in California and everywhere else along the fabled Ring of Fire. Any sort of link or text post is welcome as long as it is about printed / text / static SF material.

The book focuses on rural California, and a group of ranchers that pull together for survival, initially joined by their dedicated mailman, who insists on continuing his route. It got a bit tedious - and quite sexist (repeated mentions of man's 'natural instinct' to 'protect the female' coming out, and how 'women's lib' is now defunct), with a few dashes of racism. But the last few I have read really unearthed things I didn't notice when I was younger, and this one, which was one of their early collaborations, really shows its age.Niven was an established, Nebula Award winning author in Los Angeles when in the early 1970s, he was approached by Pournelle, an engineer with a military background who lived in the area.

The last third of the story is the survival aspect, and lives of many of the characters start to intersect.But still, this is a book that you will enjoy if you like the premise and don't pay much attention to subtext, but will probably annoy you if you do notice things like ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE BECOME CANNIBALS!

Hammer more importantly holds a party in his Beverly Hills home for family and friends to watch the television documentary about his Comet that he naturally financed. Niven and Pournelle do this a lot, as in Fallen Angels, where they spend the entire book poking at environmentalists and anti-space and anti-nuclear activists.The Authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are very well read and they disperse at the beginning of chapter insightful quotes from various other authors throughout the book.