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A review by blchandler9000
A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum
3.0
Truth be told, the edition of the book I read is not on Goodreads for some reason, so I'm putting my review here.
After reading a great short story by this author in a scifi anthology about Venus, I seeked him out to see where else he could take me.
Weinbaum had a career that was brief but prolific, and notable for his ability to imagine new worlds. All of his "Planetary" stories are collected into one volume here, spanning from Venus to Mars, to the moons of the gas giants, and even out to little, black Pluto.
The science might annoy the pedantic; Weinbaum was writing in the 1930s when information about the solar system's planets and moons was largely guesswork, so here Jupiter heats its moons, Mars is criss-crossed with canals, Venus is tidally locked with the sun, and so on. But if you're reading these stories for realism, you're doing it wrong. Weinbaum's gifts were not hard science, but pure fabrication. The best of these stories use those talents to their fullest, describing life forms and ecosystems quite unlike those seen on Earth. "A Martian Odyssey" and "The Lotus Eaters" are probably the best examples, with their intelligent plants, stone-eating organisms, and drum-critters whose motivations seem totally nonsensical to our Earthly eyes. Exploring those worlds with the protagonists is pretty fun.
Not all of the stories are brilliant, of course, and some seem redundant. There's a lot of survival-type tales, some more imaginative than others, with people scaling frozen mountains or running from deadly creatures. There's a few romances, too, most of which seem to work under the stress-equals-love trope as astronauts scale said mountains and run from aforementioned creatures. There's an amusing amount of capitalism driving the plots. Every planet has something people want to sell, and many characters are in it for the money, not the thrill of discovery. Some of the ideas in these stories seem like scifi standards now—such as space pirates, or the alien who takes the shapes of its prey—but these surely must be among the first examples of such cliches, and such well-worn routes are sometimes fun to visit.
After reading a great short story by this author in a scifi anthology about Venus, I seeked him out to see where else he could take me.
Weinbaum had a career that was brief but prolific, and notable for his ability to imagine new worlds. All of his "Planetary" stories are collected into one volume here, spanning from Venus to Mars, to the moons of the gas giants, and even out to little, black Pluto.
The science might annoy the pedantic; Weinbaum was writing in the 1930s when information about the solar system's planets and moons was largely guesswork, so here Jupiter heats its moons, Mars is criss-crossed with canals, Venus is tidally locked with the sun, and so on. But if you're reading these stories for realism, you're doing it wrong. Weinbaum's gifts were not hard science, but pure fabrication. The best of these stories use those talents to their fullest, describing life forms and ecosystems quite unlike those seen on Earth. "A Martian Odyssey" and "The Lotus Eaters" are probably the best examples, with their intelligent plants, stone-eating organisms, and drum-critters whose motivations seem totally nonsensical to our Earthly eyes. Exploring those worlds with the protagonists is pretty fun.
Not all of the stories are brilliant, of course, and some seem redundant. There's a lot of survival-type tales, some more imaginative than others, with people scaling frozen mountains or running from deadly creatures. There's a few romances, too, most of which seem to work under the stress-equals-love trope as astronauts scale said mountains and run from aforementioned creatures. There's an amusing amount of capitalism driving the plots. Every planet has something people want to sell, and many characters are in it for the money, not the thrill of discovery. Some of the ideas in these stories seem like scifi standards now—such as space pirates, or the alien who takes the shapes of its prey—but these surely must be among the first examples of such cliches, and such well-worn routes are sometimes fun to visit.