"Brightness Falls from the Air" by Margaret St. Clair (plus Thomas Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague")

First appeared in F&SF as a contest story, reprinted by J. Francis McComas and David Hartwell, the latter a major retrospective. I commented more succinctly, but with slightly different insight here. 

Summary:

On occasion Kerr watched the bird people fight, who left luminous trails in their wake, until he met Rhysha, face to face—her plumage glowing. She came to Kerr’s identification bureau to identify her brother, dead from a bird people fight—fights that the Earth people put on after forcing them to migrate. The bird people join the fights that used to be rituals, but now are a means to exit this life. The Earth people despise all extraterrestrials—even the beggars. Kerr befriends her and goes to speak for her people to give them a new planet to populate.

Commentary with Spoilers:

The hearing doesn’t go well. Kerr gets Rhysha to promise her people will stop fighting, but when Kerr gets sick, she fights anyway, leaving a note behind of how she had tried to get to him.

The title comes from a famous poem (one of the top one hundred most printed poems in the English language) by Thomas Nashe, called sometimes by "A Litany in Time of Plague" or by its first line "Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss" (which might be recognized as the title to D.G. Compton's Mars novel). James Tiptree, Jr. also used the title "Brightness Falls from the Air" for one of her novels. 

Thomas Nashe sounds like something of a impish troublemaker, which may help in interpreting his poem (see Nashe's Wikipedia page and the image of him in chains, which seems to have been more wishful thinking, but not for people's lack of trying).

The poem originates from the comedy "Summer's Last Will and Testament" about a plague that hits earth--not unlike our own time of Covid-19 although with more devastating results--where everyone is bound to die and nothing can avail us. It sounds rather somber; however, note that it is a litany, recited in church where a lay reader or preacher would read a passage, and the congregation would recite the chorus ("I am sick, I must die"--a pair of seemingly linked statements which would have had no actual religious significance in Nashe's day and region). That might create bleak humor if one is expecting some grander purpose or optimism from their church. Also, the chorus doesn't really show one's actions as contributing to one's destiny. It sounds like more of an apocalyptic prayer. I haven't read the play to see how it's used.

Just as Nashe's poem may read differently divorced from its source, so does St. Clair's title. In the poem, "Brightness falls from the air" is something of a non-sequitur, perhaps merely denoting sunlight (perhaps it is linked with youth which precedes it, or with royalty which follows, but these semicolons seem to suggest separate statements building up to the chorus].

St. Clair's tale is meant to be neither humorous nor, I think, resigned to death, necessarily, as a plague outside human control decimates Nashe's population. Instead, she takes her title literally, and her readers are meant to witness an injustice: the mistreatment of outsiders. 

Clair’s tale is simple, moving and worthy of her best, capturing strange, colliding cultures in a few deft strokes. Hartwell writes that her story accomplishes her goal to “develop a global consciousness” by dealing with “beauty, death, and colonialism.” The tale doesn’t make clear the connection with Kerr’s amateur singing, but perhaps it is an irony that he would try to impress the bird people with his singing although the text isn’t explicit about the bird people’s abilities in this matter.*

* Interestingly, I'd mentioned this in the first explanation. Not recalling my first analysis (lacking internet when I wrote this up), I mentioned it again, thinking it just occurred to me. 

Long Poems of Merit from the 2020 Rhysling Award Anthology

Note: The poets appear here, alphabetically as they do in the anthology. A summation follows. To read last year’s commentary, go here. To read this year's short poemdiscussion, click here.

Alexandria Baisden’s “The Scarecrow’s Lover” [Abyss & Apex] is a moving love-story/tragedy between a scarecrow and some strange plant that crawls up its pole. It is composed of sunflowers, strawberries, ivy, etc. If the poem could have explained or kept it to one, and if it had shortened itself, this would have ranked higher, possibly my favorite. Also, I’m not sure the special typographical displays added substantially, but it’s worth checking out. (See the Inverarity poem below for the same problem, which could have made it a contender as well.)

F. J. Bergmann is represented by three dark, brooding poems—all unusually described, the best being “Maculation” [Spectral Realms]—a kind of Lovecraftian starship horror with the gradual decay of the senses toward a greater horror. It opens:

What I missed most were splotches

of color and shade: irregular clouds

above and around me

Frank Coffman missed his calling in “The Scroll of Thoth” [The Coven’s Hornbook and Other

Poems]. The set up surrounding the poem is nothing short of a Borgesian wonder. The poem itself ponders and pales in comparison. Frank, if you’re out there, please (re)read Jorge Luis Borges and see if he inspires.

