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.