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The Wanderer
Ballantine Books U6010
It began so quietly...
So quietly that nobody except a few frightened scientists even suspected what might be happening...
Then suddenly one day, it was there. It came without malice, an elemental force, a climactic power greater than any the Earth had ever seen in its billions of years of evolution, a phenomenon which reduced this planet to the size of an anthill pushed out of the way by a bulldozer. Men called it the Wanderer.
Yet despite its vast impersonality, to each human being on Earth the Wanderer spelled something personal--after all, death is very personal indeed. And the Wanderer meant death for millions. But for others--many, many others--it was something else again.
To millions of humans running like ants over the shifting crust of the Earth, the Wanderer came as terror, to overset the certainties of science, to wreck the world, but to open up the hearts & minds of humankind.
It began so quietly...
So quietly that nobody except a few frightened scientists even suspected what might be happening...
Then suddenly one day, it was there. It came without malice, an elemental force, a climactic power greater than any the Earth had ever seen in its billions of years of evolution, a phenomenon which reduced this planet to the size of an anthill pushed out of the way by a bulldozer. Men called it the Wanderer.
Yet despite its vast impersonality, to each human being on Earth the Wanderer spelled something personal--after all, death is very personal indeed. And the Wanderer meant death for millions. But for others--many, many others--it was something else again.
To millions of humans running like ants over the shifting crust of the Earth, the Wanderer came as terror, to overset the certainties of science, to wreck the world, but to open up the hearts & minds of humankind.
318 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published February 1, 1964
126 people are currently reading
5275 people want to read
About the author
Fritz Leiber
1,336 books1,051 followersFritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy. He found his mature voice early in the first of the sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring the large sensitive barbarian Fafhrd and the small street-smart-ish Gray Mouser; he returned to this series at various points in his career, using it sometimes for farce and sometimes for gloomy mood pieces--The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the best single volume of their adventures. Leiber's science fiction includes the planet-smashing The Wanderer in which a large cast mostly survive flood, fire, and the sexual attentions of feline aliens, and the satirical A Spectre is Haunting Texas in which a gangling, exo-skeleton-clad actor from the Moon leads a revolution and finds his true love. Leiber's late short fiction, and the fine horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, combine autobiographical issues like his struggle with depression and alcoholism with meditations on the emotional content of the fantastic genres. Leiber's capacity for endless self-reinvention and productive self-examination kept him, until his death, one of the most modern of his sf generation.
Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー
Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 268 reviews
August 28, 2024
Fritz Leiber won the 1965 Hugo Award for Best SF novel for this work.
It’s weird, a different sort of first contact story and the science is very sketchy and the way he puts this together with dozens of characters all over the world is a little hard to follow.
But I think it was probably very influential for other writers back in the day.
An alien planet / celestial body shows up and all hell breaks loose on Earth and Leiber follows lots of folks all over the world to see how they are holding up.
I did notice that we have a “Space Force” and there is a mention of the world as a disc riding atop four giant elephants who are themselves riding on a space turtle. As a Terry Pratchett fan I liked that. Also, the descriptions of the aliens made me think of a certain broadway play.
Not the best, not the worst, and it has not aged that well, but probably just for hardcore fantasy fans.
It’s weird, a different sort of first contact story and the science is very sketchy and the way he puts this together with dozens of characters all over the world is a little hard to follow.
But I think it was probably very influential for other writers back in the day.
An alien planet / celestial body shows up and all hell breaks loose on Earth and Leiber follows lots of folks all over the world to see how they are holding up.
I did notice that we have a “Space Force” and there is a mention of the world as a disc riding atop four giant elephants who are themselves riding on a space turtle. As a Terry Pratchett fan I liked that. Also, the descriptions of the aliens made me think of a certain broadway play.
Not the best, not the worst, and it has not aged that well, but probably just for hardcore fantasy fans.
May 17, 2011
In this bizarre SF novel, which somehow managed to win a Hugo, a mobile planet crewed by a race of intelligent cats materialises in orbit around the Earth, causing all sorts of trouble. Tidal forces, you see. I think it's a metaphor for the arrival of sex in modern science fiction. Until the early 60s, it had been conspicuously lacking, for all the skimpily-dressed Martian princesses and suchlike. But then, suddenly, tidal forces! And there is, indeed, a surprising amount of odd sex, which I believe shocked people at the time.
The plot thread I remember best features the staff of NORAD's underground headquarters. The lecherous general has had his eye on the hot secretary for a while, but her interests are in a different place. Someone once told her that she had "strangler's fingers". She can't stop thinking about this. It gets her kind of excited.
Now the Wanderer shows up, and planetary mayhem follows. The bunker starts flooding. They're trapped. They've got hours, no, minutes to live.
Well, says the secretary to the general, why don't we make sure our last moments are pleasant ones? He licks his lips, certain that he knows what she has in mind.
So this is what you've been wanting all along? he asks slyly as he begins to take her clothes off.
Not exactly, she replies, and her long, strong, strangler's fingers dart out and fasten around his neck.
The plot thread I remember best features the staff of NORAD's underground headquarters. The lecherous general has had his eye on the hot secretary for a while, but her interests are in a different place. Someone once told her that she had "strangler's fingers". She can't stop thinking about this. It gets her kind of excited.
Now the Wanderer shows up, and planetary mayhem follows. The bunker starts flooding. They're trapped. They've got hours, no, minutes to live.
Well, says the secretary to the general, why don't we make sure our last moments are pleasant ones? He licks his lips, certain that he knows what she has in mind.
So this is what you've been wanting all along? he asks slyly as he begins to take her clothes off.
Not exactly, she replies, and her long, strong, strangler's fingers dart out and fasten around his neck.
