Books: Never Too Old to Dream

A MARTIAN ODYSSEY (289 pp.)—Stanley Weinbaum—Fanfasy ($3).

Ham Hammond was in a tight spot. Adventurous Ham, who had rocketed to the planet Venus to hunt xixtchil, a scarce, rejuvenating drug, searched desperately for a way to save himself and his lovely companion, Pat Burlingame. They had been backed into a fearsome dusky canyon by the "doughpot," one of the most monstrous creatures on the whole planet. A white mass of nauseous protoplasm weighing several tons, the doughpot had neither intelligence nor any fixed form: it just rolled itself instinctively toward anything edible.

Even Ham Hammond's mighty flame-pistol could kill it only by destroying all its cells.

Yet Ham and Pat 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 advertising and other overhead costs to a minimum, and 2) they can count on regular patronage from their own rabid fans.

Space Operas & Utopia. The four founding fathers of "science fiction" are generally acknowledged to be Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells. In the U.S., Will F. Jenkins, a 27-year veteran, who also writes under the pen name of Murray Leinster, is regarded as the dean of writers in the field. Best of the lot, according to expert editors, are Robert Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt.