Book Review: The Wanderer

One of my favourite sub-genres of the Action movie is the disaster movie, from classics like The Towering Inferno to interesting twists like Airplane! and giant special effects bonanzas like last years 2012, I sure love a story that follows a bunch of people and then blows up whatever vehicle, building or planet they are on.

Last week I read The Wanderer, a 1964 novel by Fritz Leiber which followed people around the globe as they react to the sudden appearance of a new planet orbiting the Earth just beyond the Moon.

The novel works in the same style as most of these films, wherein you cycle through a number of protagonists and see how each of them reacts to the horrible event going on. The main character of The Wanderer is a scientist named Paul Hobart who gets the most answers as to what is actually going behind the events of the novel.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the damage that hit our planets shores in super-tides due to another body in our orbit as well as the way that people on the other side of the world tended to write off the reports of people who can see the planet as mass hysteria.

My favourite Leiber novel is definitely Conjure Wife, which I dedicated a post to before, and after that the Farfhd and the Gray Mouser series. Although The Wanderer doesn't knock any of those books out of place, it was a fun SF read and I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in classic SF.