A Martian Odyssey, and Other Stories

An astronaut stranded on Mars walks eight hundred miles back to base with Tweel, a Martian whose language and logic he never manages to follow. Weinbaum published it in 1934 and science fiction changed overnight: aliens stopped being monsters and became beings with reasons of their own. Valley of Dreams follows the same expedition, and with them come Pygmalion's Spectacles, whose goggles put a man inside a story he can smell and touch, and three tales of the insufferable Professor van Manderpootz. Weinbaum died eighteen months after his first sale, at thirty-three. Fifty-nine plates of painting, from Munch to Mucha, carry the strange dreamscapes and distant worlds of these stories.