Eckert: "The HAB Theory", "The Crossbreed"; Niven: "Lucifer's Hammer"

Allan W. Eckert, The HAB Theory, orig. Pub around 1976, now from iUniverse, Author’s Guild Backinprint Edition, ISBN 059500820-8, 2000, 500 pgs, paper, reprint. HAB is the acronym for the character "Herbert Allen Boardman." This thriller supposes that the world can come an end because of a sudden pole shift. There is a lot of intrigue and violence along the way as people try to unweil and hide the secret (sort of like Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code). Toward the end, the president of the United States has to take very authoritarian measures to keep some sort of legacy for a future reborn civilization. The lights do go out. In its day this was a very effective thriller.

You can browse this at iUniverse (do a title search in the bookstore).

Mr. Eckert's reprint , orig, Pub 1968, now from iUniverse, Author's Guild Backinprint Edition, ISBN 0-595-08992-5, shows the author's versatility, this time with a quasi children's book that goes for "equal time for cats." It is a harrowing tale of a crossbreed domestic cat and bobcat, born in southwestern Wisconsin in dangerous circumstances from a feral mom, found when starving and adopted by a boy when rowing, and the boy will then have to deal with a hostile "Paw." The cat will go on quite an odyssey, sometimes by box car, all the way to the bayous of Louisiana. He will learn than man is sometimes his enemy on his return home to Wisconsin, where the boy has become an older teenager. Will the cat bond with the boy again? The book makes the psychological life of a cat, given enough territorial opportunity, seem almost human. (Indeed, the cat is almost the only animal that will invite itself into a stranger's home, incredible social acumen for an animal that also can manage its own territorial world in nature for hunting, relative to other cats.) This book contains some of the most vivid descriptive action writing that I have ever seen, and it has to be a favorite for English classes. Remember that in 1993, Time magazine had an issue called "do animals think?" Yes, they do.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Lucifer's Hammer orig. 1982; Random House Mass Marketing Paperback, ISBN 0449208133; there have been multiple editions with each author’s name. Here the Hamner-Brown comet strikes the earth about a third the way through the book. The strike bifurcates the story into before and after, and the book describes what it would be like for civilization to recover. Much of the story happens in the California San Joaquin Valley. Ironically, a main character Harvey Randall is a filmmaker. There is a harrowing scene where a diabetic hikes alone through the cold Sierra mountains after the strike; there is massive flooding and damage to nuclear power plants. The book looks forward to the movies 'Armageddon' (1998), about an asteroid, and 'Deep Impact', 1998, about a comet; both films at this link.

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