I find it very interesting, despite the italics, that Niven chose to give the comet a sort of voice in the book. Not only the comet really, but the whole solar system is described through the eons prior to Hammerfall. This gives a somewhat fated perspective to the whole collision, as if even from the conception of the celestial neighborhood the alignments of the planets and other heavenly bodies preordained the cataclysm of our world. This idea in turn threatens a main premise of the book: we choose our fates and the way we live our lives. This idea is used repeatedly throughout the book as the characters try to fulfill their dreams and fantasies before Hammerfall, and try to survive afterwards. If events are so thoroughly out of our hands, then how can we or the characters find purpose in our own lives? If we are just a virus on a rock hurtling through space and there is nothing more, why do we choose to continue to live?
This is not a lead-in to a religious discourse, but rather a reaction against Niven’s idea of universal chaos and irrevocable doom. Personally, I prefer to think of the universe as a more ordered place where absurdly random acts of physics do not lead to the erasure from existence of the only known haven of life. Yes, Niven gave explanations for the seemingly random incident, conjuring the existence of an often inferred by never seen Planet X, a massive black planet on a perpendicular orbit to the more common solar plane of the other 8 or 9, but the infinitesimally small possibility of this theoretical planet slinging a comet our way is still unbelievable to me. There are more reasonable possibilities for Cataclysm on our world or in our solar system, such as the sun going red giant, the magnetic poles switching, the icecaps melting, the moon finally escaping its orbit and flying into space or the tectonic plates experienceing sudden massive shifts. So despite the interesting characterization I found it hard to overcome the logical dilemma of proposing the comet-as-cataclysm in the first place and the suggestion of universal fate (universal in the context of the universe, not “over-arching”).