FIREBALL by Vic Mayhew and Doug Long.

"The jeans and heavy white sweater she wore warned Young that she was in a practical, no-nonsense mood."

It took two authors to write that tripe. As far as disaster novels go Fireball is a stale dud, a truly forgettable entry in the big space rock boom of the late '70s. Even the title fails to excite, lacking the cold technothriller edge of something like Meteorite Track 291 or the poetry of The Hermes Fall or Lucifer's Hammer. It really feels like we got the leftovers here, with Mayhew and Long gifting us paper thin characters and dragging us through some stilted Cold War skulduggery between the Americans and the Soviets, neither of whom want to admit they've developed space nukes which could save the day at the cost of face. Hero NASA administrator Matt Young doesn't trust the Russkies, of course, and wouldn't you know it they've gone and filmed his colleague Bob Bigelow's runaway daughter turning tricks in an NYC hotel! The Russians also give one of their own the old poison umbrella, which feels like something Mayhew and Long inserted as a hail Mary pass at gritty spy craft.

This ho-hum thriller filler takes up too much of the novel, as does Bigelow's family drama - his young son discovered the fireball in his backyard observatory, but Bigelow's too much of a bad dad to give the kid his due. Mayhew and Long seem incapable of writing genuine dialogue between their characters, with Matt Young and his reporter girlfriend Jenny exchanging underbaked bon mots and everyone else shouting, barking, growling the standard disaster fluff at each other. The scenes checking in on the asteroid's progress through deep space are dull as well, with none of the flair or menace other writers brought to their asteroid novels. John Baxter's single line in The Hermes Fall: "And its teeth are bared in a terrible hatred," is more effective than anything Mayhew and Long can produce. Their invocation of celebrity psychic fraud Jeane Dixon is their best attempt at profundity, and their reference to the Tunguska event is revealingly underwhelming, with a claim of "several square miles" of forest being flattened - the real number is over 800 square miles of destruction around the blast site, and the authors don't even bring up the shattered windows and terrifying shockwaves felt further hundreds of miles away! If they don't care, why should we?

Eventually the joint Apollo-Soyuz launch nukes the asteroid, and we get a perfunctory sequence of Manhattan's obliteration by a remnant hunk of rock, with Mayhew and Long dutifully snuffing a small crew of background characters they've unconvincingly built up one by one to no special effect.

Hardcover

Mayhew and Long both worked for Reader's Digest, which helps explain why there isn't an ounce of artistry between them in this novel. Fireball earns a pathetic 1/4 rating.

Signet Books, 1979 (original pub. 1977)