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    A Martian Odyssey
    A Martian Odyssey
    A Martian Odyssey
    Ebook43 pages36 minutes

    A Martian Odyssey

    By Stanley Weinbaum and Sheba Blake

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    A Martian Odyssey is a science fiction short story by Stanley G. Weinbaum originally published in the July 1934 issue of Wonder Stories. It was Weinbaum's second published story (in 1933 he had sold a romantic novel, The Lady Dances, to King Features Syndicate under the pseudonym Marge Stanley[1]), and remains his best known. It was followed four months later by a sequel, "Valley of Dreams". These are the only stories by Weinbaum set on Mars. The story immediately established Weinbaum as a leading figure in the field. Isaac Asimov states that Weinbaum's "easy style and his realistic description of extraterrestrial scenes and life-forms were better than anything yet seen, and the science fiction reading public went mad over him." The story "had the effect on the field of an exploding grenade. With this single story, Weinbaum was instantly recognized as the world's best living science fiction writer, and at once almost every writer in the field tried to imitate him." Before, aliens had been nothing more than plot devices to help or hinder the hero. Weinbaum's creations, like the pyramid-builder and the cart creatures, have their own reasons for existing. Also, their logic is not human logic, and humans cannot always puzzle out their motivations. Tweel itself was one of the first characters (arguably the first) who satisfied John W. Campbell's famous challenge: "Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSheba Blake Publishing
    Release dateApr 13, 2017
    ISBN9783961890286

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      Book preview

      A Martian Odyssey - Stanley Weinbaum

      2017

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      A MARTIAN ODYSSEY

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 1

      Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares.

      Air you can breathe! he exulted. It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there! He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the port.

      The other three stared at him sympathetically--Putz, the engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the Ares expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the Ares. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth's, and certainly the first successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts--the months spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.

      Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.

      Well, exploded Harrison abruptly, are we going to hear what happened? You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don't get a peep for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!

      Speel? queried Leroy perplexedly. Speel what?

      "He means 'spiel', explained Putz soberly. It iss to tell."

      Jarvis met Harrison's amused glance without the shadow of a smile. That's right, Karl, he said in grave agreement with Putz. "Ich spiel es!" He grunted comfortably and began.

      According to orders, he said, I watched Karl here take off toward the North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You'll remember, Cap--we had orders not to land, but just scout about for points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along, riding pretty high--about two thousand feet--for a couple of reasons. First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up dust if you move low.

      We know all that from Putz, grunted Harrison. I wish you'd saved the films, though. They'd have paid the cost of this junket; remember how the public mobbed the first moon pictures?

      The films are safe, retorted Jarvis. Well, he

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