Customer Reviews

The Wanderer

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A mysterious planet of approximately the same mass as Earth appears from hyperspace within the orbit of our moon, tearing the satellite to pieces and inflicting tremendous damage on our planet through vastly increased tidal forces. When author Fritz Leiber keeps his focus on that basic premise, detailing the effects of the Wanderer's appearance and mankind's efforts to cope with it, this novel really flies, particularly in an early sequence wherein an astronaut barely escapes the shattering of the Moon and finds himself in orbit around the new planet. This is real action-packed sense-of-wonder science fiction from a grand master.

However, other factors act against the novel's success. There are far too many characters and many of them are handled in such sketchy fashion that not even Leiber seems interested in them. For example, the high jacking of an ocean-liner, which could have generated some genuine excitement, is instead summarized in flat declarative sentences in a couple of paragraphs. In addition, I don't want to give away the ultimate nature and purpose of the Wanderer, so suffice it to say that by the time one of our heroes became involved in a love affair with a green-furred cat woman from outer space, certain plot elements had turned decisively away from the hard-SF depiction of global tragedy that I had begun to enjoy. Finally, the dialogue and relationships among the characters has become terribly dated. I know that it's not fair to expect an author to anticipate what will make his story seem stale forty years later; nevertheless, it does remain a distraction and an obstacle to complete enjoyment.

This review deals only with the quality of this edition, not with the story as such. It appears this edition was produced by an optical scan of an earlier edition, with no evidence that the result was proofread. There are about four 'typos' per page, enough to distract from the story. Some are easy to puzzle out ('fight' instead of 'right'); others less so.

I'll be looking at all my future purchases carefully to make sure they are not e-reads editions.

Without mentioning the basic story line, because it is covered by other reviews, I'll just hit on a few random points that struck me.

There are perhaps two dozen characters in the book, scattered all over the world (the "multiple viewpoint" approach). Many of them in the course of their conversations mention the names of real-world science-fiction authors (Heinlein, Wells, Clarke, Burroughs, etc.) as if those sci-fi authors are universally regarded as authoritative celebrities and are guiding philosophers for humanity. Why did Leiber do that? Was he intentionally sucking up to his peers? Trying to elevate his field? That was a poor device to include in a work of fiction. The effect is to remind the reader, "Don't forget, you are reading a science-fiction novel right now."

When the feline alien gave her big speech about the need to rebel from authority in order to live life to its fullest, it was as if Leiber were reaffirming (sucking up) to the youth of the 60's and telling them they are correct in their rebellious urges. But at the same time, he depicted the human teenagers in the book as wild, drunken savages bent on destruction and menacing society. Mixed message? There is also a parallel between the second visiting planet (described as the "police") and the human police on Earth who are engaged in battle with the rioting teens.

I didn't like the extreme coincidence that the one person the cat-alien snagged from the Earth's surface was also the friend and colleague of the astronaut who was pulled from the moon, and both happened to be romantic interests of the female protagonist who was carrying the vital spacegun to the Earth authorities. I hate it when authors get lazy with coincidences like that.

Leiber's depiction of the "weed brothers" was extremely shallow and comical. First time I've heard a character say "Daddy-O." He certainly treated the pot-smokers in disparaging terms, but later in the book when Cat Alien was giving her big speech, he seemed to glamorize (suck up to) the drug culture of the day when he had her explain, "We want to range through *mind* more thoroughly -- that crumpled rainbow plane inside our skulls."

"Bad Future Prediction" Department: "Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other." Heh heh. Nice try, Fritz. That sounded like the guy who predicted the telephone would never be useful.

The book could have certainly used another chapter, an Epilogue, to discuss the Earth's healing efforts afterward and the newly acquired wisdom that was gained after the crisis had passed. An "epic" of this size should have included that. As it was, the book just stopped as soon as the visiting planets vamoosed.

All in all, a fine disaster sci-fi story, with a great premise (cookie monster gobbles up our moon), adequate commentary on human reactions to it, and wide-ranging action.

4 stars if compared to only science fiction; 3 stars if considered as just fiction.