March 27, 2019
This 1965 Hugo-Winner is a mess. The story of a "wandering" planet that emerges from hyperspace to wreak havoc upon the moon and Earth's tidal system is strange to begin with, but Leiber uses a multi-POV approach with a bunch of oddball characters from around the globe (the three stoners in New York were among the most pointless) that is really unnecessary. The story drags terribly, with Leiber's prose hung up in long sections of mind-numbing descriptions, not to mention really awful dialogue dripping with 60s slang, daddy-o.
February 9, 2017
1965 Winner of the Hugo Award.
Years before furry was popular, there was The Wanderer. Years before Lucifer's Hammer, there was The Wanderer. Years before it was popular go epic numbers of scientists and normals oohing and awing over BDO's entering the Earth's orbit... oh wait, no that's pretty much a standard of SF.
Seriously, aside from the times, which may or may not let you guys forgive the casual references to casual racism, sexism, and the oddly frank depiction of a lesbian woman deciding right before she drowns that she wants to have sex with the misogynic man as they both drown and wanting to strangle him to death before the water does the job, the novel really is a quick and fun dance around the tidal effects of the earth getting a new moon by way of HYPERSPACE.
It really was pretty neat, but let's put it in context. Stranger in a Strange land came out three years before, so free love is getting into the swing of things, and this novel is sandwiched between Way Station and Dune/This Immortal. It really isn't much of a surprise, being right dab in the middle of the sixties, that we've got almost beach scenes, Science Science Science, awkward characters named KKK, and kitty-aliens. MEOW.
And don't forget Counter Culture! Those darn Wanderers. Are they Beatniks? Are they the Youth Scene? Are they running from Mommy or Daddy? Why YES! Their tie-die bus has enough living area to hold 14 thousand earth surfaces, too, and it's full of wild types. Quick! Here come the coppers! And here's the oddest thing I've read in any novel for quite some time: "Have you ever masturbated a lower life form?"
I joke! I joke! (Or do I?)
There's actually a lot of death and pathos. It's also pretty fun for all its faults. It's easier to read in a few ways than Lucifer's Hammer and has easier to consume characters, but both works have very different messages. The level of destruction is much less than in Niven and Pournelle's work that came out 13 years later, but I have to wonder if each is merely a product of its age. Still, it's hard not to see the direct line of influence.
MEOW! Dirty monkey.
Years before furry was popular, there was The Wanderer. Years before Lucifer's Hammer, there was The Wanderer. Years before it was popular go epic numbers of scientists and normals oohing and awing over BDO's entering the Earth's orbit... oh wait, no that's pretty much a standard of SF.
Seriously, aside from the times, which may or may not let you guys forgive the casual references to casual racism, sexism, and the oddly frank depiction of a lesbian woman deciding right before she drowns that she wants to have sex with the misogynic man as they both drown and wanting to strangle him to death before the water does the job, the novel really is a quick and fun dance around the tidal effects of the earth getting a new moon by way of HYPERSPACE.
It really was pretty neat, but let's put it in context. Stranger in a Strange land came out three years before, so free love is getting into the swing of things, and this novel is sandwiched between Way Station and Dune/This Immortal. It really isn't much of a surprise, being right dab in the middle of the sixties, that we've got almost beach scenes, Science Science Science, awkward characters named KKK, and kitty-aliens. MEOW.
And don't forget Counter Culture! Those darn Wanderers. Are they Beatniks? Are they the Youth Scene? Are they running from Mommy or Daddy? Why YES! Their tie-die bus has enough living area to hold 14 thousand earth surfaces, too, and it's full of wild types. Quick! Here come the coppers! And here's the oddest thing I've read in any novel for quite some time: "Have you ever masturbated a lower life form?"
I joke! I joke! (Or do I?)
There's actually a lot of death and pathos. It's also pretty fun for all its faults. It's easier to read in a few ways than Lucifer's Hammer and has easier to consume characters, but both works have very different messages. The level of destruction is much less than in Niven and Pournelle's work that came out 13 years later, but I have to wonder if each is merely a product of its age. Still, it's hard not to see the direct line of influence.
MEOW! Dirty monkey.
April 7, 2021
Abandonado.
La edición Kindle publicada hace unos meses es de vergüenza, parece una edición pirata llena de erratas y mal editada. No sé cómo se permite comercializar versiones piratas de libros.
Aparte de eso, Leiber no ayuda nada el colega. Se marca una historia donde aparece de la nada un planeta al lado de la Luna, los personajes son redichos y tienen un humor que no le termino de coger el punto.
La edición Kindle publicada hace unos meses es de vergüenza, parece una edición pirata llena de erratas y mal editada. No sé cómo se permite comercializar versiones piratas de libros.
Aparte de eso, Leiber no ayuda nada el colega. Se marca una historia donde aparece de la nada un planeta al lado de la Luna, los personajes son redichos y tienen un humor que no le termino de coger el punto.
September 2, 2023
Check out my full, spoiler lite, video review HERE. Interesting concept and science but the narrative structure distracted from the plot and flow of the story. Also, there are many parts of this book that haven't aged well.
July 7, 2010
I finished this one out of sheer stubbornness. I'm a great fan of Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" fantasy stories but this Hugo award-winning science fiction tale from 1964 has aged badly, in my opinion.
An interesting premise, a planet-sized spacecraft appearing in near-Earth orbit, is thrown off track by frequent hopping amongst several groups of characters, mostly unrelated. These asides do show the destruction caused by the now out-of-control tidal forces on our planet but Leiber spends too much time with some of these characters. He may be aiming for a sprawling, epic narrative but many of these digressions strike me as self-indulgent musings on sexual and racial politics (and there's a laughable tale of a group of semi-Beatnik proto-hippies in Greenwich Village - "weed brothers", he calls them).
