A major mea culpa needs to proceed this review. I read The Hole in the Moon and Other Stories genuine years ago and somehow my thoughts never moved from my head onto the (web)page. For that I apologise. This mess-up, however, did give me the perfect excuse to once again luxuriate in St. Clair's writing, however. Thanks to Dover Publications and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This edition of Margaret St. Clair's stories hopes to return her to her rightful place in the pantheon of SciFi authors, or so the introduction by Ramsey Campbell argues. While I often tend to save the introductions for last, not wanting to be spoiled for the stories themselves, I took my time with it this time. Campbell discusses the way in which St. Clair's writing got dismissed during her own time as "cozy" horror or SciFi, not comparable to the "grand masters" like Asimov etc. Campbell, however, argues for the complexity of St. Clair's work and I think the variety of stories collected here does attest to that. We get Science Fiction elements, Fantasy themes, Horror scenes, Ecocritical arguments, and much, much more. Alongside that there is an almost irrepressible humour in most of these stories which means I snorted out loud on the bus at least once.

'Rocket to Limbo', the first story, is a perfect example of that, as it discusses a married couple who might just be willing to use space travel to solve their marital issues. One of my favourite stories is 'The Hierophants', in which a junk salvage mission on a remote asteroid turns into a Lovecraftian but beautifully lyrical religious experience with a tragic end. I genuinely sat with the resolution for a bit, wondering how I'd feel and what I'd do, utterly captivated by St. Clair's descriptions. 'The Gardener' is another favourite, from its anti-cop start to its ecocritical message. Also some solid horror material in this one. 'Hathor's Pets' had me laughing even though I don't know if that's the intend. Imagine a man, his mother, and his sister and her husband trapped in some alternate dimension with enormous, maybe divine, mystical beings, desperate to return home. Thinking they're seen as pets they figure that misbehaving will see them "rehoused" back home. The ending really came out of nowhere. Si many others, like 'The Causes' and 'The Island of the Hands', are brilliant and their imagery will stay with me for a while. The final story in the collection, 'The Sorrows of Witches', is the most Fantasy-influenced of all the tales, and tells of the tragic love life of a necromantic queen.

In her memoir, as Campbell tells us, St. Clair said she wanted to write about people in the future who were just as clueless about their technology as we are now. And when I read that I was immediately on board. I could technically tell you what a phone does, i.e. what its uses are, but if you'd ask me how it works, how the wifi moves (?) between routers and phones, or even something like how the electricity gets into the wall for the socket to work, I'd be kinda lost. I doubt people in the future will fully understand their bionic organs or limbs, just like I don't really know what's in a paracetamol but trust it to work. So throughout St. Clair's stories we get characters who simply live in their world(s) but do not necessarily have an overarching view of how everything works or why certain things might be weird, like in 'Rocket to Limbo'. What elevates this for me is the writing, which is consistently strong and surprising. There is an ease to the prose which belies the difficulty of writing that way. It's hard to make complex things simple, as I keep experiencing in my own writing. On top of that, the imagery and pathos in each story is stunning. As I wrote above, I first read these stories years ago, and when I reread them now I had the vaguest of memories of them. I had small glimpses of moments that had stuck with me all this time, and rediscovering how they connected was a great experience. I'm definitely on the look out for more of Margaret St. Clair's writing!

The Hole in the Moon and Other Stories is a delightful collection of tales that range from Science Fiction to Fantasy to Horror to Thriller. Margaret St. Clair's writing is accessible and beautiful, always good for a laugh, and often sneakily terrifying. I'd wholeheartedly recommend this collection!

Like many SF writers from previous generations, Margaret St. Clair is overlooked. Even all-consuming critics like John Clute miss out on St. Clair’s true strengths (see his commentary at SFE [http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/st_clair_margaret]) although he astutely points out her “work was at times daringly subversive of some of the central impulses of Genre SF.”

In the past, I’ve taken a look at a classic story or two of Margaret St. Clair’s and hope to do so in the future. She is a writer of economy, rarely overwriting—often writing her best work at the short-short or short-story length, a length that is sadly underestimated in the field, baring just enough ice to suggest the berg below. Reading The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales, one realizes that she can cram in that finite space a fine imagination to boot. She may take the germ of an idea for a lesser story and then takes it into several new directions, sometimes implying world’s from mere suggestions. If that doesn’t impress you, her endings tend to stick although the complexity and ambiguities sometimes tangle with too much to wrestle. Occasionally, she could have used a good editor to hash out the ideas.

