Tweel (A Martian Odyssey)
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[edit] Tweel(character)
Tweel is an Extraterrestrial from the planet Mars feautured in Stanley G. Weinbaum's science fiction short-story A Martian Odyssey.
[edit] Appearance
Tweel's appearance is described as such:
The martian wasn't a bird, really. it wasn't even bird-like, except at first glance. it had a beak, alright, and a few feathery appendages, but the beak wasn't really a beak. it was somewhat flexable; i could see the tip bend from side to side; it was almost like a cross between a beak and a trunk. it had four toed feet, and four fingered things--hands, you'd have to call them, a little roundish body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head--and that beak.
--a Martian Odyssey, paragraph 24.
[edit] phsycology and intelligence
Tweel is a very intelligent creature, despite the fact that he thinks very differently than a man.
when Jarvis, the story's protagnist, draws the first four inner planets and the sun in the sand, Tweel successfully identifies mars as the fourth planet, and the earth as the third. he therefore is civilized, but he thinks differently than a man, for he jumps directly into the circle in the sand that represents the sun on his beak, which he does not consider unusual at all.
he is also able to grasp various words in human English--with which he puts forward advanced ideas and concepts (thus proving he is intelligent).
he is able to communicate very well with Jarvis, who understands his communications, but jarvis cannot grasp even a faint light of Tweel's intelligence.
[edit] Civilization
Tweel's civilization is apparently old and ragged, with little technology (though his species still remains advanced in terms of intelligence). vast ruined buildings are all that remains of their cities which evidently once thrived.
it is hinted at that devilish creatures (mentioned in another short story of Weinbaum's, The Mad Moon as Slinkers) are the cause of their demise. one slinker is described either reading or eating a page of a book in a great library.
it is suggested that Tweel's race travelled across the solar system, as Jarvis, Tweel's human partner and the protagnist of A Martian Odyssey describes seeing three eyes in the darkness inside a building-- similar to the eyes of Triops Noctivians, a creature featured in a future story of Weinbaum's, Parasite Planet.
[edit] Potential Sequel
originally, a sequel was planned for A Martian Odyssey and it's sequel, Valley of Dreams, but Weinbaum's throat cancer caused him to die before it was finished.
Questions are put forward in Valley of Dreams, which were most likely to be answered in the third part to the trilogy, though the sequel was never written.