I'm not a hard-science geek who gets upset when there's literary characterization chocolate in my sci-fi peanut butter but this was not a good mixture, and could have at least been a nice beach read with a more streamlined narrative. Not enough is made of the aliens either, leaving just the disaster as the main concern. For more gripping planetary calamity I'd point people to Niven & Pournelle's LUCIFER'S HAMMER (or even their alien invasion potboiler, FOOTFALL)
An interesting premise, a planet-sized spacecraft appearing in near-Earth orbit, is thrown off track by frequent hopping amongst several groups of characters, mostly unrelated. These asides do show the destruction caused by the now out-of-control tidal forces on our planet but Leiber spends too much time with some of these characters. He may be aiming for a sprawling, epic narrative but many of these digressions strike me as self-indulgent musings on sexual and racial politics (and there's a laughable tale of a group of semi-Beatnik proto-hippies in Greenwich Village - "weed brothers", he calls them).
I'm not a hard-science geek who gets upset when there's literary characterization chocolate in my sci-fi peanut butter but this was not a good mixture, and could have at least been a nice beach read with a more streamlined narrative. Not enough is made of the aliens either, leaving just the disaster as the main concern. For more gripping planetary calamity I'd point people to Niven & Pournelle's LUCIFER'S HAMMER (or even their alien invasion potboiler, FOOTFALL)
December 20, 2024
The Wanderer is an odd disaster novel that Ballantine published as a paperback original in 1964. The title refers to a planet that suddenly appears and wreaks havoc on our Earth. There's a cat lady inside the planet that wants to capture our moon before she goes back home. The story is told from multiple viewpoints, including a trio a of stoners who converse in hep jive jargon, the fiancé of a Lunar astronaut and her special cat, some UFOlogists, and a large collection of others. It's a bit like When Worlds Collide or Lucifer's Hammer, but not as well organized and with some recursive sf in-jokes and some quite dated social attitudes. It's Leiber's longest novel, though not his best. It was the first novel to win a Hugo for best of the year that didn't first appear as a magazine serial or a hardback, but of the nominees I probably would have voted for it last. (First would be Pangborn's Davy, then Cordwainer Smith's The Planet Buyer, and third Brunner's The Whole Man, in my opinion.) It's not a bad book, just not a particularly good one. There are some good bits, but it's a little hard to follow with the frequent shifts.
October 30, 2016
A planet space ship appears above Earth and eats the moon, catastrophic floods and earthquakes kill millions, all the ladies sleep with the men (in what I imagine are filthy conditions too, ew!), and one lucky guy gets sexy masturbation times with the cat-lady alien. There's a little space battle.
The second half was very tedious to get through, like starting a disaster movie that should be brainless fun... until you get super irritated by the endless dumb CGI moments.
I bet it was fantastic in the 60's.
The second half was very tedious to get through, like starting a disaster movie that should be brainless fun... until you get super irritated by the endless dumb CGI moments.
I bet it was fantastic in the 60's.
June 4, 2023
The ideas here weren't bad. It was sort of a cross between The War of the Worlds and Rendezvous with Rama (albeit the latter was written far later) in scope. A huge planet appears from nowhere and eats the moon causing havoc. The aliens on the planet are apparently fleeing an even bigger menace. Our protagonists, including a hardly believable love triangle, are busy throughout trying to figure shit out. Strange obsessions with cats abound. It is a freaking weird book as were the other Leiber ones that I have read. Some funky stuff writing sci-fi in the 60s, must have been some good drugs he was on. Weird.
July 22, 2025
Sooo was leiber a furrie??? Wtf? 😝
A new celestial body suddenly appears in our sky, amidst spectulations they finally confirm its a planet, nicknamed the Wanderer, and its getting closer. Eventually pulling the moon away from our orbit and somehow “consuming it” causibg massive turmoil on our planet. While a bit pedantic in his over explaination and probably too many character POVs showing the chaos at the loss of the moon, this first section seemed reasonable….
Until the sexy cat aliens from the Wanderer apprehend an earth man and proceed to have multiple bondage torture sex scenes. Then they leave and 1 more human sex scene and oh by the way, the earth is fine without the moon. The end.
1965 musta really been scraping the bottom of the barrel for this to win a hugo…..
A new celestial body suddenly appears in our sky, amidst spectulations they finally confirm its a planet, nicknamed the Wanderer, and its getting closer. Eventually pulling the moon away from our orbit and somehow “consuming it” causibg massive turmoil on our planet. While a bit pedantic in his over explaination and probably too many character POVs showing the chaos at the loss of the moon, this first section seemed reasonable….
Until the sexy cat aliens from the Wanderer apprehend an earth man and proceed to have multiple bondage torture sex scenes. Then they leave and 1 more human sex scene and oh by the way, the earth is fine without the moon. The end.
1965 musta really been scraping the bottom of the barrel for this to win a hugo…..
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 9, 2023
What would happen if a new planet appears in the sky over Earth? That's the question that Leiber answers. It's interesting....written in 1964, set in a near future ( I would say it would be the 70s) when the US and the USSR have bases on the Moon. When the story focusses on "the saucer people"-Americans who are interested in UFOs-it's most interesting, but the story bogs down following other characters. Still, it was a fast read and I finished it in record time...
September 9, 2022
This is a SF novel from the 60s, which mixed some new then literary technics like multiple points of view with a story of global catastrophe a little similar to much earlier When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie (1932). I read it as a part of monthly reading for September 2022 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group. The novel was nominated for Hugo in 1965 and actually won it, I guess based on the name of the author (a similar story possibly happened with ‘the worst Hugo best novel winner, They'd Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton).
