The Wanderer
by Fritz Leiber
Summary
A planet the size of Earth's moon, striped purple and yellow like a child's marble, appears in the sky without warning. It has come out of hyperspace, it takes up station beside the Moon, and its gravity immediately begins tearing the Earth apart: tides that flood coastlines, earthquakes, the Moon itself pulled to pieces into a ring of rubble.
Leiber tells it through a very large cast scattered around the world, cutting between them in short chapters. A small crowd gathered at a California observatory for a lunar eclipse. A flying saucer cult that is delighted. Sailors, prisoners, a British car full of academics, an astronaut in orbit whose mission is abruptly the most important thing happening.
One of the group is lifted into a flying saucer by a felinoid alien called Tigerishka, who is contemptuous of human intelligence, and through her the reader learns why the planet came: it is fleeing something, and its makers are refugees from a galactic authority, and the destruction of Earth is collateral rather than intended.
The disaster writing is excellent, the science is loose, and the sequence in which the protagonist has an affair with an intelligent cat is exactly as strange as it sounds.
Leiber is unusually good on crowds: the looting, the rumour, the cult members who are proved right and immediately become unbearable, and the ordinary competence of people organising a rescue in a flooded town.
Around three hundred pages, fast and episodic, with a cast large enough that the book supplies a list, and several viewpoint characters who exist only to die interestingly.
Best for readers who want a wide screen disaster novel from a writer with far better prose than the form usually attracts, and who are prepared for the strangest subplot on this entire list.
Historical Context & Significance
The Wanderer won the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the second of Fritz Leiber's wins in the category after The Big Time in 1958.
Leiber is unusual in having been genuinely important in three genres. He created the sword and sorcery pairing Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and effectively named that genre; he wrote Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness, which moved supernatural horror into the modern city decades before that became standard; and he won Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction.
He was the son of a Shakespearean actor, worked as an actor himself, and the theatrical background shows in his dialogue. He won six Hugos and three Nebulas in total and was named a Grand Master in 1981.