Stanley G. Weinbaum

Stanley Grauman Weinbaum (1902–1935) was an American science fiction writer whose career lasted eighteen months. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Milwaukee, he studied chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin and published a romance novel under a pseudonym before A Martian Odyssey appeared in Wonder Stories in July 1934. Its alien Tweel, intelligent but unlike any human mind, changed the way the genre imagined other species, and the stories that followed, among them Valley of Dreams, The Lotus Eaters and Parasite Planet, confirmed his talent. He died of lung cancer in December 1935 at thirty-three, and his novels The Black Flame and The New Adam appeared posthumously.