The story starts with several epigraphs, including by Edward E. Smith and Olaf Stapledon, which hint at the nature of the story. Then readers are presented with a list of characters in the following paragraph:
So we might begin this story anywhere—with Wolf Loner in the mid-Atlantic, or Fritz Scher in Germany, or Richard Hillary in Somerset, or Arab Jones smoking weed in Harlem, or Barbara Katz sneaking around Palm Beach in a black playsuit, or Sally Harris hunting her excitement in the environs of New York, or Doc Brecht selling pianos in L.A., or Charlie Fulby lecturing about flying saucers, or General Spike Stevens understudying the top role in the U.S. Space Force, or Rama Joan Huntington interpreting Buddhism, or with Bagong Bung in the South China Sea, or with Don Merriam at Moonbase U.S., or even with Tigran Biryuzov orbiting Mars. Or we could begin it with Tigerishka or Miaow or Ragnarok or the President of the United States.
Brush strokes deliver the infodump that this is a near future (for the 60s), with no notable changes in tech or society, but with Soviet and US bases on the Moon and the Soviets about to land on Mars. Maybe the only change (which is similar to what other SF authors of the time wrote) are much more liberal women's clothes. There is some enigma about strange photos made by astronomers, which show the stars around Pluto had blanked out or shifted position and a similar occurrence later near Venus. What happens no one knows but soon an Earth-size planet appears at a distance about that of the Moon and the main story starts.
If Moon causes tides then a much larger object causes correspondingly larger tides, and the largest share of the book is filled with reactions to this global calamity, from comic, like viewed by weed-smoking youngsters to tragic. There are also quite a few references to other SF writers, among those named are Robert A. Heinlein, E.E. "Doc" Smith and H.G. Wells, which I guess it one of the earliest nods to the fandom in a Hugo-nominated novel.
For me some attempts at comic were too transparent and the overall story was rather boring – I wasn’t touched by the plight of any character nor cared for any of them. It was a surprisingly weak Hugo winner.
The story starts with several epigraphs, including by Edward E. Smith and Olaf Stapledon, which hint at the nature of the story. Then readers are presented with a list of characters in the following paragraph:
So we might begin this story anywhere—with Wolf Loner in the mid-Atlantic, or Fritz Scher in Germany, or Richard Hillary in Somerset, or Arab Jones smoking weed in Harlem, or Barbara Katz sneaking around Palm Beach in a black playsuit, or Sally Harris hunting her excitement in the environs of New York, or Doc Brecht selling pianos in L.A., or Charlie Fulby lecturing about flying saucers, or General Spike Stevens understudying the top role in the U.S. Space Force, or Rama Joan Huntington interpreting Buddhism, or with Bagong Bung in the South China Sea, or with Don Merriam at Moonbase U.S., or even with Tigran Biryuzov orbiting Mars. Or we could begin it with Tigerishka or Miaow or Ragnarok or the President of the United States.
Brush strokes deliver the infodump that this is a near future (for the 60s), with no notable changes in tech or society, but with Soviet and US bases on the Moon and the Soviets about to land on Mars. Maybe the only change (which is similar to what other SF authors of the time wrote) are much more liberal women's clothes. There is some enigma about strange photos made by astronomers, which show the stars around Pluto had blanked out or shifted position and a similar occurrence later near Venus. What happens no one knows but soon an Earth-size planet appears at a distance about that of the Moon and the main story starts.
If Moon causes tides then a much larger object causes correspondingly larger tides, and the largest share of the book is filled with reactions to this global calamity, from comic, like viewed by weed-smoking youngsters to tragic. There are also quite a few references to other SF writers, among those named are Robert A. Heinlein, E.E. "Doc" Smith and H.G. Wells, which I guess it one of the earliest nods to the fandom in a Hugo-nominated novel.
For me some attempts at comic were too transparent and the overall story was rather boring – I wasn’t touched by the plight of any character nor cared for any of them. It was a surprisingly weak Hugo winner.
June 6, 2025
Finalmente riesco a mettere le mani (e gli occhi) su un vero capolavoro di fantascienza classica, e me lo sono goduto fino alla fine. Fritz Leiber non a caso è stato vincitore più volte dei più prestigiosi premi letterari di fantascienza come il Premio Hugo e il premio Nebula.
In Novilunio (il titolo originale, The Wanderer, si traduce in italiano con Il Vagabondo) ci troviamo al cospetto di un evento particolare: improvvisamente arriva una minaccia dallo spazio: un pianeta, definito Il Vagabondo, si sposta nello spazio e arriva fino alla Terra, provocando dei cataclismi terribili come maremoti e terremoti. Nella storia che Leiber ci dipana seguiremo le avventure e le disgrazie di diversi esseri umani, fino al punto che uno di essi verrà catturato da un' aliena dalle fattezze gattesche, e se ne innamorerà.
Romanzo corale, apocalittico, pieno di eventi, anche di incontri ravvicinati e innamoramenti tra specie diverse, forse la cosa che potrebbe risultare un po' problematica è il fatto che in ogni capitolo troviamo le vicende e le avventure di diversi personaggi e arrivi al punto di confonderti se solo interrompi la lettura per un giorno.
Assolutamente promosso, si respira vera aria di fantascienza classica, e la storia in se fa paura, fa capire che noi umani, in caso di una catastrofe mondiale, non è detto che riusciremo a cavarcela!
In Novilunio (il titolo originale, The Wanderer, si traduce in italiano con Il Vagabondo) ci troviamo al cospetto di un evento particolare: improvvisamente arriva una minaccia dallo spazio: un pianeta, definito Il Vagabondo, si sposta nello spazio e arriva fino alla Terra, provocando dei cataclismi terribili come maremoti e terremoti. Nella storia che Leiber ci dipana seguiremo le avventure e le disgrazie di diversi esseri umani, fino al punto che uno di essi verrà catturato da un' aliena dalle fattezze gattesche, e se ne innamorerà.
