The Hammer of God

I'm going to put as much effort into this review as Clarke did into making The Hammer of God an engaging story with compelling characters and a tension filled plot. Apparently this is the germinal seed for the movie Deep Impact, and at least tangentially for Armageddon as well, though I'm hard pressed to see the similarities outside of the main premise: That an asteroid is about to hit Earth and kill everyone, so a group of humans are tasked with diverting it from its trajectory.

Reading The Hammer of God is more akin to reading non-fiction about the history of space exploration, optics, astronomy and other related fields than a fictitious novel. The characters and the plot, both laughable surface level, serve only as a thin veneer on top of a hypothetical exploration of how to prevent a disastrous asteroid strike. Clarke focuses a lot of energy on extrapolating future technology and science, and how that might affect our relationship to the universe, but couldn't be bothered to write a 'story'. I know that this was initially written as a short story for Time magazine, with that specific purpose in mind, but in no way did it need expanding.

Dry to the bone, lackluster, and pointless. The worst Clarke that I've read so far by a considerable margin. Rendezvous with Rama was similarly dry, but at least there was a mystery that held my attention.