While the speculation didn’t sell me on Deborah L. Davitt’s “Children of the Trees” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] the structure and close suggest she is getting close, and may be a poet to keep an eye out for.

Emma J. Gibbon renders “Consumption” [Eye to the Telescope] quite viscerally and sadly. Is this verse the best form for her words? I’m less sure. Still, it’s got quite a bite.

“The Woman Who Talks to Her Dog at the Beach” by Geoff Inverarity [Geist] has some wonderful shifts in surprise. It begins with a woman who asks the dog typical questions an owner might ask, without expecting an answer. However, we are given answers, and the dog seems astute, contemplative to the point of brooding about their greater implications, which is lovely. However, there are problems. Who is relating the story? Definitely not the owner [labeled as “The Woman”] and not the dog as it starts outside the dog and goes inside the dog’s thoughts (how? god-like omniscience? the poet?) and back outside the dog (commenting on “the simple love of dogs,” which no longer seems so simple). Who is our narrator and how is he privileged to get his information? How does the dog go from simple [typical happy-go-lucky dog actions, no brooding] to deep [inside his head] to simple again [by some unnamed speaker]? This might have been a wonderful poem had the poet considered these questions and perhaps become a greater poem at having arrived at an unusual conclusion. (See the Baisden poem above for the same problem, which could have made it a contender as well.)

The best image lines from Herb Kauderer’s “Green Sky” [Influence of the Moon]:

human shellfish

invaded the moon,

skittering around

in personal metal houses

like vacuum trilobites

It treads some profound ground but would likely have been more successful at a much shorter length.

Marsheila Rockwell,’s “Stormbound” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] might have converted me to its revelations if it hadn’t felt familiar.

Cynthia So’s “If Love is Real, So Are Fairies” [Uncanny] tantalizes with a couple of nice images well phrased:

working her powdery

magic ....

a shiver

elicited by her microscopic fingers

whispering across the back of my neck.

D. A. Xiaolin Spires penned my favorite ten line last year. This year’s Rhylsing nominee, “tetrahedral edifices of a sticky rice realm” [Mithila Review]—as the title suggests—is an imaginative and evocative work, but a bit too on the nose and, paradoxically, too dream logicked:

light

shocks jangling my jade bangles

i smell the pungent odor of

temple incense and feel

a thousand eyes pressing against

my forehead...

i blink away the doubt, swallow my reservations and

proceed forth

T. D. Walker has two poems—“Eight Simulations for the Missing” and “For My Daughter, Who Will Ask for a Seismograph Implant on Her Sixteenth Birthday” [Small Waiting Objects]—and

Holly Lyn Walrath has one—“The Mining Town” [2019 SFPA Poetry Contest]—that were I an editor, I’d sit on to mull over. They are more ambitious than most, but am I or am I not sold on these? They are all told in piecemeal with strange and lovely structures. However, are any greater than the sum of their parts?

The first, “Eight Simulations for the Missing”, describes “sightings” (real or imagined—simulated or desired) of a loved one. The second is a mother addressing her daughter via earthquakes sensed on a seismograph.  “The Mining Town” seems to be an old West mining  ghost town, leading us eventually to the devil. In each narrative bit, the sections end with a question, not unlike the quiz at the end of reading to check if you were paying attention although the answers aren’t necessarily found within the texts.

Summation:

From these poems selected, there is no clear winner that stands above the rest. A number of these would have been more successful at shorter lengths. I commented on about two out of every five of the shorter poems, and one out of four of the longer. Note that I read for aesthetics first and then become curious about ratios and statistics, afterwards. Trying to put politics above art strangles both. A few poems were well written, but their speculation didn’t strike me, so I didn’t comment.

At a later date, I’ll need to reread the aforementioned three poems to determine how I felt about them. My gut instinct is to cast my primary vote for F. J. Bergmann’s “Maculation” with T. D. Walker’s “For My Daughter, Who Will Ask for a Seismograph Implant on Her Sixteenth Birthday” as runner-up, but maybe I’d reverse that later, or some other combination.

Of these long poems, my aesthetics didn’t happen to select poems from more than one magazine (two from what I suspect is T.D. Walker’s collection, which I’d be interested in reading) except Polu Texni, which I selected three of their poems before, making them seem to have been a magazine to read and appear in for speculative poetry—at least for getting noticed in the Rhysling awards.