Not too too long after St. Clair started published, James Blish initiated his critical article series as William Atheling (see The Issue in Hand). He said that the market was flooded with thirty magazines, publishing a lot of stories without “technique.” This was what he aimed to correct in his series. On the other hand, this created a fine training ground for many writers to grow up in. Undoubtedly, bad writers forever wrote badly, but some improved over time.

St. Clair, in her introduction to her Best of collection—a very humble if too brief recollection of a rough home life highlighted only by two kind uncles (if only she’d shared more so we could compare and contrast her life with her story “The Little Red Owl”)—wrote that the market did not support “humor and characterization,” which may go some length in explaining story defects. But her writing did “mature” through this magazine system.

Her first two stories demonstrate the training-wheels program: “Rocket to Limbo” and “Piety.” The first anticipates the tradition of Galaxy magazine (see also radio programs like X-Minus-One and the popular TV show The Twilight Zone)—projecting the present into the near future in a fun, semi-realistic manner—a now uncommon trend. “Rocket to Limbo” unintentionally photographs its time period more than future, which is most of the story’s pleasure. A woman gets an ad—for her eyes only—that she can get rid of her husband if she follows her instructions. The story begs for a sequel. In fact, despite the ending suggesting something final, it is only starting to get interesting. Observe how the characters behave toward one another. Their response is not the expected one. There’s something intriguing going on between them that is worth investigating in a second tale (plus, we’d learn about this new place). If only I’d been her editor...

“Piety” has a wonderful ending which you may or may not guess, but it goes on too long (despite its brevity) with “human” talking heads who try to pry the secret of immortality out of an alien. You may well guess both endings, which are somewhat satisfying, quelled by a less than stellar technique.

The second pair of stories show promise. “The Gardener” [reprinted by August Derleth and Michael Parry] feels modern. If I supply the initial scenario, you’ll guess the outcome: A gardener chops down one of fifty rare and ancient trees. No one knows why there have always been just fifty. Still, the ending is killer.

“Child of Void” [reprinted by Groff Conklin and Isaac Asimov] has a strong child-like voice about a single-parent family that moves to an area where the laws of physics don’t apply, and the boys find a talking egg. You cannot guess this ending, which explains the problem to a degree. As the story has a too-rich complexity that doesn’t gel, so the ending cannot resonate. It’s interesting, nonetheless, and demonstrates St. Clair’s fertile imagination. Both stories were collected in St. Clair’s Best of.

Some readers may like “Hathor’s Pets” [reprinted by Groff Conklin] because the premise is well set up: In a society where women have lost ground societally, a husband and wife have been transported elsewhere (another dimension?). They see themselves as pets, so they come up with plans that will allow them to return to their home. However, the alien treats them as unruly pets.... But it’s hard to distinguish any of the characters. The intriguing set-up resonates with the ending only thematically since one idea does not flow naturally from the other. “Good” politics may not equate to “good” stories, but it’s interesting, nonetheless.


[This is part one of a three-part review. Part two will appear here and part three here.]

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[This is part two of a review begun here. Part three will appear here.]

“The World of Arlesia” [first appearing in F&SF] is another too-complex story that requires rereading to get what has actually happened. (I do love complex stories, but they require more set up.) A couple attend a double-header [Didn’t they called them double features? Perhaps she means to highlight the sports-like nature of what they are attending] “movie” [anticipating virtual reality?] where they go to an underwater world. However, the wife witnesses an entirely different world.

One example of writing infelicity [the guide is trying to con our narrator into becoming one of many recumbent women, although what is happening to the women is never clear—perhaps something Matrix-like]:

“I won’t,” I said. “You’re trying to do something to me, something to my mind. I won’t go in there.”

“Ah, well,” she said. She dropped my wrist and was silent.

So we have a vague menace [“something”] that is easily dispatched. The next time a mad scientist has a vague evil plan or a cut-throat thief tries to steal something he’s not sure about, just say, “I won’t let you” and that will take care of everything. Despite this, it’s still worth a gander.

