Margaret St. Clair (1911–1995)

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more hero reaches Level I, and is emphasized with a final resolving chord in the last sentences of the book. show less

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.

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 show more 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... show less