The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer.

The Short of It

Plot: A mysterious planet appears out of hyperspace, high jinks ensue.

Page Count: 320

Award: 1965 Hugo

Worth a read: For the love of all you hold dear, No.
Primary Driver: (No)
Bechdel Test: Pass (Surprising!)
Technobabble: Plenty
Review: How do you take a book about a planet of freedom fighting space cats appearing out of hyperspace to devour the moon and make it so boring? So many characters, none of them have personalities except for racial stereotypes. Silly to include multiple comic relief characters when the book itself is a joke. I think I understand book burning now.

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

We're not doing this, Stranger. The only reason to read this book is to tell other people how bad it was. I haven't decided if that makes it so-bad-it's-good. I'm inclined to say it's so-bad-it's-bad. Don't do it.

If you're a masochist, here's a link that will give me a few cents if you buy the book, at no cost to you.

This is the link! 

Do consider better uses of money, such as grinding it up and pretending it's oregano or using it as kindling. 

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead

Wow. This book has to be one of the worst things I've ever read. I mean, just, I don't know where to start. Everything is terrible. I've done my best to pull everything together so you can read this review and not have to touch a single cursed page of this text.

Let's do a one sentence summary to familiarize you with the whole plot. A traveling planet of hyper-intelligent cat-people freedom-fighters on the run from a wolf-planet stop to consume the moon for fuel. 

It would be unfair to say that a lot of stuff does not happen; there are floods as the new planet changes tides, trying and failing to get onto a military base, alien abductions, and a bunch of other completely forgettable events. There is never any tension, no sense of a plot actually progressing. Things just happen one after another.

Characters: There are so many of them. None of them are interesting. The only thing we learn about them is what race they are, and you can bet your bottom dollar that this will inform how they act and how they speak. Here's a snippet from the first page to give you an idea:

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.

We interact with all of these folks, and they interact with others, and all of them are named. A bunch of them die, but none of them are worthy of note, so I guess that's totally fine. If you're wondering which one is a cat-person, I'll give you a hint: Tigerishka. Miaow is actually a cat. Wolf Loner is just a guy, but what a name. Hint: he does a bunch of stuff... alone. This is a good time to note how lazy the writing is.

ARAB JONES and High Bundy and Pepe Martinez sipped at their fourth stick of tea, passing the potent thin reefer from fingers to fingers and holding the piney smoke long in their lungs. They sat on cushions and a carpet in front of a little tent with strings of wooden beads for a door, pitched on a rooftop in Harlem, not far from Lenox and 125th Street. Their eyes sought each other's with the friendly watchfulness of weed-brothers, then moved together toward the eclipsed moon.

"Man, I bet she on pot too," High said. "See that bronzy smoke? Those lunar spacemen gonna get high."

Pepe said, "We're gonna be way out there ourselves. You planning to eclipse, Arab?"

Arab said, "The astronomical kick is the most." 

Now that right there is some literature.

Everyone is trying to sleep with one woman, Margo. She is indistinguishable from any other woman in the book, other than that everyone wants to sleep with her, for no reason other than that they do. The main role of women is to act hysterical and be slapped back to sense by men, or to say something foolish and be corrected by men, or to be confused and have things explained to them by men. Here's another human interaction had by humans.

Don said to Hunter: "That's good. If you bring them the news about me, it'll be easier for you to get in. Tell Oppie the Wanderer has linear accelerators eight thousand miles long and a cyclotron of that diameter. That should convince him of something! It'll help me if they're informed ahead of time about my intended landing." He looked toward Margo. "Then I'll be able to kiss you properly, dear."

Margo looked back at him and said: "And I'll kiss you, Don. But I want you to know that things have changed. I've changed," and she pressed more closely to Hunter to show what she meant.

Hunter frowned and pressed his lips against his teeth, but then he tightened his arm around her and nodded and said curtly: "That's right."

Hunter is an astronaut who was on the US moon-base until he was abducted by the cat-people. And he's so unremarkable that I had to go back through both my notes and the book to remind myself who he was.

I wrote a first draft without mentioning the guy writing a play. There's a guy writing a play about all of the events that are going on. He has no other purpose, and does nothing for the story, but his sections stand out because they are intended to be comic relief after the intense emotional drama of the rest of the story. 

He grabbed and shook her. "This is all for real, you little moron! We're the ones that'll be fried."

"But Jake," she protested, "you always got to have a real situation to make a play. I read that somewhere."

The aliens are paralyzingly dull as well. Here's a description of them:

Although felinoids or cat-people like his conductor formed a large minority of the Wanderer's crew, especially near the planet's surface, there were beings that seemed an end product of almost every line of terrestrial evolution, and unearthly lines, too: great-headed horses with organs of manipulation nesting in their hooves; giant, tranquil-eyed spiders pulsing at their joints with a strongly pumped arterial blood-flow; serpents with large and small grasping tentacles; glintingly scaled and gorgeously crested humanoid lizards; beings shaped and moving like thick wheels with a counter-rotating central brain and sensorium; land-dwelling squid that stood proudly on three or six tentacles; and beings seemingly inspired by such creatures of myth as the basilisk and the harpy.

It really touches the soul and brings forth all sorts of images! Like of horses. And squids. And lizards. At least the wheel aliens are an interesting concept, but still. What a shockingly unimaginative menagerie to offer as a demonstration of how outlandish the aliens are. Also, none of those aliens matter, so on we go!

There's a fair bit of polygamy throughout, delivered with the same subtle touch as the rest of this. It's not that remarkable in the broader context of this book, so instead let's talk about how Hunter has sex with Tigerishka. Truly, the erotic marvel of this book is unparalleled. Some choice selections:

For a while she did not move, although he thought he felt muscles relaxing under the fur. Then there was the faint murmur of a barely-breathed purr—just a flutter of sound—and she leaned her head against his hand so that her ear brushed his wrist. He shifted his kneading toward the back of her neck and she raised her head, rolling it from side to side with a deeper fluttering purr. Then she rolled her body away from him a quarter turn, and for a moment he thought it was to tell him to stop, but quickly discovered it was only that she wanted to be scratched under the chin. And then he felt a silky finger press against the back of his neck and draw smoothly down his body and he realized it was the tip of her tail caressing him.

And then there's the morning after:

"You mean that was the whole experience, that was all that last night meant to you? Just being 'nice' to a pet?"

She said firmly: "Last night my feelings were fully ninety per cent pity for you and boredom with myself."

"And the other ten per cent?" he persisted.

She dropped her great eyes from his. "I don't know, Paul. I just don't know," she said very tautly, grabbing his coat again. Then, "Oh, get dressed yourself," she hissed exasperatedly and pushed off for the control panel. "But be quick about it. Our visitor's almost at the door."

Paul ignored that. A hot maliciousness was flooding up into his cold misery. He slowly pulled his coat sleeve off his foot. He said evenly: "It seems to me that last night began with me treating you like a pet, scratching you under the neck and stroking your fur, and you were lapping it up, you were responding just like—"

Moving on.

The climactic resolution of this grand struggle is the cat-planet successfully vanishing, and the wolf-planet chasing them. This is a happy end because the cats escaped, and we like them now. Millions are dead. Sucks to suck, I guess.

This book is bad. I understand that I've made that point many times over, but wow, is this book bad. Don't do this to yourself. 

I had to relive many parts of this book to write a full review, and I am going to catch a cat-nap. Get it? A cat-nap. Because this book is about a cat planet. That's better writing than this book. It's just all so terrible.

After all, who has a more interesting story than Arab Jones, Stranger?

And don't forget to read a book!