“The Little Red Owl” first appeared in Weird Tales and was reprinted by Peter Haining. Uncle Charles tells frightening stories to his nephew and niece—a story where the little red owl, their hero, dies. The children, aghast, deny this has happened. The uncle is forbid from telling new stories, but he plans revenge, having professionally made a sweet coloring book that tells the same story.

It is a little spooky, adding a necessary change in point of view that some will take issue with, which also takes the key dramatic moment off-stage. It would probably work best on the screen—an anthology of horror stories like Cat’s Eye or Tales from the Crypt—the trick being to make an owl look both sweet, heroic, and terrifying.

A rather moving and ambiguous piece, “The Hole in the Moon” [first appeared in F&SF—printed and reprinted by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas], is simple yet ambitious. Men have been destroyed by a disease that sits dormant in women, but kills men although one can tell a woman who is diseased by her pitted skin. A machine or robot woman arrives (at least, she suggests this in her description of her “sisters”) and she can only be made real if this man loves her. He is conflicted by wanting to love her and drive her away, threatening violence. She leaves. A narrative gap allows a few different events to have happened—intriguing possibilities. And his decision may lead to a few different consequences—none of which exclude his final, moving decision. The editor, Ramsay Campbell, points out the ambiguity that the protagonist could be insane, but that’s not the most interesting of possibilities. The minor flaw in this tale is that his loneliness and desire should have been set up immediately—not to mention nigh magical nature of her construction (via his desire—see this discussion of genre romance). Still, it’s surprising that this tale has not been reprinted more often.

In yet another genre bar story, “The Causes” [first appeared in F&SF, also appears in Greenberg’s edition of her Best-of, and reprinted Darrell Schweitzer, George H. Scithers (an SF bar anthology) and Robert P. Mills] has one character after another describe why the world seems apocalyptic to the “main” character, George—going through Greek, Christian, and other causes. The ending saves the story, but if you aren’t a fan of world apocalypses, it’s skippable. Maybe read the first tale and skip to the ending to get the gist. However, Robert P. Mills seems to beg to differ in the tale’s quality by collecting it in a ten-year retrospective for F&SF. Introducing the tale, he wrote, “No collection of fantasy and science fiction can be considered representative if it fails to include a superior example of the bar-fantasy.” In other words, the above editors all included it because it was a bar story. It is a decent example, but what about superior examples of the Rana pipiens fantasy?

From the pages of Weird Tales, “The Island of the Hands” has an intriguing premise about seeking his wife’s lost ship. His plane goes down at her last coordinates and he wakes from unconsciousness. The island was invented to recreate things lost, so they find people dancing with simulated partners, simulated babies, simulated gems—none of which have much reality. He goes down to the mists to create the wife he lost.... The tale is stirring up until he wanders the mist, and it seems to lose itself there, wandering too long, which seems an unusual lapse for St. Clair. The tale finds itself—or a version of itself—but it becomes something else, ambiguous in a bad sense. Campbell, in the introduction, latches on to secondary characters for what the tale is up to. I also suspect that the true protagonist is not the main character but not the one he selected. If true, it’s a more interesting, ambitious and ambiguous in a good sense although that would mean that island doesn’t have the rules it was said to have (even in a straight reading, where the main character is the protagonist, the island breaks the rule of what it said about the mist).


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[This is part three of a review begun here and continued here.]

“The Continued Story” is rambling, rollicking conspiracy story. A man turns himself in to the police to get locked up, to escape from his alien hunter. The cop won’t do it, at first, because he doesn’t believe the man stole assembly kits from a toy store that disappears the next day—not to mention kits that create hallucinatory episodes like a Lunar Experience, a diamond mask, and so on. The story switches points of view and the alien pursuer’s target, but it doesn’t explain why this should be since the hunter was supposedly interested in the stealer of kits.

“Brenda” [Weird Tales, also appears in Greenberg’s edition of her Best-of and is reprinted by Groff Conklin, Eric Protter, Roger Elwood, Vic Ghidalia, Carol Serling, Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, and Robert Weinberg] is a classic. Like “The Hole in the Moon” it hasn’t been reprinted enough, despite half a dozen appearances. Brenda is a well-behaved, good little girl that none of the kids seems to like. One day she’s pursued by a gray man, stinking of rot. Through a bit of cleverness, she captures the man. But when no one else is interested in seeing her find, she lets him loose. She strangely identifies with (loves?) the creature and the ending is creepy and open-ended.