Asimov’s, Dreams & Nightmares, F&SF, Star*Line, Strange Horizons are the usual hot beds for SF poetry, but Apparition Lit, Liminality, Polu Texni,  have all caught my eye of late in addition to a few others I will have to check out. I regularly read Rattle and Poetry, but an SF poem is a rarity. I suspect the genre’s an acquired taste, especially given the special challenges of trying to fulfill two genres at once.

The ratio of female to male in long poems is about 2:1, which is close to my selection of poems to comment on although it appears only females will get my votes for long poems this year. Before I vote though, I will reread the four poems by women (please forgive me if I messed up someone’s gender) and maybe a few other poets who are usually strong, in case I read them too quickly.

Good luck to all the poets nominated.

Top 5 Poems and Discussion of the SF Poems from the 2020 Rhysling Award Anthology

[To read the discussion of long poems, click here.]

A good speculative poem is a difficult thing to balance. Writing a good poem is hard. Writing speculative fiction is hard. Trying to do both is like scale Everest while spinning plates.

The term suggests it’s going to be a narrative. Most are, generally—in a basic sense (not in a traditional story sense). It also suggests it’s going to be speculative—that is, suggest a sense of wonder—which most also do, albeit to do something astounding in so short a space is unusual, so the good speculative poem tends to focus on the emotion. I’ve seen a few excel on their technical delivery. Sometimes, instead of speculation, science appears in lieu of speculation, usually the space variety.

The trick is often the poem part. What makes a thing a poem? Emily Dickinson said it takes her head off.* And so it does, usually on a word level, asking you to see a thing anew. Billy Collins does this mainly at the image level, which some criticize him for, but note that ninety to ninety-nine percent of what appears as SF Poetry is exactly that: working at the image level only. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as some spectacularly great works can be written at this level, but it does leave a whole world of poetry to explored: the words, recombinations, juxtapositions, references, line breaks and a grab bag of literary devices to make the reader to rethink, resee what’s out there.

*SF does this, too, except in a different way, usually larger, narrative and philosophic scales although poetry can be philosophical, too.

A good work of art also turns the reader to look back on himself (or whatever the pronoun). Who are we as individuals or as a species, etc. Compare, however, the fourth poem listed here to the first. The fourth occupies its human realm with forays into the speculative. The best one lives in the skin of SF and asks us to see our own world anew. That is what makes it not only the best short SF poem in this anthology, but probably in the field.

Can a poem simply make us laugh or feel (horror, love, anger, stun, awe)? Can it simply capture a moment or a mind? Sure. But ideally it can do more than one thing. These are the major aesthetics that should govern the judging of the arts—not politics or gender or race or religion (or the poem is propagandist whose agenda isn’t the arts but whatever propaganda it’s trying to propagate). And so, with this rubric in mind, I’ll look for the best of those.

The following magazines had short poems of some note nominated here:

Star*Line – 4

Liminality -- 3

Polu Texni – 3

Asimov’s – 2

Fireside Fiction – 2

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – 2

Rattle – 2

Spectral Lit – 2

Strange Horizons – 2

These aren’t necessarily the best publishers of SF poetry (although they might be), but happen to be the center of a Venn diagram of Rhysling voters, the magazines they read, and my aesthetics.

This year, like last, more women were nominated than men. About three to one. Is this a pattern? Are women more likely to submit and publish poems and represent the legitimate majority? Or is this selection sexist? The same thing has been happening with most awards. Since a male penned the best short poem this year, it will be interesting to watch how the tally goes.

Last year, I lumped the poems into of good candidates--fewer candidates, fewer notes. This year, the best poems out paced the main body of candidates.

The Top Five Countdown:

5.

Tim Jones’s “Encore” [Big Hair Was Everywhere] is remarkable mostly for its mix of emotions—an interesting, darkly humorous voice—but also the close snaps shut with some resonance. The line breaks are unimpressive, laid out for emphasis, and seem not particularly poetic. For example: suddenly cropped lines with only “the dead” or “Fingernails” in them. Still, solid work. Sample:

Four guys, four shots of whisky.

They like their liquor strong,

the dead.

Twin guitars, bass, drums.

Eight rotting hands

poised above the downbeat.

Good tight voice and imagery. I tried quoting just one stanza, but the poem builds and so, without some context, the lines seem not as potent. Do read the full poem.

4.

Mary McMyne captures a poignant human emotion in “The Mother Searches for Her Own Story” [Strange Horizons] although the last line seems to overstate its case. The “staying alive” is merely the psychological sense, not the literal one. The line might have had a dual sense had she made that come into play within the poem, which would have added more power and resonance. Also the speculation isn’t shaped but suggested. Nonetheless, taking her speculation into our world makes it more poignant than most of these.

