Stanley G. Weinbaum 39 min read

The story that taught science fiction how to write a truly alien alien.

Chemist Dick Jarvis crash-lands his scout rocket half a world away from the first human expedition to Mars and has to walk back, acquiring, along the way, an ostrich-shaped companion named Tweel whose mind works nothing like a human's. Weinbaum's 1934 landmark broke the mold of the bug-eyed monster: its Martians are genuinely, delightfully strange, curious rather than hostile, logical on terms we can barely grasp. Told as a wry campfire yarn back aboard ship, it's warm, funny, and bursting with invention. Isaac Asimov called it one of the few stories to change how the whole field was written. Read it to see first contact done right, before almost anyone else managed it.

In its time

Published in 1934, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

39 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).