When a strange planet the size of Earth abruptly materialises out of hyperspace beside the Moon during a lunar eclipse, its arrival tears the satellite apart and unleashes tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanic ruin across a near-future Earth. Fritz Leiber tells the catastrophe through a wide, deliberately fragmentary cast: Paul Hagbolt and Margo Gelhorn, drawn together at a Californian saucer-watchers' gathering; the astronaut Don Merriam, stationed at a Moon base as it is destroyed; and a scattering of ordinary people flung into the rising oceans. Paul is drawn aboard the Wanderer itself, where he meets Tigerishka, a telepathic feline pilot whose people are refugees consuming worlds for fuel as they flee a rigid galactic order. Leiber, better known for sword-and-sorcery, here embraces the sprawling disaster novel and its ensemble of small human dramas, insisting on the individual amid planetary chaos. Structured as overlapping vignettes rather than a single arc, the book is less about the science of the apparition than about how people behave when the sky itself turns hostile, and what sympathy might be owed to strangers who wreck one world to save their own.
