A MARTIAN ODYSSEY is not really a forgotten book. It’s the oldest SF story voted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame(which is where I read it many years back. It was Weinbaum’s first SF(he’d sold a romantic novel that was serialized in early 1934), appearing in the July, 1934 issue of Wonder Stories. it was one of the most influential and enduring stories in the field, no less than Isaac ASsimov saying it was one of three SF tales that influenced the way stories wre written from that point.
Weinbaum had a short career, dying eighteen months later from lung cancer at age thirty-five.
The other stories in the book(six total) I hadn’t read. A sequel to Odyseey and the three Professor Haskel van Manderpootz, a man of supreme ego, and his friend/former student, playboy Dixon Wells, a man who’d never arrived anywhere on tme. He gets caught up in the professor’s inventions, usually losing the girl of his dreams each time. WORLDS OF IF concerns a machine that can look sideways in time at what might have been if certain decisions had been made differently(alternate universes though that term hadn’t been thought of at the time). THE IDEAL presents a machine that can make one see the ideal girl that a particular person wants. THE POINT OF VIEW allows one to look at a person and see how he views the world from his perspective.
I enjoyed this set.
Not The Baseball Pitcher 
Worlds of If –man, that takes me back! My dad had a subscription to the mag…
Weinbaum probably had a greater effect on what Algis Budrys distinguished as “newstand sf” with his first story than anyone else has had. And then, not long after, he died, very young. I still need to read more than a few of his stories.
I don’t know if his story particuarly had an influence on the name of the 1952-1974 magazine, which began life as IF: WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION, but was known as WORLDS OF IF in the ’60s, when Frederik Pohl was editing, assisted in the latter ’60s by Judy-Lynn Benjamin, who would marry part-time staffer Lester Del Rey and change her name.
An extraordinarily influential work! I loved it the first time I read it!
We are v-r-r-riends!
This story touched me immensely when I first read it. Even today the thoughts of it evoke a bit of pleasant bittersweet nostalgia.
This is a true classic. Talk about “sense of wonder”…