Word: weinbaum
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...could not retreat into the canyon, for behind them were even more terrifying Venusians, the three-eyed, four-legged, two-fingered triops noctivi-vans. What would Ham do? Readers will find the answer in A Martian Odyssey, a posthumous collection of Stanley Weinbaum's "science-fiction" stories...
Loonies & Slinkers. Before his death in 1935, Weinbaum peddled his shockers to Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories for a cent a word. He could hardly have known that science-fiction fans would one day consider them classics...
...Weinbaum began manufacturing his stories during the early '30s. He populated Mars with clever, ostrichlike creatures who could learn snatches of human speech. On Jupiter's moon, lo, he placed giggling "loonies," dimwits with balloon-shaped heads and five-foot necks-not to mention six-inch "slinkers," nasty pests that looked like black rats wearing capes. Science fictioneers credit Weinbaum with two important contributions to their field. Where predecessors had concentrated on gadgetry and ordinary men, he tried to create characters for his non-human aliens, tried to weave his doughpots and other planetary faunas into his plots...
Small publishing houses devoted to science fiction such as Weinbaum turned out have been mushrooming during the last few years, and the business as a whole appears to be on the upgrade. Most of them are three-or four-man affairs. The half-dozen or so outfits in the field each print anywhere from two to a dozen books a year. Press runs usually hover around 5,000. Yet such midget firms as Prime Press in Philadelphia, Fantasy Press in Reading, Pa. and Shasta Press in Chicago eke out profits from their small printings, for two reasons: 1) they keep...
...reader who reads science fiction dispassionately is likely to be struck by how closely the human imagination is tied to reality, even when it deliberately sets out to violate it. Stanley Weinbaum's loonies and slinkers have been seen before. The shapes may be different, but his dream-beasts come startlingly close to what the human race has been running across, for a good many years, in its childish nightmares...