#166 Four futures: The Ace Double novels of Margaret St. Clair (1956 - 1964)

This is an exploration of four short novels by a neglected female writer of SF who sought to subvert the genre from within.

One happy development in recent years is the growing awareness of the contribution of women writers to the development of classic science fiction. Today, writers like Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore, and Andre Norton are fairly well known in genre circles. Readers and explorers of past decades continue to rediscover women writers, and to- hopefully - bring their work to greater prominence. Today's focus is on one such writer - Margaret St. Clair.

The Ace Doubles line was a long-running and now highly collectible fixture of western, crime, and SF publishing from 1952 to 1978. Published in the unusual dos-a-dos format, they bound together two novels, generally by two different authors. Of the eight novels that St. Clair published, half saw print in this special format - one of them joined with an early book by Philip K. Dick.

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Transcript

In 1947, the Writer’s Digest published an article whose writer mused, "why is science fiction fun to write? At first blush, it doesn't seem attractive, particularly for a woman." That woman was Margaret St. Clair (1911 - 1995). At that time, St. Clair was just starting out in SF; her first story “Rocket to Limbo” had been published by Fantastic Adventures in November 1946. By the end of the ‘40s, she had published about 30 stories, and in the 1950s would add novels to her repertoire. As Rich Horton has put it, she “was one of the more noticeable early women writers of SF, but somehow her profile was a bit lower than those of C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and Andre Norton.”

The back cover blurb applied to St. Clair’s novel Sign of the Labrys (1963) is an unedifying example of the absurd way women writers of SF could be marketed at that time:

“Women are closer to the primitive than men. They are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They possess 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 [...].”

She was likely singled out for this ridiculous description in part because of her interest in Wicca, the new religious movement into which she was formally initiated together with her husband in 1966. By that time, her career was already entering its final phase; she published no further novels after 1973 and lapsed into relative obscurity.

However, St. Clair is again becoming better known as readers of classic SF continue to revisit and explore some of the genre’s pioneering women writers. While it is often St. Clair’s short fiction which wins the most praise, this particular look at her work focuses instead on four of her novels. These four were published between 1956 and 1964, all of them acquired by Donald A. Wollheim for the historic and collectible Ace Doubles line. In them, St. Clair imagines four very different futures for humankind, taking in androids, plagues, mass deception, and a message from the beginning of time.

Agent of the Unknown (1956)
Published as part of Ace Double D-150 with The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick

St. Clair’s first novel was originally published as “Vulcan’s Dolls” in the relatively short-lived Universe Science Fiction in February 1952. It explores mutation, rebellion against an oppressive government, and hidden potentials for humankind.

In the far future, Don Haig is an aimless layabout on the little-visited, man-made pleasure planetoid Fyon. He sleeps on a beach and does a little work for local business owners. His discovery of an amazingly life-like, perpetually crying doll shatters his lazy idyll. The doll has a dangerously magnetic effect on others, and connects Don to a clandestine rebel movement rising up against the faraway interplanetary government. In this way, a lowly beach bum is transformed against his will into a participant in a large-scale power game. Don is an amnesiac, and what he doesn’t remember about his childhood will prove to be critical.

Writing in the SFE, John Clute called this novel “perhaps the definitive St. Clair text”, the elements of which “generate a sense of extraordinary constriction, to which the elegiac conclusion of the tale adds a powerful emotional glow.” St. Clair’s often blinkered protagonist is far from the traditional science fiction superman. 

The Green Queen (1956)
Published as part of Ace Double D-176 with Three Thousand Years by Thomas Calvert McClary

Viridis is an inhospitable planet with an environment poisoned both by radiation and a deadly fungal disease. Enclosed within the protection of a special radiation shield, a highly stratified human colony has been developed. The idle, entitled Uppers lord over the impoverished Lowers, whose life expectancy is cut dramatically by cruel exploitation and their dependence on contaminated food. 

Bonnar is an Upper, a practitioner of “maskart” - a discipline of large-scale illusion designed to confuse and pacify the Lowers. Bonnar is inspired to develop an illusion which involves the Green Queen, a sort of messianic figure. This notion soon gets out of control. Bonnar’s ex-lover Leaf takes up the mantle of the Green Queen, stirs up rebellion, and threatens to bring down the radiation shield - and apparently to devastate the colony.

This novel was originally published in the March 1955 issue of Universe Science Fiction, under the title “Mistress of Viridis”.  For book publication, St. Clair added a prologue, epilogue, and short framing paragraphs at the beginning of each chapter. The Green Queen plunges immediately and confusingly into its dystopian scenario. St. Clair never fully explains what “maskart” is, and is similarly vague on the colony’s social structure.

