A so-so book. It could have probably been condensed to 50 pages and been fine. The rest of the book is just fluff. A strange sort of fluff that follows the lives of perhaps a dozen different groups as the world falls apart. The groups are all odd in their own strange ways. The message seems to be that when the world will fall apart, all the weirdos will come out in mass. The main plot about the 'Wanderer' is interesting, but not enough is actually given to it. ( )

Link to a review on my personal website. ( )

Fiction, Science fiction, A new planet appears next to the Moon and tears to pieces the satellite, "Some stories of terror and the supernormal start with a moonlit face at a diamond-paned window, or an old document in spidery handwriting, or the baying of a hound across lonely moors. But this one began with an eclipse of the moon and with four glisteningly new astronomical photographs, each showing starfields and a planetary object. Only... something had happened to the stars. The oldest of the photographs was only seven days out of the developer at the time of the eclipse. They came from three widely separated observatories and one came from a telescope on a satellite. They were the star-graven runes of purest science, at the opposite extreme from matters of superstition, yet each photograph struck a twinge of uneasiness in the young scientist first to see it. As he looked at the black dots that should have been there... and at the faint black curlicues that shouldn't... he felt the barest touch of a strangeness that for a moment made him kin to the caveman and the devil-worshipper and the witch-haunted Middle Ages. Passing along priority channels, the four photographs came together at the Los Angeles Area Headquarters of the Moon Project of the U.S. Space Force -- the American Moon Project that was barely abreast of the Russian one, and far behind the Soviet Mars Project. And so at Moon Project U.S. the sense of strangeness and unease was sharpest, though expressed in sardonic laughter and a bouncy imaginativeness, as is the way with scientists faced with the weird. In the end the four photographs -- or rather, what they heralded -- starkly affected every human being on Earth, every atom of our planet. They opened deep fissures in the human soul. They cost thousands their sanity and millions their lives. They did something to the moon, too." [from Fictionwise eBooks].
First edition, New York, Ballantine Books, February, 1964, pp. 318; e-reads.com, December 1964, pp. 320; New York, Tom Doherty Associates, 1964, hardcover, Book club edition - Hugo Award, for Best Novel, 1965. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/357870.htm...

Set in the very near future (Russians and Americans have manned missions to the moon). A rogue planet appears out of space and starts to dismantle the moon. The resultant high tides and earthquakes cause widespread devastation on Earth.

So far, so pulp. But what I think won Leiber the award is that the story is so well written. A dozen or so different viewpoint characters, some of them rather less prominent than others; a proper sensawunda with regard to the main plot; aliens who actually seem alien; a surprising amount of sex (of course, this was coming into the Swingin Sixties I suppose).

Recommended.

Another charity shop bargain - after the first few pages I thought it was going to be an uncomfortably dated novel, but in fact it had an original idea, and moved fast enough that the interludes with less central characters seemed to pass by rapidly enough.
Worth a read. ( )