A massive asteroid is on a collision course with earth, and Captain Robert Singh of the spaceship Goliath is sent out to try to deflect the asteroid. It’s a similar plot to Lucifer’s Hammer, which came out 15 years earlier, as well as the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact, which came out a few years later. The save-the-world premise is always compelling in these stories, but this book in particular doesn’t make especially good use of its core concept.
The writing style in the book is a bit odd compared to other books I’ve read from Clarke. For example, Rendezvous with Rama is tightly paced, driven by an intriguing central mystery, and has interesting characters. The Hammer of God has none of these. The story plods along, and most of the action is told, rather than shown. There’s no real mystery, as you hear about the asteroid and the eventual result right at the start of the book. And the characters all feel two-dimensional and under-developed.
It’s not an entirely bad book, as it does a good job of highlighting the threat asteroids pose to all life on earth, and there’s a reasonable respect for physics and realism, but given the subject, this could’ve been a much more exciting and interesting story.
