the facility floods with water. Stevens and Wallingford are left trapped together. Fully aware they are about to die, they find their final release in each other, despite having hated each other from the moment they met. In Great Britain Dai Davies and Richard Hillary enjoy a drink together in the English county of Somerset and then go their separate ways. Hillary returns to the Home Counties of England but is caught in the exodus from the lowlands as tides flood the Thames basin. He survives by reaching high ground in the Malvern Hills. Davies, a romantic poet, composes odes to the new planet and then attempts to walk to Wales across the apparently dry estuary of the river Severn. He is finally engulfed in a huge version of the Severn bore and drowns. At sea Wolf Loner is attempting a solo crossing of the Atlantic. Because of bad weather, and the loss of radio communication, he has no idea that anything is happening in the sky. His first inkling that anything strange has happened is when his boat bumps up against the bell tower of Old North Church in Boston. Bagong Bung is a smuggler supplying both sides in a guerrilla war, operating off the coast of Vietnam. The suddenly large tides uncover a wreck on the sea floor, which he loots for treasure. Off the coast of South America, the atomic powered cruise liner Prince Charles is hijacked by revolutionaries. Flood tides carry it deep into the Amazon basin where it eventually comes to rest on land, like Noah's Ark, with hundreds of passengers. Reception P. Schuyler Miller described the book as a "thoroughly uncharacteristic" Leiber novel, saying that "the feel of what is happening . . . counts for more than the plot" and predicting that The Wanderer "would eventually be awarded 'classic' status". Avram Davidson compared the novel unfavorably to Leiber's Conjure Wife, saying "The canvas is wide, the characters many, the charge scatters like buckshot, if you can imagine a buckshot cannon". James Nicoll has described the novel as "terrible", saying that although its premise — "hollow planets filled with catgirls who want to steal the moon" — may be "amazing or at least intriguing", the novel itself "falls well short of its potential"; he attributes its Hugo win to a weak slate of nominees, and to Leiber's "blatant and unabashed sucking up to SF