Evening Reading

I just finished readin Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Some Otherguy. Fantastic book! I loved it and highly recommend it.

A few thoughts:

Is the title of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" taked from Lucifer's Hammer? The phrase is used repeatedly, meaningfully and as a standalone sentence fragment throughout the book. McCarthy had to have read it, and the book deals with similar themes. Any thoughts on this?

It's quite something to consider how drastically the world has changed in the 30+ years since the book was written (late 70s iirc - just before the advent of personal computing and the internet). Yet, despite the totally different world we now inhabit, we would be equally helpless against a comet strike. The characters in the book optimistically suggest that given another 10 years (until the mid 80s), humans would have had the technology to deflect the Comet, but we are still nowhere remotely close to being able to do that.

Also, it's really interesting to consider how well your own home town or location would survive an event like that (or not). Winnipeg is nowhere near any mountains or oceans and is in the centre of very fertile farmland, but gets flooded by rivers every spring. It used to be the bottom of a huge lake a million years ago too, so outlook not good, depending on how much rain/water levels rise.