It was Weinbaum's second published story (in 1933 he had sold a romantic novel, The Lady Dances, to King Features Syndicate under the pseudonym Marge Stanley[1]), and remains his best known.

Upon reaching Xanthus, a desert region outside the Mare Cimmerium, Jarvis and Tweel find a line of small pyramids tens of thousands of years old made of silica bricks, each open at the top.

As the two approach a canal cutting across Xanthus, Jarvis is feeling homesick for New York City, thinking about Fancy Long, a woman he knows from the cast of the Yerba Mate Hour show.

As Jarvis and Tweel approach a city on the canal bank, they are passed by a barrel-like creature with four legs, four arms, and a circle of eyes around its waist.

There they find the cart creatures depositing their loads beneath a wheel that grinds the stones and plants into dust.

When Jarvis approaches it, he feels a tingling in his hands and face, and a wart on his left thumb dries up and falls off.

Isaac Asimov states that Weinbaum's "easy style and his realistic description of extraterrestrial scenes and life-forms were better than anything yet seen, and the science fiction reading public went mad over him.

In 2002, the Peter Crowther-edited anthology Mars Probes included "A Martian Theodicy" by Paul Di Filippo, a "thoroughly disrespectful" sequel.

[7] In 2004, Strange Horizons stated that the story has "dated badly", with a "thin" plot, but that it is "partly redeemed by sheer invention.

"[9] In a 2022 article in The New York Review of Science Fiction, historian Eric Leif Davin addressed persistent rumors that publisher Hugo Gernsback never paid Weinbaum for "A Martian Odyssey".

Moscowitz determined that although Gernsback initially delayed payment, Weinbaum was eventually paid in full for all his works appearing in Wonder Stories, including "A Martian Odyssey".

[10] "A Martian Odyssey" appears in the following Stanley G. Weinbaum collections: "A Martian Odyssey" appears as a 26-page comic book adaptation by Ben Avery and George Sellas in the anthology "Science Fiction Classics: Graphic Classics Volume Seventeen" published in 2009 (omitting the pyramid-building creatures).