Lucifer's Hammer
- 639
- Pages
- about 12 h
- Reading time
- NPR Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
Affiliate link: buying through it supports BookRank at no extra cost to you.
Our view
“Lucifer’s Hammer” is a disaster novel on the grand scale: a comet strike and the fight to survive it, told over more than six hundred pages. Some readers praise the first half, where the threat builds believably; some feel the second slides into a right-wing fantasy. Some also find that its treatment of women and race belongs to the 1970s, or complain of too many viewpoint characters and an abrupt ending.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Lucifer's Hammer is a science fiction post-apocalypse-survival novel by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle that was first published in 1977. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.6 across 227 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 61% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Science fiction average of 7.8. That is how 7.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.9 | 32 | 14% |
| Hardcover | 7.5 | 195 | 86% |
Frequently asked
How long is Lucifer's Hammer?
It has 639 pages — longer than 87% of the ranked books in Science fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Science fiction — and a score of 7.6, the closest to this book.
