Stanley G. Weinbaum

Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902–1935) published ‘A Martian Odyssey’ in 1934 and changed the field overnight: its alien Tweel was the first truly non-human alien in SF, genuinely strange, intelligent and unmalicious, rather than a monster or a stand-in human. In barely eighteen months before his death from cancer at 33, he produced a body of witty, imaginative work whose influence far outstrips its size.