A Martian Odyssey, by Stanley G. Weinbaum
Amongst the smattering of weird and whacky stories that appear in this anthology, A Martian Odyssey is, to me, the weirdest and the whackiest. Like many of the other tales, it takes some old mythology and spins it into a future tale, imagining one of the more unique alien species I’ve encountered: the avian-like Martian, Tweel.
To my mind, it is Tweel who takes the role of Odysseus, and our narrator, the human Dick Jarvis, who accompanies Tweel as they cross the Martian landscape, takes on the role of Homer, relating the Odyssey to the crew of the Ares who’ve joined Dick on the surface of the red planet.
Click on this link to read a story here .
Click on this link to listen to an audio-story here.
A Martian Odyssey is mostly a stringing together of “scary,” pseudo-mythical encounters, with Tweel -- more than a few times -- and eventually a deus ex machina saving Dick from his own stupidity. Without Tweel, in fact, the story would be a little too thin to hold up, but Tweel allows A Martian Odysseyto transcend both its sketchy plot and what would otherwise be a rather frustrating expression of the exceptionalist attitudes of humanism. Tweel is one of the earliest examples of an attempt to create a unique and highly intelligent alien species, and it is all Tweel’s idiosyncrasies that make this story worth while.
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