The Hammer of God

The Hammer of God

Author	Arthur C. Clarke
Cover artist	Stephen Youll
Country	Great Britain
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Victor Gollancz Ltd
Publication date	1993
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	226 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-553-09557-9
Preceded by	Rama Revealed (1993, with Gentry Lee)
Followed by	Richter 10 (1996, with Mike McQuay)

The Hammer of God is a science fiction novel written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1993. It deals with an asteroid named Kali headed toward Earth. Captain Robert Singh of the spacecraft Goliath is sent to deflect it. Kali is discovered by Dr. Angus Miller, an amateur astronomer on the planet Mars.

Plot summary

A good portion of the book details the life of spaceship-captain Robert Singh (including his running a marathon race on the Lunar surface and uprooting his life and moving to Mars). When it is discovered that the asteroid Kali is likely to hit Earth, Singh's ship Goliath makes an emergency voyage to Kali with a load of thrusters to set up on the asteroid, hopefully nudging the rock's orbit just enough to push it clear of Earth. In the meantime, a religious sect called Chrislam, originally founded by a female veteran of the Persian Gulf War, believes that they can convert a human being into a few terabytes of computer information, and then transmit this data across space to Sirius (where they believe aliens reside); members of the sect also come to believe that the asteroid is meant to destroy the Earth. They thus sneak a bomb onboard the Goliath and ruin the thrusters. While Singh uses the Goliath itself as a thruster to move the asteroid, the world government on Earth rushes to reconstruct one of the planet's long-decommissioned nuclear weapons, hoping to break the peanut-shaped Kali in two.

Film connection

While filmmaker Steven Spielberg optioned the rights to The Hammer of God for film production, the resultant movie, Deep Impact (1998), bears no resemblance to the book, and Clarke received no on-screen credit for the movie.([1][2] [3] [4])

Trivia

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

• Clarke reintroduces the idea of project Spaceguard, which he first mentioned in Rendezvous with Rama as a project to detect near-Earth objects. Clarke also brings in a character similar to HAL 9000: Goliath's onboard super-computer is named David and is very similar to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Quite ironically, the Spaceguard featured in The Hammer of God would seem to be the Spaceguard that exists in the real world inspired by and named after the one in Rendezvous with Rama, as it is remarked to have taken its name from an obscure science fiction novel, and the 9/11/2077 impact that prompted the Spaceguard of Rendezvous with Rama is only mentioned in the book's "Acknowledgements and Sources".
• The book notes that Singh has spent too much time in less than Earth gravity to ever return in health to Earth. This idea is very widespread within science fiction including other Arthur C. Clarke works.

See also

• Lucifer's Hammer - novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle about a comet strike.