"G. Stanley Weinbaum - The Best of Stanley G Weinbaum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

they were cardboard, they were shad-ows, they were mockeries of life.
The pre-Weinbaum extra-terrestrial, whether humanoid or monstrous, served only to impinge upon
the hero, to serve as a menace or as a means of rescue, to be evil or good in strictly human termsтАФnever
 to be something in itself, inde-pendent of mankind.
Weinbaum was the first, as far as I know, to create extra-terrestrials that had their own reasons for
existing.
He did more than that, too; he created whole sense-making ecologies.
Weinbaum had a consistent picture of the solar system (his stories never went beyond Pluto) that was
astronomically correct in terms of the knowledge of the mid-1930s. He could not be wiser than his time,
however, so he gave Venus a day-side and a night-side, and Mars an only moderately thin at-mosphere
and canals. He also took the chance (though the theory was already pretty well knocked-out at the time)
of making the outer planets hot rather than cold so that the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn could be
habitable.
On each of the worlds he deals with, then, he allows for the astronomic difference and creates a world
of life adapted to the circumstances of that world. The super-jungle of the day-side of Venus as pictured
in "Parasite Planet" is, in my opin-ion, the most perfect example of an alien ecology ever constructed.
In Weinbaum's stories, the plots, though tightly and well-constructed, exist in the reader's mind largely
for the oppor-tunity they present for a voyage of discovery of strange worlds and of ever-fascinating
life-forms.
Of all his life-forms, the most fascinating perhaps are Tweel, the pseudo-ostrich in "A Martian
Odyssey," and Oscar, the intelligent plant in "The Lotus Eaters." In both cases, Weinbaum met the
challenge of a demand John Campbell was to make of his writers in later years: "Write me a story about
an organism that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man." I don't think anyone has done it as well as
Weinbaum in all the years since Weinbaum.

And what would have happened if Weinbaum had lived? It is likely, sad to say, that he would have
left magazine science fiction for brighter, greener, and more lucrative fields.
Yet what if he had not? What if he had stayed in magazine science fiction over the years as some
other major talents have, talents such as Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, and even Robert A. Heinlein?
In that case, there would never have been a "Campbell revolution," I think.
In 1938, when John Campbell took over complete control of Astounding, he turned the field toward
greater realism and, at the same time, toward greater humanism-a double direc-tion he had himself
marked out with his story "Twilight," which had appeared in the November 1934 Astounding. In so
doing, he developed a stable of authors, including Heinlein, Van Vogt, and many others--myself for one.
But Weinbaum was a Campbell author before Campbell. "A Martian Odyssey" appeared half a year
before "Twilight," so Weinbaum is clearly one author who owed nothing to Campbell. Had Weinbaum
continued producing there would have been no Campbell revolution. All that Campbell could have done
would have been to reinforce what would un-doubtedly have come to be called the "Weinbaum
revolutions".
And in Weinbaum's giant shadow, all the Campbell authors would have found themselves less
remarkable niches. Wein-baum, who would be in his early seventies now had he lived, would surely be in
first place in the list of all-time favorite science-fiction writers.
Isaac Asmov

A MARTIAN ODYSSEY

Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares.
'Air you can breathe,' he exulted. 'It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there!' He nodded at
the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the
port.