Romanzo corale, apocalittico, pieno di eventi, anche di incontri ravvicinati e innamoramenti tra specie diverse, forse la cosa che potrebbe risultare un po' problematica è il fatto che in ogni capitolo troviamo le vicende e le avventure di diversi personaggi e arrivi al punto di confonderti se solo interrompi la lettura per un giorno.
Assolutamente promosso, si respira vera aria di fantascienza classica, e la storia in se fa paura, fa capire che noi umani, in caso di una catastrofe mondiale, non è detto che riusciremo a cavarcela!
February 28, 2021
The worst Hugo-winning novel ever, except probably They’d Rather Be Right. It could have been an effective disaster story, but it’s crippled by wooden characterization, too many irrelevant characters, an aimless plot, and rampant casual sexism and racism. (One of the characters spends half the book sexually harassing a woman, and is rewarded by getting to sleep with her.) Finishing this was a chore.
May 16, 2015
The predecessor of the disaster movie, or even better, the spoof Disaster Movie. Characters of all walks survive tidal chaos when a new planet comes to visit. Fun, but Fritz steals the show with his funny observations on culture and SF.
August 10, 2018
Storyline: 2/5
Characters: 1/5
Writing Style: 2/5
World: 2/5
This had potential. It should have been a book I liked. I'm a fan of the subgenre . I like hard science fiction. I enjoy seeing the sociological ramifications of whatever science fiction innovations the author has to show. Leiber did all these things, and I still found it a miserable reading experience. There characters were just awful. This was the worst use of the shifting perspectives technique I've ever seen. It so abysmally bad because most of the characters did not matter. Leiber had no idea what he wanted to do with the characters or what should happen to them. He didn't know when to shift to or away from them. Their subplots, if they had any, were desperately and awkwardly contrived. The characters that inhabited most of them were embarrassing to read. The writing was only a little better. Leiber understood, intellectually, what a writer is supposed to do. Adjectives in the right place, descriptions along with the proper scenes, some flourishes and embellishments. None of it worked, however. I cringed when I wasn't confused. Either it was so obviously a failed attempt at literary beauty or it was ambiguous as to when he was in his literal or figurative modes. To the extent that a book can be painful to read, this one was a punishing.
Still, there were things I liked. Usually books that I find this disagreeable had nothing going for them. I really did like the central idea of the "Wanderer," though. I thought the hard science fiction and problem solving was more than just okay; it was fairly good. It was one of the few things that Leiber did right with both the characters and the writing, letting the problem-solving be character-developing and slipping it into the story smoothly. There's even a really good short story stuck in someplace at the 2/3 mark. Those positive elements were just so totally overwhelmed by the rest, that I hated coming back to read this one.
Characters: 1/5
Writing Style: 2/5
World: 2/5
This had potential. It should have been a book I liked. I'm a fan of the subgenre . I like hard science fiction. I enjoy seeing the sociological ramifications of whatever science fiction innovations the author has to show. Leiber did all these things, and I still found it a miserable reading experience. There characters were just awful. This was the worst use of the shifting perspectives technique I've ever seen. It so abysmally bad because most of the characters did not matter. Leiber had no idea what he wanted to do with the characters or what should happen to them. He didn't know when to shift to or away from them. Their subplots, if they had any, were desperately and awkwardly contrived. The characters that inhabited most of them were embarrassing to read. The writing was only a little better. Leiber understood, intellectually, what a writer is supposed to do. Adjectives in the right place, descriptions along with the proper scenes, some flourishes and embellishments. None of it worked, however. I cringed when I wasn't confused. Either it was so obviously a failed attempt at literary beauty or it was ambiguous as to when he was in his literal or figurative modes. To the extent that a book can be painful to read, this one was a punishing.
Still, there were things I liked. Usually books that I find this disagreeable had nothing going for them. I really did like the central idea of the "Wanderer," though. I thought the hard science fiction and problem solving was more than just okay; it was fairly good. It was one of the few things that Leiber did right with both the characters and the writing, letting the problem-solving be character-developing and slipping it into the story smoothly. There's even a really good short story stuck in someplace at the 2/3 mark. Those positive elements were just so totally overwhelmed by the rest, that I hated coming back to read this one.
July 28, 2011
Picked this one up at Knack's Drugstore on Lake Street in Bridgman, Michigan and read it up at the cabin in Livingston Hills. Found it slow going, but was fascinated by one memorable element, namely the peculiar relationship between the feline commander of the enormous spacecraft and a human male, a relationship with an erotic culmination. Being still a kid--a kid overwrought by sex at the time--this encounter struck me powerfully. She, the commander, is not only nonhuman and dominant, but she is also a female. This blew my mind, jumbling the categories. Leiber did a good job of establishing her character and appearance as attractive. If she had been a toad-like alien and he had accomplished the same erotic tension, then, of course, he'd get five stars.
November 1, 2023
Regardless of quibbles about character or plot, it's always such a pleasure to read good prose in sci-fi.
Sadly, it's not always the most common occurrence in SFF. Fritz Leiber is evidently someone that takes great care with his wordsmithing, as I have already discovered in The Big Time.
The Wanderer: an actual planet that just shows up right next to the Earth, and starts sucking up our moon as fuel for its journey through hyperspace. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes & huge tides ensue. All fun stuff to read about for sure; I'd love to see Emmerich make a movie of this one.
Comparisons to The Stand are inevitable: the novel jumps between different groups of characters, all around the world in this case, as they react and deal with an apocalypse.
It's like The Stand, but better written; it came out over a decade earlier; it doesn't have a completely dull and dead second half. It also doesn't have a silly ending that throws away all that came before - The Wanderer actually values your time, and comes to a solid conclusion.
