Appendix N: A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum
The year was 1989. Young Idiot College Student Herald was nosing through The Merchant of Venus when he came upon a shrink-wrapped paperback that was at least twenty years old judging from the acid rock cover art. The title was The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum. I snatched it off the shelf greedily. I had to sacrifice that week’s Prizzao fund to buy it. No regrets it’s still sitting on my library shelf.
In that day and age, luck was your only hope for finding something that was hopelessly out of print. Amazon would not exist for years, and used books were always going to be hit or miss. As for ordering something like this at Little Professor or Walden Books, you’ve got to be kidding right? Even if someone was reprinting it, and you knew who it was, it would take you about six to twelve weeks to order something from a bookstore. And this had been out of print for some time.
I was doing my best at the time to work my way through the Appendix N of the TSR Dungeon Masters guide. It was frustrating going for the reasons I just cited adding to my frustration was the number of stories I’d heard about “Nova Weinbaum,” in anthologies like New Destines. A collection by Weinbaum, the John Campbell discovery, whose career in science fiction lasted a mere 18 months before dying of lung cancer at the age of 33 was kind of like finding gold dust to me.
During his scant time in the field, he redefined science fiction. Inventing worlds with complex ecosystems and creating sapient extra-terrestrial life that was genuinely alien.
It was as if he knew he didn’t have a lot of time left to make his mark in the world because for those few months between 1933 to 1935 he was staggeringly prolific.
“After selling the romance novel The Lady Dances (1934 as by Marge Stanley) to King Features Syndicate, Stanley G. Weinbaum in a scant eighteen months (July 1934 to December 1935), produced some of the finest science fiction stories of the 1930s. Beginning with the “A Martian Odyssey” and primarily in the legendary publications Astounding and Wonder Stories, Weinbaum sold thirteen stories, some of the genre’s most important and seminal works. After his untimely death from lung cancer in December, 1935, Weinbaum became arguably the first cult science fiction writer with many of his works published posthumously.
Before his death, Weinbaum wrote several novels including The New Adam (1939), The Dark Other (1950), and the mash up The Black Flame, which incorporated the previously unpublished short stories “Dawn of Flame” and “The Black Flame” along with new material. While the short stories individually appeared in 1936 (Dawn of Flame: The Stanley G. Weinbaum Memorial Volume) and 1939 (Startling), the novel wasn’t published until 1948 (Fantasy Press)”
Here’s the plot: The Ares expedition is the first manned trip to Mars and it’s privately funded, they are hoping the sale of pictures and whatnot will pay for their expedition. Dick Jarvis, the expedition’s chemist headed out to some overhead pictures in the auxiliary rocket. About 800 miles away, the “atomic blast” on this rocket fails and he crashes. He decides to walk back to base reasoning that any attempt to find him will likely spot him on his way back.
He spots a tentacle monster attacking a giant bird-like creature. He notices that the bird-thing has a bag hanging from its neck, reasons that it’s sapient, and comes to the bird-dude’s defense. The bird is named, “Tweel” and appears to be without precedent in fiction. Before Tweel, aliens were either bug-eyed monsters that wanted to carry off shapely blonde heroines, or they were super-enlightened humans who were given to prolonged lectures on universal brotherhood, communism, and eating vegetarian (basically they were Spock). But Tweel wasn’t any of those things. He was intelligent but he had his own motivations that Jarvis could puzzle out but not really understand at an instinctive level.
As they trudge along Jarvis spots a series of small pyramids, all of them open at the top, except for the last one in the row. The top suddenly comes off and a one-armed creature shambles out. It crawls along a few feet then buries its head in the sand and begins excreting bricks which it begins to place in a square around it. Jarvis realizes that it’s a silicon rather than a carbon-based life-form, and it’s not entirely plant or animal.
As Jarvis reaches a canal he becomes homesick for a girl back in New York, and suddenly there she is beckoning to him. Jarvis starts to run toward her but Tweel suddenly draws a weapon and shoots. The girl dissolves into the kind of tentacle monster that was originally attacking Tweel. Jarvis names it a dream-beast and surmises that it lures its prey by mental attack.
“As Jarvis and Tweel approach a city on the canal bank, they are passed by a barrel-like creature with four legs, four arms, and a circle of eyes around its waist. The barrel creature is pushing an empty cart; it ignores them as it goes by. Another goes by. Jarvis stands in front of the third, which stops. Jarvis says, “We are friends,” and the cart creature replies, “We are v-r-r-riends,” before pushing past him. The cart creatures all repeat the phrase as they go by. The creatures return to the city with their carts full of stones, sand, and chunks of rubbery plants. Jarvis and Tweel follow the cart creatures into a network of tunnels. They get lost, and he and Tweel find themselves in a domed chamber near the surface. There they find the cart creatures depositing their loads beneath a wheel that grinds the stones and plants into dust. Some of the cart creatures also step under the wheel themselves and are pulverized. Beyond the wheel is a shining crystal on a pedestal.”
It turns out the barrel critters are part of a hive mind creature, hence the willingness of the individual creature to sacrifice itself so willingly.
The crystal Jarvis saw emitted radiation that killed diseased tissue but left normal cells unharmed. Indicating, that Weinbaum already knew he didn’t have long. The story ends with a rocket from the Aries picking up Jarvis.
I can’t honestly say that a Martian Odyssey is up there with Shakespeare. It’s not a classic that will survive the ages like The Lord of the Rings. Truth be said, most of the early works of Verne and Wells fall into that category as well. Would someone else have created the building blocks that were used by the Golden Age writers? Probably. Someone was going to have to move it past its pulp roots. But it wouldn’t have been the same. Likely whoever did it would have made something much more character-driven. Much more, “Tell me about a guy who…?”
But Stanley Weinbaum asked the question, “What if…?” And that proved to be the most influential question of science fiction’s golden age.
