Tsunamis ravage every conceivable inch of exposed ocean coastline and upstream for miles along major rivers such as the Mississippi. Apparently if a comet hits Earth the Black Panthers will turn into cannibals while the white people quietly establish a conservative community. There are also the two Russians who exist to mention how superior the US is to Russia in oh so many ways, and the reformed hippies who have realized that communes are a bad idea. The last third gives us a battle between our community of civilized people and the evil army of cannibals.

There should be a name for the particular type of book that is exemplified by some popular novels published between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Later, they descend into I'm a Humanitarian territory, and use forced cannibalism ("You can eat it, or you can be eaten. A producer of television documentaries named Harvey Randall sees an opportunity for a series of prime time specials about the comet, with Kalva Soap as sponsor. Chummy Commies: The joint Apollo-Soyuz mission to study the comet means two of the four people involved are USSR cosmonauts, General Pieter Jakov and Dr. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).But the fact that the band of cannibals just so happens to be the black people was quite off-putting. So much effort went into making the impact of the comet hitting the Earth so tangible and believable, that I sat on the edge of my seat reading well into the night for a solid week. And it is to a degree: the world is forever altered after a comet enters the earth’s atmosphere and breaks apart, the huge pieces slamming into the West Coast.

I'm also a lot more inclined to be forgiving of certain attitudes in a 1959 book than in a 1977 book.

I needed it to know who I was supposed to pay attention to, because so many people were introduced for only four pages.

Dare to Be Badass: The story ends on a good one that's directed at the reader as much as the opposing characters; they can go home and fortify their feudal holding at the cost of the world's last nuclear power plant, or they can fight to protect and rebuild the civilization the comet destroyed. Anyone familiar with my reviews are aware that I'm always the first to point out that judging a book written many decades ago by contemporary standards is unrealistic.

The minute changes in mass and momentum, outgassing and the resulting small changes in the comet's orbit caused by the sun's radiation make it impossible, even up to the moment of actual impact, to accurately predict whether the comet would graze the earth's atmosphere, pass it by entirely or devastate earth with a direct impact. As far as they are concerned, Arthur Jellison (former US Senator and leader of the effort to organize and rebuild) is their leader. The Hamner-Brown comet, separately but concurrently discovered by a pair of very excited amateur astronomers, was still a very, very long way from the earth in a typical high eccentricity orbit having barely begun its descent toward the sun. I am aware that the novel was written in the mid-seventies and aspects of it were in reaction to the changes that had swept through the United States in the previous fifteen years.

When it is clear the asteroid will come closer than expected, money is wrangled to get a team of astronauts up into space to take samples, pictures and measurements, and I was surprised to find this was one of the most interesting sections for me. They have to turn many survivors away from their fortified valley because there just isn't food to feed them all through the winter. Yes its the Earth but he builds a fictional reality in the current time that is completely believable and you live it along with the characters, who you get to know really well through all 600+ pages.Early Niven/Pournelle collaboration about the physical and social aftermath of a giant meteor slamming into the Earth. 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! It's like they figured, "If they've read this far, they're not going to stop now, so we can go all out and pull no punches with what we really think. At least one reference to prior work by the authors is present in the text, through "Crazy Eddie's Insurance", a direct reference to The Mote in God's Eye (published in 1974). So perhaps you should take my review with a grain of salt, since plenty of people love Strange (unsurprisingly, no one admits to loving Practice Foundations).