I didn't mean this to be a review that spends its time bashing The Stand, but I did keep comparing the two while reading. The Wanderer doesn't have characters that stand out like Trashcan Man, or a deaf-mute guy like Nick, let alone Flagg & Abagail - it's aiming for characters that are less cartoon, yet still memorable: an astronaut stranded in space, a treasure hunter down in the Philippines, a group of people hunting for flying saucers, a young gold-digger hunting down an aging millionaire, a drunk Welsh poet.
There's definitely favoritism going on with the page time certain characters get; some arcs felt like filler, due to how infrequently they appeared, and how little they showed of events.
Unfortunately the book falls prey to some of the worst excesses of old school sci-fi - stuff I won't go into for fear of spoilers, but if you've read any sci-fi from 50 years ago, you'll have some ideas of the clichés and cheesiness.
I would have enjoyed more focus on the concepts. Chapter 36 in particular was absolutely incredible; a whole wealth of galaxy sized sci-fi ideas, fascinating concepts I'd just love to explore more, or discuss with someone. They were also fairly unique in sci-fi I've read so far.
Would I re-read: no. There's too much silliness interspersed in the good writing and awesome ideas.
Sadly, it's not always the most common occurrence in SFF. Fritz Leiber is evidently someone that takes great care with his wordsmithing, as I have already discovered in The Big Time.
The Wanderer: an actual planet that just shows up right next to the Earth, and starts sucking up our moon as fuel for its journey through hyperspace. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes & huge tides ensue. All fun stuff to read about for sure; I'd love to see Emmerich make a movie of this one.
Comparisons to The Stand are inevitable: the novel jumps between different groups of characters, all around the world in this case, as they react and deal with an apocalypse.
It's like The Stand, but better written; it came out over a decade earlier; it doesn't have a completely dull and dead second half. It also doesn't have a silly ending that throws away all that came before - The Wanderer actually values your time, and comes to a solid conclusion.
I didn't mean this to be a review that spends its time bashing The Stand, but I did keep comparing the two while reading. The Wanderer doesn't have characters that stand out like Trashcan Man, or a deaf-mute guy like Nick, let alone Flagg & Abagail - it's aiming for characters that are less cartoon, yet still memorable: an astronaut stranded in space, a treasure hunter down in the Philippines, a group of people hunting for flying saucers, a young gold-digger hunting down an aging millionaire, a drunk Welsh poet.
There's definitely favoritism going on with the page time certain characters get; some arcs felt like filler, due to how infrequently they appeared, and how little they showed of events.
Unfortunately the book falls prey to some of the worst excesses of old school sci-fi - stuff I won't go into for fear of spoilers, but if you've read any sci-fi from 50 years ago, you'll have some ideas of the clichés and cheesiness.
I would have enjoyed more focus on the concepts. Chapter 36 in particular was absolutely incredible; a whole wealth of galaxy sized sci-fi ideas, fascinating concepts I'd just love to explore more, or discuss with someone. They were also fairly unique in sci-fi I've read so far.
Would I re-read: no. There's too much silliness interspersed in the good writing and awesome ideas.
April 1, 2025
If I wasn't committed to reading through all of David Pringle's 100 Best Science Fiction Novels list, I would have DNF'd this one. Unfortunately, I did press through and was shocked at just how little actually happens here. When a mysterious object which appears to be a planet appears in Earth's orbit and subsumes the moon, Leiber introduces us to a large cast of characters scattered around the world. They are theorising about the nature of this 'Wanderer' and dealing with the climate impacts as a result of this enormous body's presence. With so many characters in play, it's astonishing that the author doesn't flesh out any of them enough to make you care about their lives or circumstances. This is made even more frustrating by the lack of any meaningful events for most of the book, instead relying on dull conversations for the most part. I don't need my stories to be completely action packed but with no interesting character studies, I found this one incredibly difficult to get through. This is made even worse by the fact that the book is significantly longer than many other SF novels published during the same period.
There are some alien beings here which are supposedly part of a super-civilisation at the height of sophistication, who for some reason speak in a laughably primitive way. I can't really point to anything that I liked here.
There are some alien beings here which are supposedly part of a super-civilisation at the height of sophistication, who for some reason speak in a laughably primitive way. I can't really point to anything that I liked here.
September 20, 2010
I was determined to finish The Wanderer, a novel I picked up last weekend at Saint Vinnie��s, if it killed me. I didn’t think it could literally kill me until I read the following:
"Don woke from his slumber, or thought he did until he realized that he was outside his body. He didn’t realize he was outside his body at first, but then he realized he didn’t have any arms or legs and he realized that couldn’t be right. Then he realized it was floating about six feet above his bed, and he realized that floating and not having any arms or legs indicated perhaps that he was not really there, so he tried to turn his head to see if his body was still lying on the bed below him but he couldn’t, of course, because he didn’t have a head because he was outside his body."
I’m paraphrasing, but only because I didn’t want to quote five more pages of disjointed text like that. I lived through it once, but I don’t think I could do it again, and I didn’t see any reason to put you through it, either.
At first The Wanderer was good fun, a romp through what is often called The Golden Age of science fiction when authors like Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell and this novel’s writer, Fritz Leiber, wrote space operas about square-jawed astro-explorers riding atom-powered rocket jets to Venus to meet a race of octopoids and either start a nuclear war or have sex with them. The Wanderer is about a space ship as big as a planet that pops out of hyperspace into orbit around Earth and starts to eat the moon. While the moon’s being broken up in to kibble, cat people in flying saucers abduct some Earthlings and have sex with them. There’s lots and lots of mass destruction and sex, although the sex is only hinted at while the mass destruction is described in excruciating detail.
