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.

Most of the contemporary masters have one point in common: their stories are laid in the future. Interplanetary flights are routine, as are the "space operas" in which heroes chase villains through dazzling stretches of the galaxy. One of the oldest forms of science fiction is the "Utopia story," in which a coherent history of an ideal world is sketched out. A popular form is the "prophecy story," in which the consequences of man's inventive ingenuity in, say, rocket ships, are thought out. Subject matter ranges from the zoology of other planets to apocalyptic portraits of the world after it has been destroyed in the Third, Fourth or Fifth World War.

Hungry Fans. Readers of science fiction include a special cult which specializes in collecting the classics in the field and faithfully supports the worthy publishing ventures. The prices which some of the more prized volumes command are steep. H. P. Lovecraft's The Outsider sells for from $50 to $100, Vol. I No. 1 of Astounding Stories of Super Science for as high as $50. Several publishers estimate that from 30% to 40% of their readers are professional men, some of them scientists who read the stories for relaxation but with a sharp eye for scientific errors. Clubs are often organized by fans who hold regular discussion meetings and publish such magazines as Fandom Speaks, Fantasy Review, Macabre, The Gorgon and Lunacy. One Californian keeps his precious 2,000-volume collection in a fireproof concrete vault.

There has been some speculation about the reasons for the science-fiction fad. The Saturday Review of Literature's Harrison Smith has speculated about the relation of the "age of anxiety" to the "scientific fantasy story" as "a buffer against known and more conceivable terrors." Publishers' Weekly finds that the appeal of these stories lies "in their free flight of [imagination] . . . uninhibited by present reality, yet sometimes terrifyingly close to the advanced discoveries of modern science."

The 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.

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