The first was E.E. “Doc” Smith with his universe-spanning space opera and the third was Robert A. Heinlein with his quite human, fast-paced realistic stories.
Weinbaum was a brief star in the pre-Golden Age period of science fiction who foreshadowed what was to come in that bright time a few years later.
Stanley G. Weinbaum, born April 4, 1902, did something no other science fiction writer had done to that time. He created a believable series of stories that did spout the clichés of his time.
Live Fast, Die Young
“During the last year and a half of his life, Stanley Weinbaum changed the field of science fiction forever. His first SF sale, ‘A Martian Odyssey,’ appeared in the July 1934 issue of Wonder Stories. It attracted instant acclaim for both its content and its style, and launched Weinbaum to the very top of the field,” according to Scifipedia.
Up until that summer of 1934, the vast majority of SF stories were adolescent fantasies with bug-eyed monsters, damsels in distress and a lot of ray guns. The aliens invariably were the villains with very human pulp-era motivations, even if they were tentacled horrors.
In 1938, John W. Campbell Jr., a former SF writer of big, universe-spanning adventures, then quiet eon-spanning morality plays, became the editor of Astounding Stories, the leading SF magazine of the time. Campbell essentially created the Golden Age by imploring his writers to “write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man,” according to the Asimov introduction in The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum.
Among the Best
“A Martian Odyssey” often is counted among the best SF short stories ever written, usually coming in second only to Asimov’s “Nightfall.” The story is about the first encounter with a Martian by astronauts on the red planet. The Martain, Tweel, is exactly what Campbell would order a few years later: smart, adaptable with a personality all his own, and very alien.
Upon the release of the story in Wonder Stories, Weinbaum instantly was considered the forefront of the science fiction field and one of its top new authors. Unfortunately, his entire career would span only another 18 months before cancer killed him at 33.
Today, Weinbaum’s works are nearly as fresh as they were 70-plus years ago. The most dated aspects are the hard-fisted humans in the stories. They tend to read like pulp fiction. The aliens, however, Tweel top among them, still are fresh and alien.
For a list of Weinbaum’s works, go to http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Stanley-G.-Weinbaum. There are several collections of his work in print including The Martian Odyssey and Other SF; Interplanetary Odysseys — Classic Tales of Interplanetary Adventure Including: A Martian Odyssey, its Sequel Valley of Dreams, the Complete ‘Ham’ Hammond Stories and Others; STRANGE GENIUS — Classic Tales of the Human Mind at Work Including the Complete Novel The New Adam, the 'van Manderpootz' Stories and Others; and The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum.
 |
 |
