I don't know how many of you are familiar with the author Fritz Leiber. My understanding of his work is that he tends to be somewhat satirical, and somewhat humorous, while telling stories that are interesting.
Well, anyway, his 1964 novel The Wanderer was promoted to me as "the story of an astronaut who gets abducted by aliens and has a lot of weird adventures. A++." I figured, it's by Fritz Leiber, it can't be bad, right?
Turns out the plot synopsis is wrong. It's the story of a planet that suddenly appears where no planet should be, the resulting chaos on Earth, and the adventures a number of people have as a result. I'll tell you more below the fold.
[MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. IF YOU PLAN TO READ THE BOOK, AND WOULD BE DISCOURAGED BY SPOILERS, EXIT THIS DIARY AND GO DIRECTLY TO THE NEAREST LIBRARY WITH A GOOD SF COLLECTION.]
Seriously, though, I'll do my best to avoid spoilers.
This is a story set in the mid- to late-1960s. The USA and USSR both have research bases on the moon, although the Soviet lunar program is considerably more advanced. May 1968 hasn't happened in this world (it was four years in the author's future when the book was finished). And the world, well, the world is full of ordinary people. A few persons of note are a Bircher helping right-wing terrorists in Central America, a poet skeptical of space programs, a smuggler selling guns and drugs to both sides in Vietnam, and an interesting love triangle in California consisting of an astronaut, a PR man for the space agency (United States Space Force, it's called), and the artist they're both interested in. Some of these characters make it through the novel unharmed. Some of them don't.
The drama gets started when astronomers notice some star-field distortions that couldn't be caused by atmospheric effects, but only really gets kicked off when another massive heavenly body, brightly colored and reflective, appears in the sky a mere 250,000 miles away. The gravitational and magnetic effects cause all manner of havoc, disrupting radio transmissions and causing earthquakes all over - including on the moon, where our astronaut friend desperately tries to escape in an under-fueled lander. Back on Earth, a flying saucer with the same livery as the new moon appears, a creature leans out, and it snatches away the NASA (excuse me, USSF) publicist...
It's fun. The book is both interesting as a story and interesting as social commentary, and it contains humorous references to and occasionally darts at other science fiction authors. But the best thing about the book is the characterizations. The book is not, as many more recent SF novels are, about the action and the events, or about the technology - we're just expected to understand and accept that humans have mastered rocketry and nuclear power, while the aliens' mastery of physics is far beyond ours. No problem. We're also expected to accept that the aliens' anatomy, body chemistry and thought processes are vaguely similar to ours. Those aren't questions that really interested the author. What interested him was what makes people their own individual selves, and why they do what they do.
One of the most delicious pieces of characterization is the alien scout who abducts the publicist. Among other situations, she makes a hilarious mistake in the process of making contact, assuming that the local industrially-developed civilization belonged to the species morphologically similar to herself. And toward the end of the novel, it's revealed that the aliens are neither benevolent nor malevolent, just people - like us in so many ways, who act without thinking and often don't understand why they did what they did. The author even leaves a fairly major question of motivation unanswered, leaving us, the readers, to figure out why the scout did what she did.
I'm not going to say much more, other than that sex with a telepathic and predatory species whose raw brain-power outclasses yours by far is probably a good way to lose a few sanity points.
Anyway. You should go and read this book. It's called The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber, first published in 1964. I believe it's out of print, but you can probably find it at used book vendors or the more nerdy sort of public library.