“Stawdust” starts at a crisis moment—a man and a woman face off on a ship, surrounded by dummies, kidskin stuffed with sawdust of what used to be passengers, with both remaining suspects claiming to be innocent—and then reverses to the beginning when it all started. You’d think you were in a contemporary fantasy mystery, but no. We learn that the ship is a starship (leaping history and genres), and that soon enough the culprit was always known. The initial drama was false. When I was learning the field, I was told never to mix SF and magic, and it seems that St. Clair loves to do this. The title is both a clever and awful pun. The ending does turn the story into a minor irony although a more emotionally powerful ending should have been available.

“The Invested Libido” and “The Autumn After Next” are two slightly humorous and thoroughly competent tales. The first immediately constructs a strange world and the man who chose to use Martian psycho-pharmaceuticals to cure his ills only to find it changing him. Literally. To a squid. He sneaks into an aquarium only to get caught. Under psychiatric supervision, he conforms to other shapes. [This story makes one wonder if it has a meta-fictional purpose of explaining why St. Clair switches point of view so often.]

The next tale tells of a wizard who tries to get a village to do spells properly, but they are lazy and don’t listen. Trying should be their reward, the villagers think. Finally, he comes up with a plan that will get them to do spells right, but the best laid plans.... This is fun and well told, but not among her more ambitious works. It’s available to read for free here.

The final story, “The Sorrows of Witches,” tells of a witch queen who loses her lover and tries to revive him through necromancy. Because she needs an heir, she needs a living lover who will become a stumbling block between herself and her lover. Over time, her writing style seemed to improve with solid entertainments although her scope, imagination and ambitions shrank.

How does St. Clair compare to her contemporaries? Was she short-changed? She was better than Isaac Asimov when it comes to technique, but Asimov had a soaring, large-scale, methodical imagination that benefitted most from accumulated effects (his robot stories and the early Foundation books). Both writers suffered from talking heads.

I dipped into C. M. Kornbluth to prepare for this and for future examinations (namely Mark Rich’s biography, C. M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary). One story of Kornbluth’s troubles me, but he has a strong, immediate evocation of main character and place (even in his worst, early stories)—his non-Earth societies are rich, lived-in. The one story where she rivals Kornbluth in this is “The Invested Libido”. Where St. Clair outdoes Kornbluth is her better ability to stick the endings and her rare use of dialogue tags and adverbs (“Stop using tags and adverbs to describe your dialogue!” the reader growled at Kornbluth menacingly).

Ray Bradbury, whom Campbell compared St. Clair to, was a better writer in nearly every regard except Bradbury’s later work, which seemed less significant although sometimes he stitched together slight stories to greater effects.

How does she compare? She numbers among the era’s better writers, especially if you like that era’s spare writing style—but only a handful of tales here showcase her talents to their best effects.

Since St. Clair passed in 1995 and her work can no longer be edited with her approval without use of a time machine, what she needs is a Selected Stories, St. Clair Reader or Best collection to highlight her work to best effect. Martin Greenberg edited one, but it’s probably time for another. Three here deserve readers and inclusion: “The Gardener”, “The Hole in the Moon” and “Brenda”. A few cases could be made for the importance of others in this collection.

This collection inspired me to read and reread St. Clair. To follow my progress, look here to see the results of my search to hunt down some of her best work.

I was introduced to the work of Margaret St. Clair decades ago through her novels, The Dolphins of Altair and The Dancers of Noyo. I still have those old Ace editions. Now Dover has gathered together her short fiction, which belongs on every SF collector’s shelf. The stories show the scope (and weirdness) of her imagination. Her stories are often uneasy, dark and Twilight-Zone-ish, but always fiercely intelligent. She trusts her readers to perceive what is going on without explaining or spoon-feeding.