I almost gave up in disgust about two-hundred pages into the book when Leiber kills off one of the most interesting characters, but by then I’d invested quite a bit of time and energy in it and there were only about a hundred thirty pages to go, so I pressed on, cheating a bit by skimming through the exposition and trying to catch as much of the story as I could from the dialog, until I came to the part where one of the main characters speaks to another character via hologram, which he explains away as “actually an advanced method of communication; incidentally, I’m in space right now!” When the dialog fails to hold your interest any longer, that’s a hint it’s time to give up any hope of finishing the story.
I took one last stab at making it all the way to the end by taking it to bed with me. After all, I had only thirty or so pages left, but they were pretty awful pages by that time. I got the feeling Leiber was sick of the story by then, too, and just wanted it to be over with. When I flipped open to the bookmark and started reading, My Darling B looked over and noted, “Oh, you’re almost done!”
“Thank goodness!” I added, and explained what a turd it was. She was amazed I was trying to stick with it.
“I thought reading was supposed to be something you enjoy,” she said, and that’s when I realized what I was doing by trying to finish was all wrong, and I realized I should put the book down, and I should turn the light out and I should float away bodiless to la-la land. The end.
"Don woke from his slumber, or thought he did until he realized that he was outside his body. He didn’t realize he was outside his body at first, but then he realized he didn’t have any arms or legs and he realized that couldn’t be right. Then he realized it was floating about six feet above his bed, and he realized that floating and not having any arms or legs indicated perhaps that he was not really there, so he tried to turn his head to see if his body was still lying on the bed below him but he couldn’t, of course, because he didn’t have a head because he was outside his body."
I’m paraphrasing, but only because I didn’t want to quote five more pages of disjointed text like that. I lived through it once, but I don’t think I could do it again, and I didn’t see any reason to put you through it, either.
At first The Wanderer was good fun, a romp through what is often called The Golden Age of science fiction when authors like Heinlein, Asimov, Campbell and this novel’s writer, Fritz Leiber, wrote space operas about square-jawed astro-explorers riding atom-powered rocket jets to Venus to meet a race of octopoids and either start a nuclear war or have sex with them. The Wanderer is about a space ship as big as a planet that pops out of hyperspace into orbit around Earth and starts to eat the moon. While the moon’s being broken up in to kibble, cat people in flying saucers abduct some Earthlings and have sex with them. There’s lots and lots of mass destruction and sex, although the sex is only hinted at while the mass destruction is described in excruciating detail.
I almost gave up in disgust about two-hundred pages into the book when Leiber kills off one of the most interesting characters, but by then I’d invested quite a bit of time and energy in it and there were only about a hundred thirty pages to go, so I pressed on, cheating a bit by skimming through the exposition and trying to catch as much of the story as I could from the dialog, until I came to the part where one of the main characters speaks to another character via hologram, which he explains away as “actually an advanced method of communication; incidentally, I’m in space right now!” When the dialog fails to hold your interest any longer, that’s a hint it’s time to give up any hope of finishing the story.
I took one last stab at making it all the way to the end by taking it to bed with me. After all, I had only thirty or so pages left, but they were pretty awful pages by that time. I got the feeling Leiber was sick of the story by then, too, and just wanted it to be over with. When I flipped open to the bookmark and started reading, My Darling B looked over and noted, “Oh, you’re almost done!”
“Thank goodness!” I added, and explained what a turd it was. She was amazed I was trying to stick with it.
“I thought reading was supposed to be something you enjoy,” she said, and that’s when I realized what I was doing by trying to finish was all wrong, and I realized I should put the book down, and I should turn the light out and I should float away bodiless to la-la land. The end.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 11, 2015
I can't believe this painfully tedious book won the Hugo. Perhaps our Science Fiction sensibilities have just changed quite a bit since 1964. This book threatens to derail my plans to read every Hugo Best Novel winner; apparently the award has occasionally been an unreliable yardstick.
On second thought, it must have been a slow year; I have not read Davy, The Planet Buyer, or The Whole Man, 1965's other contenders, so I can't say. But the previous year the nominees were Cat's Cradle, Dune, Glory Road, Way Station, and Witch World. If you've been a science fiction fan for a while, at least one of those is probably a book you enjoyed. So I'm going to hope that the 1965 Hugo committee all had the flu, or something, and carry on.
On second thought, it must have been a slow year; I have not read Davy, The Planet Buyer, or The Whole Man, 1965's other contenders, so I can't say. But the previous year the nominees were Cat's Cradle, Dune, Glory Road, Way Station, and Witch World. If you've been a science fiction fan for a while, at least one of those is probably a book you enjoyed. So I'm going to hope that the 1965 Hugo committee all had the flu, or something, and carry on.
September 22, 2013
Fritz Leiber is known for Fantasy, both Swords and Sorcery and Urban Fantasy (a genre he practically invented), but The Wanderer is a mixture of disaster/apocalypse and first contact novel. It is in fact surprisingly 'hard' as far as the science fiction elements are concerned. A new planet, the Wanderer, appears suddenly next to the moon, its gravity causing earthquakes and huge tides which cause considerable destruction on Earth. Leiber follows several groups of people through the story including two who have direct contact with the inhabitants of the Wanderer.
It is an interesting novel but it is something of a mixed bag. The disaster scenes are well done, although I think Leiber should have focused on fewer groups stories. There are some characters introduced early in the novel, that seldom get mentioned afterwards, he maybe should have cut those plot threads out altogether. The concept of the aliens was interesting but the inter-species romance was cringe inducing and easily the weakest part of the book. A good but not great book, but interesting nonetheless just for Leiber's take on science fiction.
