I had been bowled over by the short fiction in The Best of Stanley Weinbaum, so when I saw this at the used book store it seemed like a good bet. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good book. Somewhere deep inside there is both an interesting concept about the birth of a new race of supermen, and an interesting concept of making their story a retelling of the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Unfortunately, Weinbaum can’t make these concepts work---unconvincing and shallow characters acting in unconvincing and implausible ways keep getting in the way of these concepts coming off. Not to mention the utter nonsense of the central idea from an evolutionary science point of view.

There are some original ideas (certainly for 1939) and a surprisingly substantial amount of surprisingly direct discussion of sex. The second half of the book works better than the first half. And I found the glimpses of life in 1930s Chicago moderately interesting.

The inside cover blurb of my 1969 Avon paperback says that Weinbaum worked on this novel for nine years, and it has the feel of a book where the author knew that he hadn’t quite made his idea work, so he kept tinkering away, convinced that he could fix it, but in all likelihood only making it even more of a complicated mess. ( )