The Worlds of IF

Professor Haskel van Manderpootz, is a supremely immodest genius who rates Albert Einstein as his equal (or slight inferior). These are the stories of his inventions as used by one of his much more mundane students in his quest to find true love.

Dixon Wells, a perpetually late playboy repeatedly runs afoul of the inventions of his friend and former instructor in “Newer Physics”, Professor Haskel van Manderpootz, a supremely immodest genius who rates Albert Einstein as his equal (or slight inferior). In “The Worlds of If“, Wells tests an invention that reveals what might have been; in “The Ideal“, the professor creates a device that can show the image of a person’s ideal (in Wells’ case, his perfect woman); the contrivance of “The Point of View” allows one to see the world from another’s perspective. In all three, Wells finds and then loses the woman of his dreams. Sometimes it’s best to remain in ignorance…

The Worlds of IF (1935)
The Ideal (1935)
The Point Of View (1936)

Stanley Grauman Weinbaum’s (1902–1935) first story, “A Martian Odyssey“, was published to great acclaim in July 1934, but he died from lung cancer less than a year and a half later.

Weinbaum was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, first as a chemical engineering major but later switching to English. On a bet, Weinbaum took an exam for a friend, and was later discovered; he left the university in 1923 and did not graduate.

The Worlds of IF has 5 illustrations.