It is an interesting novel but it is something of a mixed bag. The disaster scenes are well done, although I think Leiber should have focused on fewer groups stories. There are some characters introduced early in the novel, that seldom get mentioned afterwards, he maybe should have cut those plot threads out altogether. The concept of the aliens was interesting but the inter-species romance was cringe inducing and easily the weakest part of the book. A good but not great book, but interesting nonetheless just for Leiber's take on science fiction.
September 12, 2022
This was a bad book that really didn't deserve the Hugo it won. The high concept is that suddenly a planet appears from hyperspace near the Moon, and the tidal forces start to cause havoc on Earth. This sounds like an interesting thought experiment, something for the "What if...?" type columns, but turns out its much less interesting as a full-lenght novel.
The main problem with the book was that there were way too many characters who were extremely non-interesting. Whenever a viewpoint changed, there was about 50/50 chance that I couldn't remember who that character was and didn't care. And whenever some side character died, I cheered a little - one less boring sideplot to follow!
And it gets worse! The aliens are not plausible at all and the interactions between humans and aliens are like something out of the worst episodes of Star Trek TOS.
This was trash, and I regret all the time I spent reading it.
The main problem with the book was that there were way too many characters who were extremely non-interesting. Whenever a viewpoint changed, there was about 50/50 chance that I couldn't remember who that character was and didn't care. And whenever some side character died, I cheered a little - one less boring sideplot to follow!
And it gets worse! The aliens are not plausible at all and the interactions between humans and aliens are like something out of the worst episodes of Star Trek TOS.
This was trash, and I regret all the time I spent reading it.
June 12, 2013
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.
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.
December 15, 2020
The Wanderer earned Fritz Leiber his second Hugo Award. He won the first time in 1958 with The Big Time. I liked this one a good deal better.
An eclipse of the moon turns out to include the arrival of a rogue planet, four times the diameter of the moon and giving off a bloody and golden light. Humans name it The Wanderer. Once the planet consumes the moon, tidal surges and massive earthquakes make Earth a terror.
In addition to the apocalyptic horror of it all, I thought Leiber did a great job of showing the effects on various people around our planet as tides roll into cities and submerge the streets, as ships at sea try to navigate, as a group of flying saucer buffs come up against the space program, and as an astronaut on the moon is captured by the alien planet.
It took me a while to get used to all the characters and the shifts between their stories, but overall I enjoyed the book as a wild tale. I am discovering that it pays off to read older sci fi. I always think about how it influenced the sci fi of today. The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Octavia Butler's work, The Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin. I bet they all read this one when they were growing up.
An eclipse of the moon turns out to include the arrival of a rogue planet, four times the diameter of the moon and giving off a bloody and golden light. Humans name it The Wanderer. Once the planet consumes the moon, tidal surges and massive earthquakes make Earth a terror.
In addition to the apocalyptic horror of it all, I thought Leiber did a great job of showing the effects on various people around our planet as tides roll into cities and submerge the streets, as ships at sea try to navigate, as a group of flying saucer buffs come up against the space program, and as an astronaut on the moon is captured by the alien planet.
It took me a while to get used to all the characters and the shifts between their stories, but overall I enjoyed the book as a wild tale. I am discovering that it pays off to read older sci fi. I always think about how it influenced the sci fi of today. The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Octavia Butler's work, The Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin. I bet they all read this one when they were growing up.
December 29, 2022
This was the 1965 Hugo Award winner which I found a first edition paperback copy of at a Library book sale earlier this year. It's about a planet suddenly appearing alongside the moon causing big consequences for the Earth. The disaster survival storylines were pretty good, but there was a bunch of weird relationship stuff, and the actual cause of the planet's appearance was pretty cheesy. When you look at the list of Hugo nominees for that year, it was a bunch of books you probably never heard of written by some classic authors you maybe have heard of, so possibly it was not a strong slate.
July 27, 2010
This is one book I could have actually judged by its cover - very cheesy. I have no idea how this won a Hugo Award. The author tries to tell a story of aliens coming to Earth from many different perspectives, but ends up just confusing the reader by never giving any depth to any of the characters. Also, many of the storylines are pointless and end without ever giving any insight as to their importance.
The whole thing is very dated. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
The whole thing is very dated. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
March 27, 2019
A hippie disaster novel with cat aliens. Which, like, could be something. But, not this time. Unfortunately it's a mess. Its odd voice has some charm but the jumping around to dozens of barely established characters, giving them only a quick look-in at each stop, just ends up feeling plodding and jumbled.
June 13, 2024
I should’ve judged this book by its cover: I’m not a cat person, nor a suspiciously-cat-like-humanoid person.
For a book confronting Earth’s existence in the universe, it had a few incredibly powerful quotes:
But the depth of thought ended here; even for the character who thought these lines, whose pitiful urges and behavior undermined his rare sensibilities. The story was an eclectic collection of side characters who poorly contextualized the greater situation and only distracted from the primary conflict. What was the primary conflict?
Bottom of the barrel for Hugo winners.
For a book confronting Earth’s existence in the universe, it had a few incredibly powerful quotes:
He found himself thinking of how safe the Earth had swung in all its loneliness for millions of years, like a house to which no stranger ever comes, and of how precarious its isolation had really always been.
Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order.
But the depth of thought ended here; even for the character who thought these lines, whose pitiful urges and behavior undermined his rare sensibilities. The story was an eclectic collection of side characters who poorly contextualized the greater situation and only distracted from the primary conflict. What was the primary conflict?
So much attention was given to the effects of civilization due to tides’ heightened intensity (which was quantified by a coarse explanation of the inverse-square law) and none at all to the environmental effects of their absence. The Earth-bound adventure was frustratingly circuitous. It reminded me a lot of The Last Jedi, in which the lumbering chase sequence was so unself-reliantly stilted that even a plethora of side quests couldn’t prop it up.
Bottom of the barrel for Hugo winners.
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