In the near future, an alien craft lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. A six-legged, two-armed alien named Hollus relates to paleontologist Tom Jericho that the Earth, Hollus's home planet, and the planet of another alien species all experienced the same five cataclysmic events that prove the existence of God.
During the twenty-second century, a space probe's investigation of a mysterious, cylindrical asteroid brings man into contact with an extra-galactic civilization
“The first satisfying end-of-the-world novel in years . . . an ultimate one . . . massively entertaining.”—Cleveland Plain-Dealer The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival—a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known. . . . “Take your earthquakes, waterlogged condominiums, swarms of bugs, colliding airplanes and flaming what-nots, wrap them up and they wouldn’t match one page of Lucifer’s Hammer for sweaty-palmed suspense.”—Chicago Daily News
In 2010, a group of survivors, including those attending an engineering conference, make plans to rebuild society after a comet strike off the coast of California has all but wiped out mankind.
“Entertaining . . . [Arthur Clarke] handles both ideas and characters with deftness and wit; in short, the outstanding living science fiction writer is romping.”—Chicago Sun-Times In the year 2110 technology has cured most of our worries. But even as humankind enters a new golden age, an amateur astronomer points his telescope at just the right corner of the night sky and sees disaster hurtling toward Earth: a chunk of rock that could annihilate civilization. While a few fanatics welcome the apocalyptic destruction as a sign from God, the greatest scientific minds of Earth desperately search for a way to avoid the inevitable. On board the starship Goliath Captain Robert Singh and his crew must race against time to redirect the meteor form its deadly collision course. Suddenly they find themselves on the most important mission in human history—a mission whose success may require the ultimate sacrifice. Praise for The Hammer of God “Clarke is still at the top of his game.”—The Detroit News “As good as anything he has written . . . For a hard science-fiction treat, I suspect The Hammer of God won’t be topped.”—Star Tribune, Minneapolis “Classic Clarke . . . A good story.”—The Denver Post
Follows a group of eighty people chosen to board a revamped space shuttle set to leave Earth before an astroid destroys it and everything on it, but no one knows if their plan will work, or where they will end up even if it does.