This is a great..no, a FANTASTIC story, with a deep philosophical issue behind its cosmic disaster theme: the conflict between any society's quest for perfection, and the individual's need to do things..differently.

The book is a tad long; way too many characters are introduced, and too much time is spent on the effects on Earth by the Wanderer. Some editing, and this would have earned 5 stars.

Storywise, it IS 5 stars.

By the way, check out his ghost novel Our Lady of Darkness. More great stuff

The book is a many sided description of a geological distaster on planet wide scale. Without revealing to much: the plot is driven by the occurence of planet in orbit of Earth. It's not as much about the alien interaction (and certainly not about an alien invasion) as it is about the devastating geological effects that the gravity pull of this planet has on Earth. An on it's people.

The book starts slowly, by introducing the 30-some protagonists (among them drunkards, scientists, UFO-believers, teenagers, would-be playwriters) all over Earth, living their very different things. But within 40 pages the action really gets to you. The value of having 30 correspondents with so varied a perspective around the world really adds to the experience.

The book is action packed, and shows considerable insight in the human behavior in times of disaster. Most of the character's situations and reactions are so real, that you cannot stop considering what you would have done yourself if these things had happened to you.

The importance of gravity to life on Earth becomes very clear to the reader. While reading the book you cannot escape marvelling about the wonderful, and fragile equilibrium that exists on this tiny planet. The book really gave me an acute feeling of cosmic scale, in which some minute change in the balance might trip the scale for us, and forever change everything we took for granted.

Paul Leiber well deserved the Hugo Saward in 1965 for this book. It hasn't aged much. It only shows that it's from that time, by the somewhat oldfasioned modes of discourse and interaction, between the sexes and the races. But that soon blends in, as the context of the book.

If there ever was a film scenario waiting to be found this is it. Especcially in our times, where the real spectacular views of this book can be generated by computer. Oh, I'ld love to see this on a large movie screen.

Lucifer's Hammer sort of set me up for disappointment with this novel. Both novels flip back and forth between a large cast of characters before and after a disaster that comes from the heavens. Both depict that destruction in full immersion 3-D, Dolby Digital IMAX glory. Both are pretty rigorous in their science at the beginning though this novel, due to its plot twists, ends up in space opera territory. Still, a story where the moon gets chewed up, millions die from tidal waves, and civilization starts to fray should be more entertaining than it turns out to be.

The characters are colorful enough, all met on the eve of a lunar eclipse. They include a group of "saucer students", an American astronaut on a lunar base, a man sailing solo across the Atlantic, a has-been actor on a mission to bomb the Presidential Palace of Nicaragua, a sex-crazed couple in New York out to compose a musical, a couple of poets in the UK, a would-be treasure hunter off the seas of Vietnam, a captain ferrying fascists on an atomic-powered liner en route to a coup in Brazil, a science fiction fan who falls in with a dying millionaire, and a German scientist who absolutely will not accept any evidence of the apocalypse apart from his own instruments. The Black Dahlia killer just may put in an appearance too. They are all interesting, colorful, their segments generally at the right length.

The plot? After a lunar eclipse, another big object appears in the sky, the moon starts to get ripped apart, and massive tidal devastation - along with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes - is caused by that object. The first hundred pages mysteriously dragged for me, though. I think less ominous foreshadowing and anarchy and strife - at least on stage - than in the longer Lucifer's Hammer explains my dissatisfaction.

However, the latter part of the novel introduces a new and surprising element very much in keeping with some of Leiber's short fiction which sides with the dangerous and eccentric over an enforced safe, sane order of things. Aliens, cats, E. E. "Doc" Smith, and interspecies attraction all make an appearance too.

Read it for the characters and that last third and not for disaster porn.

While everyone's eyes are turned to the skies to watch a lunar eclipse, a planet appears out of nowhere. At first, people are intersted in this new planet, then the devastating earthquakes and tidal changes begin as the Wanderer, as many have named the planet, begins threatening the Moon.

This engrossing novel catalogs the catastrophic events following the Wanderer's appearance through the eyes of many people instead of focusing on just on small group. From the saucer students, gathered on a California beach near Vandenburg 2 to watch the eclipse, to a treasure hunter in the waters off Vietnam, to a man crossing the Atlantic on a small boat and a cruise liner being hijacked off the coast of South America, and even to a few astronauts on the Moon. The author Fritz Leiber does't just give an anecdotal visit to each; he returns to them, keeps their storylines going so that the reader gets mutliple viewpoints of the same events. This is especially effective when the saucer students on Earth watch what the Wanderer does to the Moon, while the astronauts on the Moon live through the experience. It keeps reminding you that the events have a global impact. Plus, Leiber's descriptions are rich and detailed, even with some hand drawn illustrations showing the phases of the Wanderer.

Full of rich descriptions and great characters, this is a very entertaining sci-fi novel.

Suddenly, out of hyperspace, a planet sized space-warship appears and orbits the Earth as if it were a gigantic new moon. The moon disintegrates under the gravitational strain and the debris is consumed by the space-warship for fuel. On Earth the tides rise and fall disastrously, killing huge numbers of people. The space-warship's inhabitants try to alleviate the problem on Earth through the use of their advanced technology, and a speedy refuelling procedure, their haste further motivated by the imminent arrival of another, pursuing, space-warship.

This is one of Fritz Leiber's lengthier titles, made so by his use of multiple viewpoint to tell how people around the world are experiencing the effects of the gigantic new satellite in orbit. I thought this worked well, in general, but there could have been a few of the characters edited out without loosing the effect, improving the pace of the book overall, and reducing its length significantly. By today's standards the prose style, with respect to a sci-fi story, may seem a little old fashioned in its highly omniscient third person delivery, but this book was first published in 1964 and reads more like a 1970's one at worst. Nevertheless it is better written than the majority of today's output, the exceptions being Iain M. Banks, and C.J. Cherryh, to name a couple. In the States this title is currently out of print, but is available by Gollancz as a new printing via Amazon uk.

This book has some good moments, but they are scattered around haphazardly in a seemingly random jumbling of events.

The arrival of the Wanderer, a planet-sized spaceship, wreaks havoc with the Earth - tides, earthquakes, etc. - and the book covers a range of stories of people all over the Earth affected by the Wanderer. While I usually don't mind several unrelated stories occuring simultaneously, several of the storylines in this book seem pointless. He tries to do too much with too few pages, and the result is that you don't care about most of the characters. Caring about the characters is of utmost importance in a disaster book (or movie), or you don't care if the people live or die. This can be alleviated (for me, at least) if there is some interesting scientific explanations of what is occuring, but there is little of that in this book.

This could have been an interesting story, and in fact the last 50 pages or so are reasonably good. It doesn't make up for the first 250, though.

I guess I am not a fan of Fritz Leiber's writing. I first tried reading "The Big Time", but could not finish it (only made it a third of the way through the book). Now, I find a similar response to this book. With "The Big Time", it was just a bizarre story with which I could not connect. The thing with "The Wanderer" is that *this is EXACTLY the kind of story I normally love*. But, I couldn't even finish this story. I read dutifully to the halfway mark, then I found myself skipping sections, till finally I thought "what's the point?". To summarize my problems with this story would be to say that I just didn't give a whit about anything or anyone in the story. This condition is created, amoung other reasons, by the constant jumping between up to 15 different scenarios. I assume his intent is to show us how the event impacts people all over the world. But I found that I couldn't have cared less about ~13 of the scenarios. The ones I did care about were those where he unfolded the secrets of the aliens. But, even that threadline could not hold my interest. I also kind of lost it when he first presents the aliens. I don't want to give anything away to someone intending to read the story, but I've had my fill of these sorts of aliens. I tried to read this, I really did. When I had problems, I put the book aside and came back to it later, reading nothing else inbetween. I did this multiple times over the course of 6 weeks, before finally calling it quits. I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just me, and my current frame of mind, that was making the story so difficult. It wasn't. Life is too short to waste on a book you're not connecting with. Clearly, some people are connecting with this story. Just didn't work for me.