The wailing asteroid [Import] [Paperback]

Murray Leinster (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 142 pages
• Publisher: Sphere (1968)
• ISBN-10: 0722154801
• ISBN-13: 978-0722154809
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Wailing Asteroid, October 10, 2010

By 

Joseph W. Turner (Atascadero, Ca. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wailing Asteroid (Avon SF, G1306) (Mass Market Paperback)

One of my favorite science fiction stories, I read the original publication until it fell apart on me years ago. Some folks have called it bland and predictable but for me it was a nicely paced and thoroughly enjoyable read. Some of the scene setting gave me the sense of actually being there. Anyway, one of my favorites and it was great to find it again! Joe Turner

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "And the Stars, Kenneth, Are for Man-- Not for the Communists!", April 20, 2011

By 

Paul Camp (Chattanooga, TN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wailing Asteroid (Paperback)

Oh, the Dean Machine, the Dean Machine,
You put it right in a submarine
And it flies so high that it can't be seen--
The wonderful, wonderful Dean machine!
-- Damon Knight

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, John W. Campbell, Jr. wrote a series of editorials in _Astounding/Analog_ lambasting the U.S. Air Force for the wretched performance in the space race against the Russians. Campbell's solution was to put our money and energy into researching reactionless space drives. He was convinced that an invention by Norman L. Dean that seemed to bypass Newton's third law of motion could lead to a space ship that would put the stars in the hands of America.

Articles in _Analog_ reflected Campbell's latest enthusiasm. There was Campbell's own "The Space-Drive Problem" (June, 1960), with John Schoenherr's cover of a submarine orbiting Mars. G. Harry Stine's "Time for Tom Swift" (Jan., 1961) expressed the belief that a scientific genius (a Tom Swift) was out there somewhere who would show us how to make spaceships with reactionless drives. The culmination was a heavily mathematical article by William O. Davis called "The Fourth Law of Motion" (May, 1962) which argued that we could bend (though not quite break) Newton's third law of motion. To some readers of _Analog_, it must have seemed as if they were living in a real life edisonade. Any day now, an inventor hero was going to lead us to the stars. Any day now.

I don't know how much Murray Leinster's edisonade _The Wailing Asteroid_ (1960) was directly influenced by the goings-on in the pages of _Analog_. But it certainly seems to be a reflection of the times. There are satellites, missles, the DEW line, bomb shelters, the Cold War, and military bureaucrats. But American individualism wins out in the end.

Oh, yes. The story. Well, it seems that radio telscope stations around the world begin to pick up a regular musical code every seventy-nine minutes. It is coming from M-387, an obscure asteroid. But our hero , an engineer named Joe Burke, has heard the signals in his head from time to time since he was eleven years old.

Burke believes that the code is a set of instructions for building a super spaceship. But there is a catch. Building spacecraft is strictly illegal. How to get away with a project this big? Burke's plan is to build a ship that looks like a jumbo-sized plastic bomb shelter. Leinster (who was an inventor himself) has great fun showing how this is done. I know of no other novel in all of science fiction that boasts of such a spacecraft. Nor do I know of a scene exactly like the one in which a bomb shelter is fleeing from a group of nuclear missles.

Now, edisonades do not come from a literary tradition of deep philosophy, elegant poetry, or classical novels. They come from a tradition of dime novels, penny dreadfuls, pulp thrillers, and Edward Stratemeyer syndicated series. Their appeal is not so much literary as it is the living of a power fantasy. Wouldn't it be fun to whip together a wonderful spaceship? Wouldn't it be fun to whiz off to M-387? And _then_...

But alas for romance. The _Analog_ space-drive articles petered out after the middle of 1962. The Dean drive came to naught. We never did discover a Tom Swift or a Dick Seaton. America won the space race, but it did so with conventional liquid fuel rockets rather than an FTL drive or repelatron fields. Still, Leinster's novel maintains a certain charm and quirkiness. It is one of his most entertaining and original works.

_Addendum_: _The Wailing Asteroid_ was made into a British movie called _The Terrornauts_ (1967). I have not seen it, but all reviews that I have read indicate that the film was rather dreadful. Stick to the original book.