What the novel does have is an increasingly intriguing climax, as Bonnar - an impressively immoral, self-interested protagonist - gets closer to revelations about Viridis, and to the true source of his inspiration for the Green Queen. Rich Horton has written that The Green Queen is “kind of a mess”, but that could have made “pretty good” by a strong re-write - this is about right.

The Games of Neith (1960)

Published as part of Ace Double D-453 with The Earth Gods Are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer

Generations ago, a religious minority fled Earth and founded a colony on the distant ocean world of Gwethym. With a population of under two million drawn from a mix of French, Norwegian, and Chinese colonists, the planet is largely self-sufficient but trades valuable silk on the interstellar trade routes. Anassa is a priestess for an unusual local religion: the people of Gwethym essentially crowd-sourced ideas for a new goddess, Neith. Not even Anassa believes in this deity, but it serves useful social functions.

After the priestess survives an assassination attempt, she sets out with her lover - the pragmatic scientist Wan - to investigate the cause of her would-be killer’s frustration. It increasingly appears that Gwethym is the site of an energy leak caused by spacewarp technology, which has torn the fabric of spacetime. Already, the entropic effect is so strong that at the leak’s epicentre, ordinary chemical reactions cannot occur. Anassa and Wan are trying to solve this problem when the impossible happens: Neith arrives, her nonexistence apparently being no obstacle.

Around the time The Games of Neith was published, St. Clair was slowing her previously rapid output of short fiction. Perhaps relatedly, her third novel is stronger than her first two - clearer, more coherent, and better paced. Constrained by an Ace Double word count, St. Clair was not able to fully explore the relationship between faith and science, nor the parallel worlds conceit. This is an effective story, however, one that brings to mind the hole in the ozone layer, not detected until 25 years later in 1985. The fusion of Earth cultures also gives the book a distinct feel.

Message from the Eocene (1964) 

Published as Ace Double M-105 with Three Worlds of Futurity

St. Clair’s fourth novel, Sign of the Labrys, was not published as an Ace Double but was instead put out conventionally by Bantam in 1963. The writer returned to the Ace Double format for a final time in 1964, and in some style. Volume M-105 is made up entirely of St. Clair’s work - her fifth novel Message from the Eocene is backed with her first short story collection Three Worlds of Futurity. This neat arrangement should surely be resurrected by an enterprising publisher today.

This is the only one of St. Clair’s Ace Double novels to be set on Earth. The Eocene was a distinct period in geological history, albeit one which was not formalised until a few years after the novel was published, in 1969. St. Clair seems to use it loosely, describing a period billions, not tens of millions, of years ago. In this primordial past, war is raging between factions of an intelligent species. One individual - called, of all things, Tharg - is entrusted with a unique book and sent to hide it.

To his shock, Tharg is hunted not by enemies of his own species but by the more powerful, alien Vaeaa who he had believed to be mythical. He is able to hide the book from them, and their attempt to extract information from him shunts him into a non-corporeal form. Tharg becomes a timeless observer, neither alive nor dead. As millions of years pass, he observes the evolution of humans, and hopes to lead them to the book and its secrets.

While St. Clair sets up an interesting structure which involves Tharg trying to communicate with humans in various time periods and locations - including, briefly, her native Kansas - Message From the Eocene ends abruptly and unsatisfyingly. 

These four novels are more interesting than they are brilliant, and perhaps more interesting when taken as a group. It is important to recall how tight and potentially constricting the Ace Double format could be - each of these novels is not much more than 40,000 words, generally the low end of the novel definition today. At times - as in The Green Queen and Message from the Eocene - it feels that St. Clair could have done more with these stories if she had a larger wordcount to play with.

At the same time, there is something in these books which - as the SFE puts it - represents a fascinating “dissent from within” [...] “the very heart of popular SF.” St. Clair’s heroes are offbeat figures without special qualifications or powers, who often have little control over or even awareness of the forces surrounding them. Her settings are also unusual - while three of these four novels are set on very different human colonies, they all subvert the human-centric triumphalism of much mid-20th century SF. 

With any luck, St. Clair will join the ranks of women writers of classic SF who are quite well known in genre circles. It may well be that her short fiction, including the portion of it credited to the name Idris Seabright, will take the larger share of new notability. However, these short and novels are also key parts of her work, and reflect a sizeable part of what made Margaret St. Clair a distinctive figure in the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s.