Our Adventures in Fiction series is meant to take a look at the writers and creators behind the genre(s) that helped to forge not only our favorite hobby but our lives. We invite you to explore the entirety of the series on our Adventures In Fiction home page. Adventures in Fiction: Stanley G. Weinbaum by Ngo Vinh-Hoi Not many authors can be credited with changing the entire trajectory of a genre, yet Stanley Grauman Weinbaum managed to do so with his very first published science fiction story A Martian Odyssey. The story first appeared in the July 1934 issue of the science fiction pulp magazine Wonder Stories, which was a distant third in popularity to Astounding Stories and Amazing Stories. Forty years later, no less a figure than Isaac Asimov would declare that “hidden in this obscure magazine, A Martian Odyssey had the effect on the field of an exploding grenade. With this single-story, Weinbaum was instantly recognized as the world’s best living science-fiction writer, and at once almost every writer in the field tried to imitate him.” That’s a lot of weight to place on a short story of a mere 10,000 words but per Asimov A Martian Odyssey presented some of the first alien landscapes and creatures that didn’t exist “only to impinge on the hero, to serve as a menace or as a means of rescue, to be evil or good in strictly human terms—never to be something in itself, independent of mankind.” In Tweel, our human protagonist’s companion on his Martian journey, we have the first intelligent and sympathetic alien that both prefigured and fulfilled Astounding editor John W. Campbell’s long-standing challenge to write “about an organism that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man.” H.P. Lovecraft was also a great admirer of Weinbaum, stating that he “had the imagination to envisage wholly alien situations and psychologies and entities, to devise consistent events from wholly alien motives and to refrain from the cheap dramatics in which all adventure-pulpists wallow.” Details about Weinbaum’s early life are thin on the ground, but it is known that he was born on April 4th, 1902 in Louisville, Kentucky and that at some point his family re-located to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he attended high school and had his first science fiction story The Lost Battle published in the school...