The Manderpootz Series includes the three stories of Stanley G. Weinbaums early science fiction trilogy. He is best known for his short story A Martian Odyssey which has been influencing Science Fiction since it was first published in 1934. Weinbaum is considered the first writer to contrive an alien who thought as well as a human, but not like a human. In a series of comedies featuring the eccentric scientist Professor Manderpootz including the Alternate-History story The Worlds of If, The Ideal and The Point of View he flippantly devised absurdly miraculous Machines. The humorous stories follow the doings of Dixon Wells, a perpetually late playboy who runs afoul of the inventions of his friend and former instructor in Newer Physics, Professor Haskel van Manderpootz, a supremely immodest genius who rates Einstein as his intellectual equal.