Ringworld, 1970

Well hell-loo: I remembered Ringworld by Larry Niven as a real classic, but picking it up after a long time, I once again realized what a truly amazingly imaginative piece of fiction this is: it introduces the concept of the Ringworld, an artificial ring one million miles wide, circumfering a sun at the same orbit as the Earth, therefore creating livable space of 3 million times the Earth's surface.

The technology Niven uses in the book is cool, the action is dense, the main character is fun and the aliens he's traveling with are hilarious -- an enormously fantastic read!

Read Ringworld online

Lucifer's Hammer, 1977

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, first published in 1977, is the mother of all end-of-the world stories. A comet impacts on Earth and modern civilization is ruined by the resulting natural disasters. The novel follows a large cast of characters and details the discovery of the comet, the resulting panic and media hype, impact (so-called "Hammerfall") and the aftermath in various scenarios.

Reading this book and Cormac McCarthy's The Road alongside, you can't help noting the striking similarities in the setting of both novels: The Road could easily be a sequel to Lucifer's Hammer, taking place a few years or decades after Hammerfall, with stockpiled provisions running out and cannibals and madman all over the place. All of these story elements are referenced in Hammer, and "road" becomes a fixed term for the inhabitants in the gathered community called the Stronghold: individuals who are not useful for the society or have committed a crime are punished by "putting them on the road", i.e. throwing them out of the safe camp, so it becomes a constant worry for everybody: "The road was always there, and nobody ever forgot it."

Before the sun burned, before the planets formed, there were chaos and the comets.

Chaos was a local thickening in the interstellar medium. Its mass was great enough to attract itself, to hold itself, and it thickened further. Eddies formed. Particles of dust and frozen gas drifted together, and touched, and clung. Flakes formed, and then loose snowballs of frozen gases. Over the ages a whirlpool pattern developed, a fifth of a light year across. The center contracted further. Local eddies, whirling frantically near the center of the storm, collapsed to form planets.

It formed as a cloud of snow, far from the whirlpool's axis. Ices joined the swarm, but slowly, slowly, a few molecules at a time. Methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide; and sometimes denser objects struck it and embedded themselves, so that it held rocks, and iron. Now it was a single stable mass. Other ices formed, chemicals that could only be stable in the interstellar cold.

It was four miles across when the disaster came.

Read Lucifer's Hammer