At the beginning of the 21st century, we humans feel as if we are
on the verge of becoming masters of the universe. No, not He-man or Skeletor,
but rather manipulators of space-time. We can clone animals, cure diseases, send
ships to the stars, cook rice in just one minute. As long as we control our
emotions and don’t destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, it seems that
nothing can stop our ascent. But that isn’t true. Forces outside our world may
have a say in our future. Life on this planet has been wiped out before. It
could be again. 1998 was the year of the comet; or the asteroid. Hollywood discovered that
those icy, rocky cores were lined with money. Splashed upon the silver screen
were the films Deep Impact
and Armageddon. The small
screen saw Asteroid, a
made-for-TV movie produced by NBC (in 1997).
But the inspiration for all of that big budget death and destruction from above
had to come from somewhere. Rewind 18 years to 1980. This is the year that Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez
and his son, Walter Alvarez, announced in the journal Science
that there was strong evidence that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused
by an asteroid impact. In the vast cosmic ocean, the tiny head of the nail
called Earth had been struck by the hammer of God. Now fast forward twelve years to 1992. In May of that year, Arthur C. Clarke
was approached by Time magazine
to write a short story/article about life in the next millennium. Clarke chose
to write about the consequences of a collision between Earth and an asteroid. The same year, scientists rediscovered comet
Swift-Tuttle and produced trajectory simulations that showed the possibility
of impact on August 14, 2126. With all of this new data, Clarke decided that the
piece he had given Time was really a compressed novel and decided to
expand upon it. I’m not so sure. I’ve never read the original Time story, but The
Hammer of God at times feels incoherent. It’s a great vehicle for Clarke
to do what he does best—speculate on what the world will be like in the
future. But it’s a short novel—just 246 pages—and many of the chapters
feel like they were written as individual pieces some time in the past and just
inserted into this book to make it longer. If you prune away those portions,
what you’re left with is short indeed. That’s not to say that they’re bad. Clarke has a great imagination for
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