Lucifer’s Hammer, you see, was the name given by Pournelle and Niven to a hypothetical asteroid that collided with Earth, and the mile-high wave was the result of the impact of a large chunk of that asteroid in the Pacific Ocean. He proved once and for all who was the best surfer in the world–at least, right up until the wave swatted him against the side of a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper. It was a good book (a bestseller, in fact), but out of all its memorable scenes the one I remember best is is the one of the surfer whose ultimate dream had come true: he was riding the biggest wave in the world, a wave hundreds and hundreds of feet high, riding it longer than anybody had ever ridden a wave before. Sometime around the end of the ’70s I read a book called Lucifer’s Hammer, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Haven’t had anything to worry about for a while? Here, let me fix that…
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