Hugos 1965: The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber

The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber

Every year, when I finish my Hugo voting, I pick up the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't read yet. For 2023, that brings me to Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer, which beat out three novels I haven't read (though one, Cordwainer Smith's The Planet Buyer, I will get to someday) to win the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Leiber is my first repeat winner in this sequence of posts, as he won Best Novel or Novelette in 1958 for The Big Time.*

Originally published: 1964
Acquired: September 2023
Read: October 2023

As the epigraphs and some of the early dialogue in the novel makes clear, this is an attempt to take the space opera concept of planets that can move through interstellar space (as seen in, for example "Doc" Smith's Lensman novels) and apply some real-world logic to it. If a mobile planet appeared in Earth's solar system, what would be the result? The book unfolds like a disaster movie, following a number of parallel plotlines about different people dealing with effects like the break-up of the moon and some incredibly high and low tides.

I was very into it at first, but the more I read it, the less interested I was; at 346 pages (in my Gollancz edition, at least), the book is just too long proportional to the amount of interesting things that happen. Leiber reminds me of his contemporary Clifford Simak, good at both mood and character, but it felt like not much was actually happening. Groups of people very slowly make it from point A to point B. And it just keeps going on and on and on. The beginning of the book, as the disaster begins to unfold, it utterly captivating, but having grabbed you, Leiber assumes you will continue to be captivated by the same thing slowly unspooling for hundreds of pages. Probably could have been a cracker of a novella, but my least favorite of the seven novels I've read in this sequence thus far, except for The Forever Machine.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two

* Though not the first repeat of winner of the award; that was Robert A. Heinlein, with Double Star in 1956 and Starship Troopers in 1960. However, I skipped Starship Troopers as I've read it before.