The Wailing Asteroid

Three and half stars. <br /><br />A classic science fiction story of discovery, with a touch of hard. Very entertaining, with some really good ideas and also some classic tropes (the most significant, the role of women in the plot). And some sense of wonder too, in the wailling asteroid mentioned in the title. This novel was published in 1960, thirteen years before "Rendez-vous with Rama".

Mark Nelson's latest narration at <a href="https://librivox.org/the-wailing-asteroid-by-murray-leinster/" rel="nofollow noopener">Librivox</a> is this Murray Leinster, which I haven't read. Love both Nelson and Leinster, so this will be a treat.<br /><br />Not one of Leinster's best but entertaining enough. When an asteroid enters our solar system, emitting odd warbling "wails", scientists soon figure out that Earth is being hailed by another civilization. Are they friendly or enemies? What is the warble saying? Can the Cold War stop long enough to work together? As is so often the case in Leinster's stories, an enterprising young engineer comes up with a novel form of space flight and jumps ahead of everyone to explore the mysterious asteroid. Along with a few friends, including his best girl.

"There is as yet no hint of what the messages may mean but that they are an attempt at communication is certain."<br /><br />An artificial signal received on Earth that appears to be of non human, but intelligent origin sets the people of Earth into a frenzy. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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." <br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"The truth was too horrible to believe, so it was resolved not to believe it."<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.

‘As the earth party wandered through the rock-hewn corridors, they had no doubt about the purpose of the asteroid.<br /><br />It was a mighty fortress, stocked with weapons of destruction beyond man’s understanding. It seemed as if it was deserted by some ancient race and yet in a room high in the asteroid a powerful transmitter beamed its chilling sounds toward earth. Near it, on a huge star-map of the universe, ten tiny red sparks were moving inexorably toward the center – moving at many times the speed of light; moving on a course that would pass through the solar system.<br /><br />The unknown aliens would not even see our sun explode from the force of their passing, would not even notice the tiny speck called Earth as it died…’<br /><br />Blurb from the 1968 Sphere paperback edition<br /><br />This is an odd little concoction from Leinster which begins when a strange musical message is received from space and identified as originating in an asteroid.<br />A scientist, hearing the message is shocked, as the music is part of a recurring dream he has had since childhood, The Russians immediately send out rockets to reach the source of the signal, but our valiant hero, with the help of images from his dreams, (and his girlfriend, her friend and his best friend) is able to build a ship in his backyard.<br />The four end up on the ship (it’s not important why) and blast off to the asteroid.<br />The asteroid is actually a space-fortress with artificial gravity, its own air system and a bank of screens upon one of which can be seen ten red moving dots.<br />With the help of some mind-induction educational cubes they learn that the red dots are an ancient enemy of the fortress builders and are on their way to destroy the Solar System.<br />If one employs a certain suspension of disbelief, it’s enjoyable hokum although certainly not an example of Leinster at his best.<br />It’s another Origin of Man tale since, as astute readers would have guessed long before Leinster springs the surprise on us, humans are the descendants of the fortress builders, whose last garrison escaped to Earth two million years before.<br />It is up to our hero to find a way to stop the ships of the mysterious Enemy and prevent the Solar System from being destroyed.

I have had the paperback book edition of this novella since I was a young boy and read it many times over the decades because I love the story. The story is set at the very end of the space race era when a mysterious radio signal suddenly starts arriving at receiving antennae all around the earth as they face the correct direction. I won't spoil the story by telling any more except to say our adventurous crew are led by a very driven engineer who owns his own small specialty firm which lets him develop important things quickly without the large multinational bureaucracy every big corporation has clogging up the process. <br /><br />Last week I had the joy of listening to the free audiobook version which is available free on Librivox because the copyright was not renewed in a timely manner allowing this novella to become a public domain work of fiction. I recommend this book to classic sci-fi fans in both paperback/kindle print version and Librivox free audiobook version, it is a treat to enjoy the male-female dynamic from the early 1970's before so much hostility entered the act of balancing work and family.

This is one of Leinster's delightful puzzle-stories, similar to a Heinlein story but without the preaching. It was one of my favorites when I was young, though the lack of any characterization and some of the social attitudes made me wince a time or two upon re-reading it now. It was nicely filmed as The Terrornauts fifty years ago, with a screenplay by John Brunner (!) and a budget which must have been in the dozens of dollars. Leinster was one of the fine old masters of the early days of the genre.

read.. but very very partially... it's very dated but this was not a problem and I love to read of imaginary futures that never happened. But there was a huge problem just a few pages into it, I don't know if it was because of the translation or not, anyway, I read the following sentence: "a few miles east from the equator"... and I really couldn't go further.

