Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902–1935) was a US science fiction writer who had a substantial impact on the American science fiction scene despite his short life. Early on, two years studying chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin helped Weinbaum envision the premise of his most famous work, “A Martian Odyssey” (Wonder Stories, 1934), reprinted here. The story broke new ground in attempting to envisage life on other worlds in terms of strange and complex ecosystems. Told in Weinbaum’s fluent style, it became immediately and permanently popular. Weinbaum followed up “A Martian Odyssey” with a less successful sequel, “Valley of Dreams” (Wonder Stories, 1934). Other Weinbaum stories in this vein include four stories in Astounding Science Fiction in 1935: “The Lotus Eaters,” which features an interesting attempt to imagine the worldview of an intelligent plant; “The Mad Moon”; “Flight on Titan”; and “Parasite Planet.” He also contributed to the well-known round-robin SF story solicited by Fantasy Magazine for its September 1935 issue, “The Challenge from Beyond,” with Murray Leinster, E. E. Smith, Harl Vincent, and Donald Wandrei.
Weinbaum’s premature death from lung cancer robbed science fiction of its most promising writer of the 1930s, the full measure of his ability only becoming apparent when his longer works began to appear posthumously. The New Adam (1939) is a painstaking account of the career of a potential superman who grows up as a kind of “feral child” in human society; it initiates into the pulp science fiction world the kind of superman story more commonly told in scientific romance form by Olaf Stapledon and other English writers, the kind of story in which the superman cannot adjust to normal humans and suffers fatal solitude. Another posthumously published SF novel, the psychological horror story The Dark Other (1950), is an early exploration of the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme. The King’s Watch (1994 chapbook) is a previously unprinted hard-boiled detective tale.
“A Martian Odyssey” was his second published story, but his first in the science fiction genre. (A year earlier he had published a romance novel using the pseudonym Marge Stanley.) In the collection The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, Isaac Asimov wrote that 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.” In 1970, when the Science Fiction Writers of America voted on the best stories (prior to the existence of their Nebula Award), this story came in second to Asimov’s novella Nightfall and was the earliest story to receive such recognition.
As with Edmond Hamilton’s work, Weinbaum’s science fiction influenced horror and weird fiction as well. H. P. Lovecraft wrote, “Somehow [Weinbaum] had the imagination to envisage wholly alien situations and psychologies and entities, to devise consistent events from wholly alien motives and to refrain from the cheap dramatics in which almost all adventure-pulpists wallow.”