A Bad Movie Based On A Good Book

The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I first came across this story when watching the move The Terrornauts, which was (loosely) based on this book. The movie was just awful. However, just as bad books sometimes make good movies, sometimes lousy movies are based on good books. I got this for free from Project Gutenberg, and I have to say I enjoyed it. Not the best science fiction ever, but a decent effort with some pretty neat ideas.

The story begins when radio signals start coming from an asteroid that are clearly intelligent. The hero of the story recognizes the signals as matching some he heard in a recurring dream. He'd had that dream since he was a child, and details from the dream help him build a spacecraft to visit the asteroid. What he finds there suggests that the human race is being threatened by an unknown enemy, and he'll need to learn the secrets of the asteroid to save it.

Pretty good stuff, though dated. My one criticism is that Leinster introduces a Russian cosmonaut who is also sent to visit the asteroid, but he never gets there and he's forgotten (by the author, not the reader).



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