Perhaps best know for his sword & sorcery stories featuring Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, Fritz Leiber wrote successfully across a number of genres, including horror, fantasy, and science fiction. His epic sci-fi disaster novel, The Wanderer, won Leiber the Hugo in 1965 (he also won in 1958 for The Big Time.) Among the list of previous Hugo winners, The Wanderer stands out as one of the more obscure choices. While Leiber remains a well-regarded writer, his Hugo-winning novels have frequently fallen out of print. Gollancz publishers have recently recognized the importance of Leiber’s magnum opus, and included it in their collection of classic sci-fi reprints.The plot kicks off when an artificial planet, quickly nicknamed the Wanderer, materializes from hyperspace within earth’s orbit. The Wanderer’s gravitational field captures the moon and shatters it into something like one of Saturn’s rings. On earth, the Wanderer’s gravity well triggers massive earthquakes, tsunamis, and tidal phenomena. The multi-threaded plot follows the exploits of a large ensemble cast as they struggle to survive the global disaster. If you read The Wanderer with an eye toward the rich, sympathetic characterizations that distinguished Leiber’s sword & sorcery efforts, you’ll be disappointed. Many of the subplots, particularly those focusing on characters from disparate lands like South America, Europe, and Asia, convey the global scale of the catastrophe, but otherwise don’t seem to go anywhere. The episodes are just too brief for readers to develop any attachment to the characters. It’s clear, however, that Leiber intended it this way. He seems to be borrowing pen pal H.P. Lovecraft’s concept of a hostile cosmos populated with god-like aliens who act utterly indifferent to the plight of humankind. Leiber supports the story’s thematic pessimism about humanity’s role in the universe by intentionally avoiding characterization. Indeed, the actions of the human characters have little impact on the final outcome. Our lot is merely to survive the onslaught of forces beyond our ability to understand or control. The Wanderer is a story that must be read as existential horror.With The Wanderer, some pundits give Leiber credit for laying the groundwork for the modern disaster story subgenre. This is a somewhat dubious legacy, if taken at face value; it follows that The Wanderer not only prefigured excellent work like John Brunner’s quartet of “awful warnings,” but also made possible the glut of cheesy Irwin Allen movies from the 1970s. While some critics slammed The Wanderer for exhibiting more scope than depth, it went on to win a Hugo nonetheless. And it isn’t difficult to see why The Wanderer took Hugo home. Leiber ingeniously blends genres, recasting the disaster tale within a sci-fi context. Leiber’s jaunty prose provides a sly, ironic (and welcome) counterpoint to the grim proceedings (though the street lingo that he weaves into the narrative has grown dated). The Wanderer also demonstrates that Leiber was no mere science fiction dilettante. He displays a self-consciousness awareness of the genre’s history and clichés, and clearly enjoys engaging scientific speculation and explication (however dubious the science, Leiber’s enthusiasm remains infectious.) Furthermore, The Wanderer ranks among Leiber’s most ambitious works. Its reach extends beyond the merely global; rather, it encompasses a depiction of the civilized universe that recalls Olaf Stapleton’s vast, intimidating cosmos. Leiber’s pessimism about humanity’s role in the universe adds to the novel’s revolutionary luster, as it direct undermining the presumption of many golden age sci-fi writers that the universe was just waiting passively for humans to colonize it.
