Margaret St. ClairRezensionen

Margaret St. Clair wrote some odd stories, but I a pretty sure this is the oddest. Many characters living multiple chunks of different persons lives in what is probably, but not necessarily, a post-holocaust California. This situation may be caused by take-over by our android robot overlords, or over-use of Native American hallucinogens, or a police state seeking to push the population back to some sort of control after the breakdown of society.

La Tierra constituía un horrendo y fantástico lugar tras las espantosas epidemias sufridas. Los pocos seres humanos que sobrevivieron a ellas eran incapaces de soportar la presencia de unos a otros, viviendo en cavernas excavadas en las entrañas de la Tierra, donde las bombas atómicas eran incapaces para llevar su destrucción. Pero en un hombre en especial residía la esperanza del mundo, aunque él lo desconocía. San Sewell solo sabía que debía continuar su camino a pesar de los temibles peligros derivados de la oscuridad del pasado y ser rescatado por la sabiduría antiquísima de una misteriosa mujer, dotada de poderes mágicos, Despoina.

An early distopian novel in which a man attempts to escape a society resembling ancient Crete, with a very graphic minotaur in charge. The Minotaur is a quasi government entity the FBY, who are intent on killing Sam, our hero who, like everyone else, lives in a labyrinth of underground apartments, with rigorously controlled entrances and exits. Like Logan, Sam escapes with a cool chick to confront an unknown future.½

As Amazon describes it : Twenty short stories from the trailblazing sci-fi writer Margaret St. Clair.

This is a 2021 collection. There is an earlier hard to find 1985 book with the same title with mostly different stories. Twenty short stories that are examples of good quirky 1950's science fiction. The little bits of St. Clair's writing I have run across in anthologies in recent years made me interested, so I was happy to see this new collection. She mostly wrote short fiction although there were also some novels by her, notably The Dolphins of Altair which I remember seeing when I was young. The vast majority of her fiction appeared between 1946 and 1962. We have 20 stories here and they are:

1. New Ritual, first published in The magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1953 under pen name Idris Seabright

2. Starobin, first published in Future Science Fiction #34, Fall 1957. You can see and read it here: https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/sffaudio-usa/mp3s/StarobinByMargaretSt.Clair...

3. Flowering Evil, first published in Planet Stories, Summer 1950. where is Planet Stories when you need it - well, here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64745/64745-h/64745-h.htm

4. Thirsty God, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1953 under pen name Idris Seabright

5. The Death of Each Day, , first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1958 under pen name Idris Seabright

6. The Anaheim Disease, first published in Science Fictions Stories January 1959

7. Roberta, first published in Galaxy magazine, October 1962

8. Stawdust, first published in The magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1956 under pen name Idris Seabright

9. The Heirophants, First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1949

10. Prott, first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1953

11. The Man Who Sold Rope to Gnoles, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1951 and later appeared in a large number of anthologies.

12. Fort Iron, first appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1955

13. The Nuse Man, first appeared in Galaxy magazine, February 1960
and a follow-up story
14. The Airy Servitor, first appeared in Galaxy magazine, April 1960

15. The House in Bel Aire, first appeared in If, January 1961

16. Birthright, first published in Fantastic Universe, April 1958

17. The Death Wish, first published in Fantastic universe, June 1956

18. The Gardener, first appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949

19. Personal Monster, first published in The magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1955 under pen name Idris Seabright

20. The Everlasting Food, first appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1950

These are stories that you can feel the 1950's in them. You get in a rocket and zoom across the galaxy. Men from the future with super gadgets. They tell you a story. They have little twists. They are entertainments. Some of the stories such as 'Thirsty God' are just plain weird and I can't help but wonder what possessed the author to write it. Then, we get a poignant anti-war story like 'The Death of Each Day.' Then, 'The Anaheim Disease' a sort of alternate history woo-woo set during the 1918-1919 flu epidemic. These are mostly science fiction, with bits of fantasy, horror and whimsy. 'The Man who sold rope to Gnoles' contains all of those things.

St. Clair is different than most 50's authors, I'll say that. Some of these stories are appearing in this collection for the first time since their initial magazine appearance. There are a few too many twisted and oddball stories for my taste and so I can't say that I really liked this collection as a whole, but I can appreciate it. There are several excellent stories in here however.

