Review: The Wailing Asteroid

The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"There is as yet no hint of what the messages may mean but that they are an attempt at communication is certain."

An artificial signal received on Earth that appears to be of non human, but intelligent origin sets the people of Earth into a frenzy.

Joe Burke was in the middle of confessing insanity to his partner, explaining that he'd always wanted to marry her but had not wished to inflict his madness into her life, on the grounds that he had been hearing (since childhood) a strange message that noone else can hear. When the news of the extraterrestrial message is broadcast on the radio, Joe forgets all about his marriage proposal and immediately he draws a connection between the public messages and his own private ones.

When Joe Burke was young an uncle was showing him some cromagnon artefacts and he dropped and shattered a peculiar black cube. Ever since then, he had been having these recurring dreams and throughout his early years had tried to explore certain elements of the dream as best he could by recreating strange items from the dream. After the public announcement of the signal he picks up this idea again and with some practice creates a tiny but powerful pseudo magnet, with negative inductance.

"At the cost of several hours work, he had made a thing like a magnet, which wasn't a magnet and which destroyed itself when turned on."

Burke runs a small tech business and, suspicious of the aliens' intention, he uses his few resources to covertly construct a spaceship of inexplicable design (not actually rocket powered) and launches himself out to meet the aliens face to face.

"When a man is important enough it does not matter if he never does anything, it is only required of him that he do nothing wrong. Eminent figures all over the world prepared to do nothing wrong. They were not so concerned to do anything right."

There's plenty of confusion and paranoia among the scientists and the general population alike in this story, which speculates in some detail how societies and individuals would react to the news. Americans for example are the first to reply with a message of their own. Russians go one step further and are the first to send a probe out to investigate the signal at its source. Physics that don't work (or at least break our previously established principles) get scientists in a grumble of their own.

"The truth was too horrible to believe, so it was resolved not to believe it."

Large groups of people, wanting very much to pretend that none of this is happening, have taken issue with both of those initiatives deeming them dangerous and believing that the best response would have been to ignore the alien signal and wait to see what happens next.

The book is rife with oldskool gender cliches, mostly gender roles. Joe Burke finds women mysterious and the old adage is at least implied, that the man always asks the woman to marry rather than vice versa. However, the story also has Joe's gal, Sandy, distinctly more knowledgeable and capable than he is at several points and she's certainly never once a pushover.

I spotted several uses of the term "waked" instead of woken. Not sure if that's grammatically correct where you're from but I wouldn't expect to hear it over here in slang capital Oz.

According to GR this was first released in 1960, pre moon landing folks, so give this a bit of slack for a few silly notions, but I still think overall this was a well thought through imagination. There's a little bit of telepathy, which we will forgive, but also a bunch of fun ideas about gravity waves (including using them for communication). The received signals are said to originate at M387 - Shoal's Object- 360 million miles from the sun, at less than 2 miles in diameter and with variable brightness suggesting an irregular shape. Shoal's Object is a fictional Messier object supposedly discovered in 1913. At one point the narrative says that there were no ancestral species for either dogs or humans, but I think he must have meant no *known* examples. Otherwise I'd have to presume it is a sly missing link plug, which would be a shame.

The story has excellent pacing throughout, it moves along at a very steady trot and even gets a good bit nice and tense towards to the thrilling end. The narration by Mark Nelson is very good.

I've had the Librivox app on my phone for ages and finally decided to have a play with it today. I've got the playback speed cranked right up and this still read wonderfully. The player isn't perfect but it works well and importantly has a snooze timer. Selection of books is always growing and some of the narrators are doing a top notch job these days. I highly recommend that you check out the app and support the Librivox project if you can.

View all my reviews