In researching her biography, I learned a couple of fascinating things about St. Clair – that she was a lifelong supporter of American Friends Service Committee, and that she lived at Friends House in Santa Rosa in the last years of her life. So it did not surprise me to learn she was indeed a birthright Friend (Quaker), although she became interested in Wicca later in life after researching a novel. She wrote:

“Those who have lived through the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Coventry, Dresden, may be excused for forgetting that love, kindness, compassion, nobility, exist. Yet in man’s animal nature lie not only the roots of his cruelty, viciousness, sadism, but also of his perfectly real goodness and nobility. The potential is always there.”
-- Quoted in Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction, by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson

The first couple of stories were fine, in a sort of minor episode of The Twilight Zone way, but not the sort of thing which explained why St Clair should be in need of reintroduction. Should I have been warned by that Ramsey Campbell introduction? I've never entirely got him either. But then I realised the collection was in chronological order, which has an obvious sense and neatness to it, but will often mean frontloading the apprentice efforts. And the third piece, starting in much the same mode, sunk into a whole other level, seductive and ornate, as alluring visions transfix the unwary human visitors to an asteroid – a little Clark Ashton Smith, but perhaps even more in thrall to the Decadents. After that comes 'The Gardener', which recalls a particular major episode of The Twilight Zone, given extra moral force by a dash of MR James and a lot of head-shaking at the follies of colonialism. True, the ending would have been more chilling for being more implicit, but it's haunting all the same. Another tale anticipates several of Philip K Dick's hits, years before he was doing that kind of stuff himself; the title story has a proto-Tiptree gender savagery; Stawdust recalls Jerome Bixby's It's A Good Life, but with the perspective flipped to make for a whole different flavour of chilling. The last and latest stories from a long life are outright fantasy, one in a vaguely Larry Niven vein, the other suggesting Smith again, but from a very different angle. By the end, I was in no doubt that St Clair was a significant talent. Just maybe don't start with those first two stories.

(Netgalley ARC)

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book, in exchange for a fair and honest review.

While I read some of Ms. St. Clair's work back in the 70s, this short story collection really showcased her talent at writing science fiction/horror. Her work is subtle, not in your face - the horror in some of the stories creeps up on you, leaving an unsettled feeling. Like any collection, some stories stand out more than others, but there's not one in this book that isn't worth reading.

I was particularly taken by "The Gardener" - its ecological theme is perhaps even more relevant today than when it was written. "The Island of the Hands" was also particularly striking, with its theme of "what happens when you get what you wish for." "Rocket to Limbo" is a fun little reversal of "The Gift of the Magi" - you can see what's coming, but it's fun to watch it play out.

One of the things that struck me about these stories is how they rarely feel dated - there is one, "Hathor's Pets," written in 1950, in which women in the 80s were put back into subordinate positions, but it's easy enough to mentally fit this into context. For the most part, there's nothing about these stories, except minor physical details, that makes you think "how aged and quaint" - I enjoyed them very much on their own merits.

Good stories, by an awfully good writer, who has been somewhat overlooked. I'm glad this anthology of her stories has been published, so her stories can be rediscovered.

I've always enjoyed Dover Books and their low-cost reprints of interesting by hard-to-find titles from the past. This falls right into that category, being a collection of science fiction stories by a lesser-known (today, anyway) author. Good selection and a couple titles near the end are her newer material as a bonus.

One of the better short story collections. Great mix of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. I've actually read one of them in another collection. It's not often that you read a book of short stories and not get bored with a few. Magic Margaret was ahead of her time and a wonderful author.

Thank you Netgalley for the Arc

This is an excellent set of stories. It seems like a "best of" collection even though it's not described that way. Highly recommended for sci-fi fans.

I really appreciate the copy for review!!

I hadn't heard of the author before this book but I love short stories so I wanted to give it a try and I'm glad I did. Some stories I really liked, some were just ok, but overall I enjoyed the book. (Although, I'm not going to lie, I only skimmed the intro because I just wanted to get to the stories.) I also felt like some of these would have been perfect for a graphic novel.

I would like to thank the publisher for allowing me to read a copy of this book for an honest review through Netgalley.

I love these stories of the fantastic by Margaret St. Clair and wish they'd been more widely available sooner. Her writing is sharp and concise, and her stories are excellent forays into SFF, including the more human elements of the genre. The collection is marred only by a terrible and stiff introduction by Ramsey Campbell, who seems intent on telling readers that "male writers did it first" in regard to everything St. Clair wrote. So skip the intro and jump right into the stories.

This is my first experience reading Margaret St. Clair. As a follower of science fiction, I was glad I had the chance to check this book out. The stories are relatively short and many have appeared in publications I know.

St. Clair sets about to build worlds in short written spaces, and she does so with detail and interest. I’m recommending this collection to others that enjoy science fiction and fantasy, and I’m going to read this a second time.