I don’t think I like Fritz Leiber’s work. At least not his
science fiction work. Observant readers may remember that I reviewed Mr.
Leiber’s 1958 Hugo Award winning novel The
Big Time a little while ago. It wasn’t bad but it was hardly my favorite
Hugo winner. The novel was too long on
ideas (inter-time war, rest stations outside the universe, Venusian satyrs,
etc.) and too short on pages (129). The Wanderer, Leiber’s 1965 winner, is the
exact opposite. It’s too long at 320 pages for its core idea. That and it just
isn’t a very good book.
Let’s
start with the core concept: an Earth-sized planet appears suddenly in the sky
(called the Wanderer by the people of Earth), havoc ensues, and people around
the world react to it. At its core, this isn’t a bad concept. The havoc from
the massive gravitational changes such as hurricanes and tidal waves make for a
good backdrop. It all falls apart from there. The story is told from multiple
perspectives, so many in fact that I can’t remember all of them and so randomly
that often times when a plot thread was brought up I couldn’t remember anything about it. It
did not help that most of these didn’t go anywhere. The story of Wolf Loner
(not the last in a series of bad names used in this book) who is sailing across
the Atlantic by himself is without a point. Same with the story of the atomic
cruiser hijacked by revolutionaries. Nothing happens. There are too many
threads that never weave into whole cloth.
This would
be more forgivable if the main characters and stories were more interesting. With
few exception, both the stories and characters are uninteresting and ridiculous. The one exception was about Donald Merriam, an astronaut stuck on the
moon when the Wanderer arrives. His escape through the Moon while it is being
ripped apart is great. Leiber’s description of the events is excellent and
filled with enough uncertainty to keep the reader guessing. Sadly, the other
stories don’t fare as well. One of the main threads is the travels
of the Saucer Symposium, a group of alien watchers and theorists, as they
escape from a Southern California beach. Donald Merriam’s finance, Margo, and
his friend, Paul, are part of that group. Not much comes of this plot either
except for the group running into the typical post-disaster craziness, Margo
cheating on her finance with a breaded married professor, and Paul getting
abducted by some of the aliens that live on the Wanderer. We'll come back to
the abduction in a moment. As the Saucer Symposium runs into homicidal soldiers
and violent teens, I wondered if every post-apocalyptic story has to do this:
show that people are violent animals if the veneer of civilization is stripped
away. I see this all the time (zombie apocalypses always do this) and its
getting old. Maybe it wasn’t as cliched in 1965 but it certainly seems that way
now. Margo’s seduction by the professor seems less like a seduction than the
acts of sexual predator. Creepy.
There
was promise after Paul is abducted but that plot doesn’t go well. I was excited
because I wanted to see the aliens that lived on the Wanderer. Sadly, the aliens were
a major disappointment. All of them are anamorphic animals. The alien that
abducts Paul is a cat woman. It’s very lame. It doesn’t help that Paul
describes her in very sexual terms making me wonder if Leiber was an early
furry. I won’t even get started on the ridiculous of alien society and the
purpose built planets surrounding stars as an egg covers a shell.
Obviously, I was not a fan of The Wanderer.
It was certainly not my least favorite Hugo Winner, it will take quite a lot to
be worst then They’d Rather Be Right, but it is pretty low on the list.
Fritz Leiber is one of the pioneers of Sword and Sorcery so maybe those are
better. Next up is the first tied year in Hugo history. One is the science
fiction classic Dune by Frank Herbert
and the other is an obscure book called This
Immortal by Roger Zelanzy. How do they stack up? Wait and find out.
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