A MARTIAN ODYSSEY And Others

Reading, PA: Fantasy Press. Very Good+ in Good dust jacket. 1949. Limited Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. Limited First Edition, this copy is # 220 of 500 copies with a special limitation page inserted. This copy is in Very Good+ to Near Fine- condition and has a Good only dust jacket. The book and its contents are in clean, bright condition. There is a former owner's bookplate (science fiction related) to the front pastedown page. The top edge of the text block has some ground-in dirt and darkening. The text pages are clean and bright. The dust jacket has large chunks missing from the spine ends (both top and bottom) and several other smaller chips missing from the top edges. The black dust jcaket has some rubbing to the spine and flap joints and some toning and foxing to the rear cover. The dust jacket art is by A. J. Donnell. "Stanley Grauman Weinbaum (April 4, 1902 – December 14, 1935) was an American science fiction writer. His career in science fiction was short but influential. His first story, "A Martian Odyssey", was published to great (and enduring) acclaim in July 1934, but he succumbed to lung cancer less than a year and a half later...He is best known for the groundbreaking science fiction short story, "A Martian Odyssey", which presented a sympathetic but decidedly non-human alien, Tweel. Even more remarkably, this was his first science fiction story (in 1933 he had sold a romantic novel, The Lady Dances, to King Features Syndicate, which serialized the story in its newspapers in early 1934). Isaac Asimov has described "A Martian Odyssey" as "a perfect Campbellian science fiction story, before John W. Campbell. Indeed, Tweel may be the first creature in science fiction to fulfil Campbell's dictum, 'write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man'." Asimov went on to describe it as one of only three stories that changed the way all subsequent ones in the science fiction genre were written. It is the oldest short story (and one of the top vote-getters) selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America for inclusion in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964." .