Okay, I admit it: I bought this because of the cover art. It was at the Eastercon, and it was like a quid. And I knew I could review it for SF Mistressworks (when I resurrect the blog, that is). I’d previously read a collection by St Clair, and some of her other stories in various women-only anthologies, but I think this was by first novel by her… And it wasn’t at all what I expected. In fact, it read more like Doris Piserchia than the St Clair I’d expected. The story is set after a plague – world-wide possibly, US-wide certainly; it’s hard to tell with US sf novels – in a California which has returned to a tribal agrarian culture. Sort of. The protagonist, Sam McGregor, is a bit of a rebel and doesn’t understand why the young men of the tribe must always dance under the instruction of the android Dancer. So he’s sent on a Grail Quest, which means driving down the coast in search of some sort of epiphany. Instead, he begins to relive the lives of people from earlier times, including a dead young woman being autopsied, and the inventor of the androids. To be honest, not a single bit of this novel made the slightest fucking sense. McGregor meets up with the daughter of the android inventor, who also appears to have something to do with “bone melt”, the disease which basically depopulated California, or the US, or the world. St Clair seems to have no clear idea of her story or what she wants to say. The result is a novel that doesn’t read so much as if St Clair made it up as she went along but more like a novel she couldn’t be bothered to turn into sense. It was her last.

...The character in the story does not follow the pattern of the classic, lone astronaut faced with a challenge in space. Competence and ingenuity do not save the day at the end of the day. The main character slides deeper into obsession until he digs himself a hole he can't get out of. Alone, cut off from help, in the deeps of space, is not a good place to be when you bit off more than you can chew. I liked this story a lot. I think St. Clair might have been more popular if she had been writing today.

Full Random Comments review.

Nothing by her is in CLAN, but consider buying anything by her.

contents:
Introduction
Idris' Pig [“The Sacred Martian Pig�]
The Gardener
Child of Void
Hathor's Pets
The Pillows
The Listening Child
Brightness Falls from the Air
The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles [as by Idris Seabright]
The Causes [as by Idris Seabright]
An Egg a Month from All Over [as by Idris Seabright]
Prott
New Ritual [as by Idris Seabright]
Brenda
Short in the Chest [as by Idris Seabright]
Horrer Howce
The Wines of Earth [as by Idris Seabright]
The Invested Libido
The Nuse Man
An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas
Wryneck, Draw Me

I picked this up after reading an anthology which included the story
"Brightness Falls From the Air." Its masterful portrayal of a
beautiful person of a race doomed by the cruel amusements of another,
and the one man who tries to save her, brought me to tears. And made
me wonder why on earth I had never heard of the author before. St.
Clair wrote most of the stories included here in the 40s and 50s (with
a few later ones included as well). "Brightness Falls From the Air" is
still my favorite, but all of these stories were good. Writers like
this really show that there was no excuse at all for some of the awful
sci-fi that was churned out in the so-called "Golden Age." These
stories are not only great sci-fi, but great literature: well-crafted,
insightful, and cuttingly dark.
Time to look up more of her writing...

This book has a compressed elegance sadly absent from the current overstuffed fiction scene: it does the job, and then stops. It does not tell you what it us going to tell you, tell it to you, and then tell you more than once what you've been told, on and on, for three or ten or more volumes. I should point out one very obvious point that is never mentioned in the critical literature I have seen: the story tracks that of Dante's Inferno, something that becomes clear enough by the time the hero reaches Level I, and is emphasized with a final resolving chord in the last sentences of the book.½

These 5 short stories and short novel from Margaret St. Clair, range in time from 1949 to 1964, and vary wildly in quality, type and tone. Even the short novel, Message from the Eocene, begins as an SF story about an alien attempting to deliver a book from the stars to a city while beset by lightning bolts hurled by another alien race, on an Earth before life began. From there, without leaving the main character, it becomes a haunted house story in the 1800s, then another haunting in the 1960s, and I won't spoil how it ends, except to say that everything seems to be made up as St. Clair goes along, the ending most of all. The writing style of the opening and final episodes seem straight from 1930s American SF, while the middle episodes read more in line with the late 1950s. Two stars at best for Message as a curio.

