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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Wanderer
by Fritz Leiber
The Wanderer is not not a good book by any means, but it's fun enough disaster fiction and cosmological speculation, if you can overlook some real groaners in the writing.
The story follows a cast of dozens as a garishly decorated planet appears from hyperspace near the orbit of the moon. While at first people stare in wonder at their new purple and gold neighbor, wonder turns to horror as the 80-fold increased gravity of the Wanderer shreds the moon and starts a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, super-tides, volcanoes, and immense storms all over the Earth. Infrastructure, both physical and social, collapses under the immense weight of the unnatural disaster, as the mostly littoral human species flees to any high ground. There are scenes of destruction to rival a Roland Emmerich movie, and one advantage of the large cast is that Leiber can kill some to show he's serious.
Unfortunately, those deaths don't come soon enough, and the basic problem with the book is that it's mostly people in different places reacting to the same events in the same way. The only truly novel situations are two humans rescued/kipnapped by the aliens of the Wanderer. The planet is an artificial battlestation, designed for speed and escape in hyperspace, and crewed by rebels against a stultifying immortal galactic government that seeks to remember as much as possible against the heat-death of the universe. That is a grand idea, but one that appears much too late in the story, and presented in a giant expository monologue by a sexy alien catlady. The A plot of the book follows a group of 'Saucer Students', who happened to be attending a lecture on UFOs when the Wanderer appeared, trying to get an alien Momentum Gun to Vandenberg AFB and the world's best physicist. Though they pass for main characters, they're easily the most boring part of the book. While everybody is cardboard, the other characters are more brightly painted.
So about those groaners: Pointless sex and sadism, racial stereotypes, the hilariously dated 'weed-brothers' wandering Manhattan high on the devil dope while the world ends. This book is also panders to SF fans like crazy: all the smart people drop Heinlein and E.E. 'Doc' Smith references when discussing alien phenomena. I've read worse books, but I've also read better.
The story follows a cast of dozens as a garishly decorated planet appears from hyperspace near the orbit of the moon. While at first people stare in wonder at their new purple and gold neighbor, wonder turns to horror as the 80-fold increased gravity of the Wanderer shreds the moon and starts a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, super-tides, volcanoes, and immense storms all over the Earth. Infrastructure, both physical and social, collapses under the immense weight of the unnatural disaster, as the mostly littoral human species flees to any high ground. There are scenes of destruction to rival a Roland Emmerich movie, and one advantage of the large cast is that Leiber can kill some to show he's serious.
Unfortunately, those deaths don't come soon enough, and the basic problem with the book is that it's mostly people in different places reacting to the same events in the same way. The only truly novel situations are two humans rescued/kipnapped by the aliens of the Wanderer. The planet is an artificial battlestation, designed for speed and escape in hyperspace, and crewed by rebels against a stultifying immortal galactic government that seeks to remember as much as possible against the heat-death of the universe. That is a grand idea, but one that appears much too late in the story, and presented in a giant expository monologue by a sexy alien catlady. The A plot of the book follows a group of 'Saucer Students', who happened to be attending a lecture on UFOs when the Wanderer appeared, trying to get an alien Momentum Gun to Vandenberg AFB and the world's best physicist. Though they pass for main characters, they're easily the most boring part of the book. While everybody is cardboard, the other characters are more brightly painted.
So about those groaners: Pointless sex and sadism, racial stereotypes, the hilariously dated 'weed-brothers' wandering Manhattan high on the devil dope while the world ends. This book is also panders to SF fans like crazy: all the smart people drop Heinlein and E.E. 'Doc' Smith references when discussing alien phenomena. I've read worse books, but I've also read better.