The Wanderer is the Hugo winner where the Moon gets eaten before the book is a third done, and it’s one of the oddest Best Novel picks of the sixties, partly because of how it’s built and partly because of where it came from. Fritz Leiber wrote it as a Ballantine paperback original in 1964, 318 pages, and it took Best Novel at Loncon II in London in August 1965. Look at what it beat on the 1965 ballot: John Brunner’s The Whole Man, Edgar Pangborn’s Davy and Cordwainer Smith’s The Planet Buyer. A disaster novel with sixteen main characters and a catwoman in the middle of it came out on top, the same award that went to The Demolished Man a dozen years earlier.
My own note on this one is short, and I’d rather give it to you straight than dress it up: I really enjoyed it, it was a very interesting read. The rest of this is the story itself, because the story is where the interest is. The book is set a few years after 1964, the US and the Soviets both have bases on the Moon, and the Soviets have kept their early lead by sending an expedition to Mars (a cosmonaut named Tigran Biryuzov is orbiting the planet when the story starts). Spoilers all the way to the last page.
A new planet turns up during the eclipse
It opens on a total lunar eclipse. Astronomers have already noticed something odd, stars twinkling and smearing across a patch of sky, and the book’s explanation is that something enormous is coming out of hyperspace. Then it’s just there, a planet hanging beside the Moon, banded in big purple and gold patterns, one of which looks like the Tao symbol. Everybody ends up calling it the Wanderer, and nobody has the faintest idea what it wants.
Leiber doesn’t stay in one place for any of this. The first chapter is basically a roll call, and the cast is enormous: astronauts, potheads, saucer cultists and sailors. There’s Wolf Loner at sea in the mid-Atlantic, three friends (Arab Jones, High Bundy and Pepe Martinez) smoking on a Harlem rooftop, a smuggler named Bagong Bung in the South China Sea, two playwrights on the thirtieth floor of a New York skyscraper working on a play about floods in the city, and Don Merriam on the American Moon base. Don is an astronaut, and he’s engaged to Margo Gelhorn.
The one who matters most is Paul Hagbolt, who is escorting Margo and her cat Miaow to an observatory in California to watch the eclipse. Paul, Margo and Don make up the book’s love triangle, with Paul on the ground next to Margo while Don is stuck a quarter of a million miles up. Paul and Margo fall in with a flying saucer symposium, a gathering of intellectuals, dreamers, charlatans and misfits who have been talking about visitors for years and, a bit like the crowd in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, turn out to have been paying attention to the right thing. They stumble toward the answers more than they work them out.
The Moon goes, and the ground goes with it
Within days the Wanderer is eating the Moon. The planet is a ship that’s nearly run out of energy, and its drive and weapons need an enormous amount of matter converted to power, so the Moon is a fuel tank. The tides go mad, there are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions all over the world, and the radio sky fills with static. Millions die. One of the bleaker details is that the safest places at sea turn out to be tidal nodes, spots near Norway, the Windward Isles and Tahiti, where the water barely moves while everywhere else tears itself apart.
Don’s thread is the one that goes off-world. He’s the only astronaut to get away from the American Moon base, and he tries to launch a base ship just as the Moon splits apart under the Wanderer’s pull and he falls through the gap. The Wanderer’s crew captures his ship, which leaves him a prisoner inside a planet-sized vessel while his fiancée is stuck on a collapsing coastline. The saucer symposium has it rough in the meantime. An earthquake buries their cars in a landslide, and from there it’s tsunamis, aftershocks, roving mobs and the occasional flying saucer overhead, with Paul and Margo trying to get to somebody who can make sense of the sky. And then the turn. During one of the tsunamis a saucer shows up, and a cat-like being inside it uses a weapon to hold the water back. When the saucer leaves it drops the weapon, a momentum pistol, and it lands in the hands of the people on the ground. Margo ends up with it, and she goes from feeling brave because of the gun to realising she’s got her own backbone.
Tigerishka
The cat-like being is Tigerishka, and she’s the book’s real centre. She’s large, she’s female, she’s telepathic, and she pulls Paul up into her saucer while he’s holding Miaow. The first thing she gets wrong is who’s smart. She thinks the cat is the intelligent one, and when she works out her mistake and learns English telepathically she calls Paul a “monkey,” which is the polite end of what her people think of humans.
Her saucer is full of flowers and lined with mirrors, and as Paul spends time in it she warms to him. He falls for her, and eventually she returns it, which is where the book gets weird even by the standards of the sixties. She tells him who the Wanderer’s people are. They come from a culture that spans the universe, has beaten death, and can build planets and cross hyperspace, and its whole purpose is making sure intelligent life survives to the end of time. They’re fugitives from that culture’s police, because they won’t conform, they want to experiment with hyperspace, space, time and the Mind, and the Wanderer is basically their getaway car. The cat people are only one body type aboard, since members of that culture can take forms that reflect where their species began.
That also explains the Moon. They’d come to Earth because they were almost out of power and it was the nearest big lump of matter, and the tidal waves were damage nobody on board had much interest in. Some of the crew send saucers down to cut the destruction back, and that’s the job Tigerishka’s saucer is doing when she pulls Paul out of the water.
The trial, the Stranger and the last battle
Tigerishka’s ships rescue Don, and he and Paul are reunited aboard. Then the police arrive, in the form of a second planet, dull gray where the Wanderer is purple and gold, which the book calls the Stranger. Paul and Don are hauled in to testify at the Wanderer’s trial. They describe the good treatment they got from the crew, and thousands of humans appear through holographic projection as evidence, and it goes badly anyway.
Before the fighting starts, Tigerishka parks Don’s ship near Earth and gets the two men off in it. She keeps Miaow and takes her back to the Wanderer, which is a small cruel moment in a book full of large ones. Then the two planets fight, a battle in space that ends with both of them gone. The skies are empty, Earth has no Moon, and the last scene is Margo and her companions walking to Vandenberg Spaceport just as Don’s ship comes in to land.
Why it won, and how it holds up
Part of why The Wanderer took the Hugo is that it did something the big disaster stories hadn’t, following a worldwide catastrophe through a dozen small stories at once, in four stages: warning, disaster, aftermath, explanation. It’s also where the book splits people. The cast is so big that most characters barely register and plenty of them die in the disaster section, and the complaint you hear most is too many people and not enough time with any of them. The reaction when it first came out was split too, with one reviewer in Analog predicting a classic and another in F&SF comparing it unfavourably to Leiber’s earlier Conjure Wife.
I get the complaint, and I’d still point you at it. The Tigerishka chapters and Don aboard the Wanderer are where it’s at its best, and the Moon going is a big, ugly, memorable set of scenes. Some of the attitudes are firmly 1964, and the interspecies romance is going to draw an eyebrow from somebody. Other apocalypse winners go quiet and sad, like A Canticle for Leibowitz, and this one goes loud. The next Best Novel went to Dune, which spends a whole book on one planet instead of tossing a few around.
What stays with me is how little of it is about us. Humans are what happens to be on the road when a car chase goes through, and the book is honest about that, because Tigerishka sees us as monkeys, the police see the Wanderer as a runaway, and the Wanderer sees the Moon as a gas tank. When the two planets vanish at the end, the thing that goes with them is the one creature everyone aboard first mistook for the smart one, a house cat named Miaow.