Fantasy listing ??<br />Due to eye issues and damage Alexa reads to me.<br />A wonderful will written fantasy Sc-Fi space adventure novella with interesting characters. The story line is two women and three men on a space adventure on an Asteroid that is thousands of years old. Their finds on the asteroid are amazing. I would recommend this novella to readers of space adventure. Enjoy reading 2021 ??✨

I was at my favorite used bookstore (Dunaway’s in St. Louis), and was browsing the S-F section, looking for something by Murray Leinster, came across this one, from 1960. It tells of what appears to be an asteroid from deep space, which emits radio signals. The protagonist, Joe burke, is an engineer, who recognizes the signals, which he had heard in dreams when he was a child, in which he was on a mysterious planet with two moons, and he is holding a strange weapon. Joe plays the tape of the radio signals for his girlfriend, Sandy Lund, and he also attempts to make a replica of the weapon, with disastrous results.<br /><br />The “asteroid” is found to be an alien spaceship, and Joe feels a strong urge to visit it. He has several assistants in his lab and builds a spaceship of his own which will meet up with the alien ship. When they enter the ship (which conveniently has the capacity to manufacture and recycle air), they find a number of large chambers, many of which hold weapons. The small group also finds a number of small cubes, which apparently are used for weapons and strategy training when they sleep. And here comes the kicker: Joe recalls that a fragment of such a cube was discovered in a location which is part of Earth’s prehistory. Thus, there is a connection between Joe’s dreams and the possibility that the civilization that had made the asteroid had had some ancient connection with us. The small party discovers that that civilization’s “enemy” is on their tail, and that they will have to learn to modify and activate the weapons and missiles at their disposal in order to engage and defeat the enemy. <br /><br />While I found this book entertaining, I kept thinking that the interior of the asteroid was reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama,” and I was also reminded in the Wikipedia article which compares the spacecraft Burke and his associates fashion as similar to that envisioned by H. G. Wells’ “The First Men in the Moon.” Other references are made to Earth’s civilizations having been the descendants of alien visitors (H. P. Lovecraft had the notion of “The Old Ones” in a similar fashion).<br /><br />I will say that I did become irritated by the sexism in this story (as I have found in many S-F stories from this era). The two female characters are basically secondary and see themselves as subservient to the men, disclaiming any scientific knowledge or even innovative ideas about how to deal with the situation. <br /><br />This book was made into a movie, “The Terrornauts,” from 1967, with a script by John Bruner, a well respected British S-F author of the time, who apparently should have known better. The Wikipedia article describes a similar plotline, but the reviews are merciless, criticizing the acting, cheesy sets, a homemade robot, and awful dialog, making it, to my mind, perfect for “Mystery Science Theater.” Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find it at my local library, or even on Amazon/Neflix/Hulu/Crakle. If and when it becomes available, I promise to submit a gleeful review!<br /><br />

A signal from outer space reaches Earth and is broadcast over the radio, interrupting Joe Burke just as he is about to propose to his secretary and longtime friend, Sandy Lund. As it turns out, the signal is comprised of sounds resembling those of a flute. They are eerily familiar to Burke from a recurring dream he had as a child after his uncle gifted him with a number of relics found in a Cro-Magnon cave.<br /><br />Though disappointed, Sandy returns to Burke's engineering office where he plays a recording he made of the sounds years before and they are an exact match to those from space. Soon after, astronomers identify the source of the signal as an asteroid on a course that will bring it close to Earth.<br /><br />Without sufficient evidence, the United States and Russia interpret the signals as a threat. The two major powers compete, and fail, to send a craft to the meet the aliens. However, Burke designs and constructs a small ship with the assistance of a yacht builder named Holmes and a taciturn electronics expert named Keller. Sandy's sister Pam joins the team to assist with tracking orders and receiving shipments.<br /><br />Early in their testing of a reactionless drive, an explosive mishap draws the attention of a reporter, two government agents, and the police. Burke tries to persuade them that he is building an advanced bomb shelter. They are not convinced and suspect Burke and company of conspiring with the aliens. A few days later, the police return to arrest them, but Burke launches the ship with Holmes, Keller, and the Lund sisters aboard.<br /><br />A week and a half later, they reach the asteroid and fly the ship through a tunnel, which closes behind them. Lights, breathable air, and an artifcial gravity system are activated, allowing the intrepid voyagers to leave the ship. To their dismay, they find the asteroid devoid of life.<br /><br />Burke and his team explore the interior and learn that it is a garrison, long abandoned by its troops. They also interpret the flute-like signal as a beacon ordering the ancient soldiers to return in order to defend against an approaching enemy. Who were the soldiers and where did they go? More importantly, can Burke and company learn how to operate the garrison in time to defend Earth against this powerful and unknown threat from interstellar space?<br /><br />If you can ignore Leinster's cardboard characterizations—such as the whiny and emotionally clueless Burke and the stereotypical capricious, husband-hunting women—The Wailing Asteroid is an enjoyable light-hearted adventure with a healthy dose of plausible 1960s science and engineering.