THE HERMES FALL by John Baxter

Who will survive and what will be left of them when author John Baxter slams asteroid Hermes into the North Atlantic at 150,000 miles per hour? It's a classic '70s disaster epic with all the sex, sleaze, and world ending cataclysm you'd hope for, plus some biting criticism of NASA politics with the freshly debuted space shuttle facing a trial by fire in its new mission to destroy Hermes. No prizes for guessing how that goes ...

Baxter says he was inspired to write the novel following his research on the Tunguska event for his nonfiction work The Fire Came By. Here he rises to poetry with his passages on the asteroid, while the plotting and characters are crafted finely enough to avoid the fill-in-the-blank formula tang of many disaster/thriller novels. The novel only falters in the final 50 pages, when our hero astronaut must suddenly race cross country to save his girlfriend from some escaped convicts. It's clear Baxter was attempting to draw down the perspective and end on a human level, but the contrived circumstances and attendant rape peril are a shoddy comedown from the previous highs.

The Hermes Fall was one of a trio of big space rock novels released in quick succession at the end of the '70s. Lucifer's Hammer came out in 1977, followed by The Hermes Fall in 1978 and Shiva Descending in 1980. Hermes is the best of the three. Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer is techno-fascist wish fulfillment for the soft suburban set, with the end of the world allowing the authors to justify their reactionary worldview putting minorities, women, and dirty hippies firmly in their place. Benford and Rotsler's Shiva Descending suffers from turgid plotting and card stock characters. Worst of all is the simple fact that neither book captures the chaotic, all consuming destruction of the fall nearly as well as Baxter does, though Niven and Pournelle get credit I suppose for being the first out of the gate.

Across the pond, Panther Books released this tatty looking edition.

And its teeth are bared in a terrible hatred ...

4/4

Ballantine Books, 1978