Publisher's Synopsis
A four-man crew crash lands on Mars, and Dick Jarvis, who sets out on his own meets Tweel, a sympathetic creature who shows him the ways of the planet. A strange pyramid building creature, a tentacled 'dream beast', and broken record cart people. Check out for yourself why A Martian Odyssey came in 2nd in the best science fiction stories of all time, right behind Asimov's Nightfall. This short story set the career of Stanley Weinbaum off like a bomb, since he wrote a story like none had done before: it was about an alien who is sentient and intelligent rather than a mindless barbarian. He also added the twist that despite the creature's intelligence, it didn't have human logic or reason. It was followed four months later by a sequel, Valley of Dreams. Stanley Grauman Weinbaum was an American science fiction writer. His career in science fiction was short but influential. He is best known for the groundbreaking science fiction short story, A Martian Odyssey," which presented a sympathetic but decidedly non-human alien, Tweel. Even more remarkably, this was his first science fiction story. Isaac Asimov has described this story as "a perfect Campbellian science fiction story, before John W. Campbell. Indeed, Tweel may be the first creature in science fiction to fulfil Campbell's dictum, 'write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man'."
