Following an unsuccessful campaign against the ondat, the Ila, flees to a distant planet where she creates a new imperium through her knowledge of nano-technology.
Five hundred years later the woman, Luz, arrives, having persuaded the ondat - who have tracked the Ila, down - that her use of nano-technology will split the Ila's creation from her, giving the ondat the revenge they have been seeking, without the need for devastating force. The ondat give Luz thirty years to prove her plan.
But thirty years is not quite enough for Luz, and the ondat, not wishing to wait any further, unleash their attack on the Ila's planet by bombarding it with ever more deadly meteorite hits, to culminate in one planet shattering strike - the hammer.
At this late stage, the madman, Marak, is Luz and the Ila's only best hope to avoid the ondat's revenge.
This book makes sense provided it's thoroughly read without skipping sections, which is very tempting to do in the desert trekking sequences. Skipping will make you miss important explanatory details, and so the book will be very unsatisfactory as some others have claimed, and I found it to be, if I did so.
I would have liked to have seen the first three chapters made into one, with their details conveyed as retrospective viewpoint from the time that Marak is preparing to leave Oburan to head eastwards at Ila' behest. I feel it would have balanced the details of the opening trek towards Oburan, Marak's meeting with Ila, and been a neater segue to the outgoing journey.
There was a very vague sense of how much time was passing on the first outward journey. It only becoming clear in the section where the Ila was in transit, that 30 - 50 days was the time between Oburan and the Tower. No big deal perhaps, but I found it distracting. Lines like `on a certain day' not helping.
Some elaboration of Luz's technological capabilities would have been good, so that I wasn't wondering why she hadn't some more speedy way of conveying Marak and his colleagues back to marshall the Ila and her followers. An ATV, or some kind of air-transport to discreetly drop them off a short distance from Oburan. After all, masters of interstellar flight, nano-technology, and air-conditioned tents, etc, would reasonably be expected to have such resources to hand, given such a large ship, and where 30- 50 days is a such big factor with respect to the story's timeframe.
This is touched on in the last chapter at a time of about twenty years later, in which Marak recollects the need for `masks and machines' to make travel feasible in the early post-hammerfall climate. The fliers seem to be a feature of this time as well and are not necessarily part of the pre-hammerfall period. These fliers seem more akin to tiny observation aircraft, not intended to carry any burden.
Anyway, read it thoroughly and their shouldn't be a problem.
I would recommend that readers of Hammerfall read Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider, since they share some key details. Also get the Morgaine set, now out as one complete book. And read the Foreigner series, CJC's - to my mind anyway- best blending of technologically advanced and developing, dissimilar cultures. CJC's spacer books such as Tripoint, Downbelow Station, and Cyteen, etc, are worth looking at, too. I found the barren desert environment of Hammerfall to be evocative of the space transits between space stations.
I enjoyed reading Hammerfall and am looking forward to the next one.
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Joel Hollowday
A welcome new author to read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2014