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.

Hugos Side-Step: Changewar by Fritz Leiber

Collection published: 1983
Contents originally published: 1958-65
Acquired and read: September 2020

Changewar by Fritz Leiber

The Big Time was the only novel in Leiber's "Change War" series, about a vast cosmic time war between implacable enemies, but he published a number of short works in the same milieu, and I liked The Big Time enough to track them down. There's no one collection that reprints all of them, as far as I can tell, so I picked up the most recent collection with most of them... which is from over 35 years ago! (I'm learning that outside of the Lankhmar stories, Leiber isn't kept in print very well.*) Changewar contains seven Change War stories (the space must have been a victim of a timeline revision), some of which revisit characters from The Big Time, but most of which look at different aspects of the conflict.

Of the seven, I would say I liked about half of them. "Try and Change the Past" is a pretty prototypical sf premise at this point: no matter what you do, history will correct itself it. But it's well told and enjoyable, and it introduces the Change War concept pretty well, so it makes for a good opener. I also really liked "The Oldest Soldier," about a guy who really likes soldiers but has never fought himself being inadvertently drawn into the weirdest rear guard action imaginable. "No Great Magic" was neat, too, about an amnesiac in a New York City theatre: only something much more complicated than she can imagine is happening. This is the longest story in the book, but I wanted it to be longer, actually! It ends with her figuring out what is going on, and I would have gladly read about what happened next had Leiber decided to expand it. I think the premise is great, and he doesn't fully exploit its possibilities within this short space.

Others, like a lot of sf, had a good idea not much was done with. "Knight to Move" has some cool concepts in it, and a strong narrative voice, but isn't much of a story; "When the Change-Winds Blow" is evocatively told, but its connections to the actual Change War concept seem pretty scant.

"A Deskful of Girls" was the only one I really didn't like. One of those sf stories where what is going on isn't very clear, but when you can glimpse it, it isn't very interesting either. Like "When the Change-Winds Blow," its connection to the Change War seemed minimal, as well.

As I said in my review of The Big Time, Leiber apparently did not invent the idea of a "time war" but he did popularize it. One might imagine that someone writing forty years before Doctor Who spent decades exploring this concept would read as old hat, but I found that Leiber did a lot of cool, interesting stuff with the concept, and I wish he had done more.

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: Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss

* The two missing stories are "Black Corridor," last reprinted in 1988 (in English, anyway), and "The Haunted Future," last reprinted in 1990.

Hugos 1958: The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

Originally published: 1958
Acquired: July 2020
Read: August 2020

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

The Big Time won the 1958 Hugo Award for Best Novel or Novelette.* Like a lot of Leiber's work, it's long out of print, though I was able to get a nice-looking 2000 Tor hardcover for cheap. The Big Time was one of the first of Leiber's "Change War" stories, about a time war being raged between factions across human history; the SF Encyclopedia doesn't credit Leiber with inventing this now-familiar sf idea, but does indicate he popularized it. It's an odd book, though. Instead of confronting the idea head on (as, say, this year's Hugo winner This Is How You Lose the Time War did), The Big Time takes place entirely in the Place, a recreation and recuperation area for Change War soldiers positioned outside of time and space; we never see the Change War even close to directly.

Instead, we see a set of Change War soldiers from different eras and ideologies, all now serving a common cause, as well as recreation staff; the first-person narrator is a woman entertainer in the Place. Two different groups of soldiers arrive in the Place at once, and things go a little haywire, mostly centering around one who was a Rupert Brooke-esque World War I poet cut down in his prime, and then recruited. There are some neat concepts here, and I liked the voice of Greta, the narrator, and I appreciate that Leiber didn't come at his Change War head on... but I'm not convinced this was the best possible story to tell about this idea, and even though it's quite short (just 128 pages in my edition), it still felt a bit too long. But there is really neat stuff here, some of it quite disturbing, and I zipped right through it, and enjoyed almost all of it. A good book, good enough that I'm going to read a collection of Leiber's Change War short fiction.

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: Changewar by Fritz Leiber

* This is the only year there was a combined award for novel and novelette. A lot about the awards fluctuated early on. If you've been following my posts about old Hugo winners, you'll note I skipped 1957, because that year the only awards were for Best American Professional Magazine, Best British Professional Magazine, and Best Fanzine. No awards for individual works at all!