A Martian Odyssey

Dick Jarvis, the chemist of the first expedition to Mars, crash-lands his small rocket far from the main ship and must walk hundreds of miles back across the desert. On the way he rescues a strange, ostrich-like Martian, Tweel, from a tentacled creature, and the two become friends, though they can barely understand each other. Together they meet other bizarre beings: a silicon creature that eats sand and builds pyramids of its own waste bricks, barrel-shaped creatures pushing carts, and a dream-beast that lures its prey with illusions of what they most desire.

Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902–1935) published the story in 1934, and its Martians, intelligent but truly alien rather than monsters, delighted readers and influenced writers such as Isaac Asimov; he died of cancer a year and a half later. Compare the hostile Martians of Wells's The War of the Worlds.