1934
3 books
- Bertie decides he can fix everyone's love lives better than Jeeves, and the wreckage is glorious, peaking when a newt-obsessed Gussie gives a drunken speech at a school prize-giving. Nothing sad ever happens, the sentences themselves are the treat.
- Yes, the science is creaky 1930s pulp, but Weinbaum's aliens still feel genuinely alien: Tweel, the birdlike Martian in A Martian Odyssey, thinks in ways you never quite decode, and that's the point. If you like first contact done with curiosity instead of ray guns, this is it.
- You get unapologetic early space opera: Conway Costigan and Clio Marsden hurtle through interplanetary intrigue while civilizations become pieces in a much larger struggle. The science is gloriously dated and the prose can be blunt, but the scale keeps expanding until ordinary adventure feels cosmically important.