The five stories in Three Worlds of Futurity (Venus, Mars, and Earth) are more interesting. In chronological order. I can't decide if Idris' Pig (originally The Sacred Martian Pig in Startling Stories) was meant to be a spoof or a screwball comedy. The setting is pure Brackett planetary romance, but the plot is pure Bringing Up Baby, as the hapless hero, duped into delivering a stinky miniature living Martian pig, is dragged along for quite a ride by a lively but mysterious woman. Idris by the way was a pen name of St. Clair's. The Everlasting Food is from 1950 (Thrilling Wonder Stories) but reads like 1930. It is set on Venus, and is about a man whose Senhedin wife loses her race's special self-defining Seeing and what happens next. Like Message, it's fantasy, in the guise of SF. The Island of the Hands from 1952 is a "what happens if you can make you wish come true" story from Weird Tales. With the next story, The Rages (Rations of Tantalus in Fantastic Universe) from 1954 is dramatically different and more modern. The SF idea is standard: a future where almost everyone depends on pills to manage everything, including "the cycle," but most critically, euphoria pills to manage episodes of rage that eventually destroy one's personality. Not surprisingly the hero begins to learn that perhaps the pills are making things worse. What's really surprising is how explicit the discussion of sexual urges and repression are in this story. In the earlier stories, following pulp formula and, apparently St. Clair's own personal interests, nudity is prominent but sex pretty absent. In The Rages, the very first paragraph lays the foundation for the study of perfect appearance versus sweaty sex. The hero rising in the morning considers his wife in bed, with whom he has not had intercourse in years: "Love is beautiful, wholesome, lovely, a wonderful experience. So they both thought. But somehow... And then, love might have rumpled the bed." Finally, Roberta (1962) is a typical Galaxy short story, in the vein of Bester's Fondly Fahrenheit. Three stars for this collection, for the last two stories primarily.½

Interesting concept for phantasy, involving Minoan antiquities. Don't forget that this book appeared shortly after Mary Renault's two big hits in this subject-area. Unfortunately, Ms St. Clair neither developed the concept philosophically nor -- unlike the more spirited Ms Renault -- told a very compellking tale½

Don't know why I've been obsessed with this book, but I've read it probably 20 or 30 times. I enjoy the beginning of the book where the protagonist continues to descend into the various levels of this dystopian world. without wanting to spoil the book for those who haven't read it, I can hint that after the hero returns from level "H" or level "I" the book does begin to lose steam, but that's only after I read it about 10 times. The concepts the author puts forward in 1963 are strangely familiar today, and her book in some ways resembles, in structure, today's fantasy video games with their many levels and history/sci fiction mingling with the paranormal. Highly recommend.

Women are writing science-fiction!
Original!Brilliant!!Dazzling!!!
Women are closer to the primitive than men. They are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They posses a buried memory of humankind's obscure and ancient past which can emerge to uniquely color and flavor a novel.

Such a woman is Margaret St. Clair, author of this novel. Such a novel is this, SIGN OF THE LABRYS, the story of a doomed world of the future, saved by recourse to ageless, immemorial rites...
Fresh!Imaginative!!Inventive!!!

I mean, really. It wasn't even as if women sf writers where that uncommon when Sign of the Labrys was published: Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore, Katherine MacLean, Zenna Henderson, Judith Merril and Andre Norton, to name just a few all wrote before 1963. Margaret St. Clair herself had debuted in 1946 and written quite a few short stories, as well as several novels before Sign of the Labrys. Still, the blurb did what it was supposed to do: got me to buy this novel and read it.

More at http://cloggie.org/books/sign-of-the-labrys.html½

Written in the '60s, this predictably eco-conscious bit of SF holds up fairly well against the years. Dolphins, telepathy and technology are rendered artistically without requiring a gigantic suspension of disbelief. The ancestral backstory of humans and dolphins is - if not the most original idea in print - related engagingly. The book had little trouble holding my interest through to the end.

The novel's downsides, however, are some rather abrupt scene changes which jar you from the event and time-flow, and a lack of insight into the emotional lives of the humans. While the main character's bonding with the dolphins was vivid, there is little in the way of emotional consequences or guilt for being responsible for some drastic and horrific catastrophes. There is rather a lot of moral wrangling before deciding to embark upon actions that will cause deaths to millions of people - but little contrition afterwards, at least on the part of Sven and Madelaine. Doctor Lawrence is another matter, but due to the viewpoint from which the book is narrated, we don't see any of it.

Points lost on that end, but still a worthy read for fans of the genre.