Yes, there are flying saucers in The Wanderer. Yes, it is an “Invaders from Outer Space” story of sorts. Yes, it is written by Grandmaster Fritz Leiber. But no, it isn’t what I expected. And, as fabulous as I’ve always considered Leiber, it wasn’t something I enjoyed. A terrific novel begins with a clever hook and The Wanderer has just such a hook. It considers the same event, a cosmic event with a strange appearance near the moon, from the perspective of nearly a dozen different characters from a dozen different venues. This was fascinating in the form in which it was presented in the first chapter and might have been okay for short “look-ins” on later occasions in the book, but Leiber was determined to tell the stories of all of these characters even when there wasn’t anything significant to tell. One character even rescues another at one point, but it doesn’t make any real difference because, as a reader, I didn’t really care what happened to either of them. Anyone who reads my reviews knows that I’m not usually this callous, but I felt about most of these lifeless, shabby, useless characters the same way as the invading aliens must have felt about them.It turns out that the cosmic phenomenon makes some rather catastrophic changes to Earth and the Moon. Portions of the novel becomes a survivalist epic (or bad disaster film) and certain portions have a rather different take on alien encounters (this isn’t your father’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although one such might even have gone on to a “fourth” kind). But it doesn’t all come together in a satisfying way for me. The Wanderer may have been the hardest book for me to get through all year. I was determined to finish it because of respect for the author, but not because I was involved with or cared about the characters. At times, I admired their resourcefulness and their intellectual curiosity, but they were shallow with a capital “S.” There is a bit of hard science to go with the soft speculation in The Wanderer and I was pleased with the way certain characters (deemed the “saucer students” by the author) could apply theory to speculation. As one of the characters suggests, in such a situation, “…science fiction is our only guide.” (p. 150) That part was intriguing, but the action and development of the plot was artificially lugubrious due to the schizophrenic whiplash of trying to keep up with characters all over the world.I liked Leiber’s clever homages to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars (pp. 66-7) and Pellucidar (p. 111), as well as Buck Rogers (p. 121) and E. E. “Doc” Smith (p. 149). One of the characters in the “saucer students” narrative line is even nicknamed “Doc.” Of course, any person who talks a lot and has a doctoral degree is likely to pick up that nickname. When I audited a course in viticulture, my classmates all called me “Doc” and I’m nothing like “Doc” Smith in terms of understanding space, time, and physics. About the only positive I took away from the book, other than an overall theme suggesting that counter-culture and rebellion aren’t merely human expressions, was somewhat of a negative. A female character in the book wants to find an older scientist and deliver her discovery to him. In one of the most interesting phrases in the book, she is accused of seeking “incest with Einsteinian overtones.”
Do You like book The Wanderer (2001)?
Media influences media, and so popular novels today often read like movie scripts. This is one of the oldest novels I've read that has that flavor. It reminds me of the disaster movies that were popular in the 1970s; The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, etc.Switching between characters that have no impact on, or involvement in the main thrust of the story splits up the focus. It takes away from the main themes, without managing to make the book into a real disaster story. So while the quality of the writing makes the book readable, the fractured plot detracts.And as others have mentioned, the themes are very dated now. Those themes, along with a decent treatment of the popular disaster format were undoubtedly what gained it a Hugo for best novel, but they have aged poorly.
—Tim
Premise: When it appears in the sky, many don't believe it. Many deny what it is. But the Wanderer is a planet, real, alien, and catastrophic for many of the people of Earth.It took me a long time to get into this book. And it's not a very long book. Much of it is structured in a way that reminds me of the beginning of The Stand: it jumps between many different groups of people to show how they are affected by the crisis. In The Stand, I think this is brilliant. The problem with it here is that most of the groups are either uninteresting, awkwardly dated in description, or just unsympathetic. I don't really care what happens to the spoiled young people who take refuge in a penthouse or the Brazilian terrorists that you never get any names for.The descriptions of how and why the planet-ship affects the tides and causes earthquakes is interesting enough, but it goes on a bit long. Frankly, I'd rather more time had been spent making me care about characters affected by said tides, etc.Once the narrative settles mostly onto one main group of characters on the California coast, it gets more interesting because these characters are given at least a little development. Once we start to learn more about the great planet-ship: its inhabitants and its purpose, it becomes more intriguing still. Of course, we never really know anything about them; they come in, cause chaos, give their account of events, and are gone.The Wanderer has a problem similar to Stranger in a Strange Land, although not as bad. It takes place at some time forward enough from the time of its writing to have a small base on Mars, but from the characters' attitudes and behavior, they clearly live in, say, 1967. It also suffers for me by not really having much in the way of interesting female characters.I thought the ending of Margo's plot line was annoying, and I was overall pretty disappointed with this book.
—Lindsay Stares
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.
—Manny