2 + 3.

I won’t separate these two, but will discuss their relative merits:

“The Night the Unicorn Leapt from the Tapestry” by Kate Pentecost [Liminality] is truly magical and sweet. Nice images. The most memorable line is “velvet ropes unhitched themselves as [the Unicorn] moved among the still lifes.”

To read Lily Zhou’s “From ‘Moon Sonnet’” [Poetry], one may need to be conversant in the Chinese myth of Chang’e. Still we can see a semi-unreliable persona:

“I am terrible

at playing heroine. I’ve done all I can:...

saved the tortoise from its slow drowning.”

The tortoise is presumably not drowning although he may have after a natural death, but it sounds like his death had been hastened. The language here is suggestive and taut, which is the poem’s strength. Contrast that with Pentecost’s which might have worked as well in prose. Pentecost’s, however, has a stronger sense of wonder.

1.

Bruce Boston’s “The Ruined Library” [Asimov’s] is the best poem. Why? First, he sets up an atmosphere of decay. It pays attention to the lines and the big picture. We have a “blast // building and broke” where we get the sound matching image. Plus there are fascinating phrases like “cargo of words.” The killer, though, is the double play of his ending:

Yet the deserted library

still has many patrons.

Creatures small and pale...

tunnel through one

volume after another,

devouring one letter

at a time until they

have the last word.

Damn. That’s good. Tape this sucker on your locker or above your writing desk to inspire.

                                                                                                                            

For comments on other short poems of merit that appeared in this year’s Rhysling Award anthology, click here.

Short Poems of Merit from the 2020 Rhysling Award anthology

Note: I will discuss my top five here, and semi-loose selectioncriteria, including an overview.

Mike Allen conjures some dark, wild imagery in “The Sacrifices” [Sycorax Journal].

Two light verses that work as speculative humor are David Clink’s “Steampunk Christmas” [Star*Line] and P S Cottier’s “[Aliens declutter]” [Scifaikuest]

Good lines from Deborah L. Davitt’s “The Journey” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] (reminiscent of C. L. Moore’s famous tale, “Shambleau”):

She found him on the shore, ship-wrecked, sea-wracked—

his eyes had lost their light...

her serpentine locks twined

around him, supple, sleek, and scaled.

Lamentable repetition: “Every love’s a journey into darkness”

Good lines from Robin Wyatt Dunn’s “Disassembly at auction” [Mobius: The Journal of

Social Change]

And a hallucinatory blue smear over the left retina

Chassis intact, with some bruising of the metal...

Gonads still functional

Brain missing.

Left leg is a total loss

Right, still has...

Good finale from Amelia Gorman’s “Alternate Galatea” [Liminality]:

 the base is strong and the paper

whispers and rustles in the wind

Vince Gotera’s “All-Father” [Dreams and Nightmares] is a nice tribute, clever with a morsel of wonder.

Good lines from Jessica J. Horowitz’s “Taking, Keeping” [Spectral Lit]:

When at last they took her tongue, she etched each letter

into the tips of her fingers, across her ribs,

in the hollow places behind her eyes.

She carved epics between the layers of her skin,

stitched verses into each sinew.

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s “Area 51 Custodian Gets Coffee” [Star*Line] is the kind of poem you’d think would find its way into this type of anthology. Nice narrative fragment, nice little visceral shock at the end.

In “Goddamn These Minotaurs” Persephone Erin Hudson [paintbucket] displays voice and energy, but nothing yet to quote. Not quite there.

John Philip Johnson plays with bitter-sweet irony in “Mothsong” [Liquid Imagination] although no particularly striking lines. His “Fly” [Rattle] poem closed nicely.

Catherine Kyle’s “Seven Reasons to Have Hope for a Better Future. Number Five Will Really Get You!” [Quail Bell] has an ironic tone that works for it although the best thing is its fantastic title. It mixes Biblical apocalypse with common jokes about the latest generation’s penchants.

Kathleen A. Lawrence retells “Hansel and Gretel” [Star*Line] from the witch’s perspective in “The Nonpareils: As Told by the Woman in the Gingerbread House” to some advantage.

Mary Soon Lee tells some entertaining verse: “To Skeptics” [The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] being the most effective.

Francine P. Lewis ["drag strip drag" in Eye to the Telescope] and Jeff Crandall [“Halsted IV” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] had some impressively structured poems. Crandall’s being the more emotive due to the nature of Lewis’s tight structure, where the poem is reverses itself in two directions. Crandall is more loose with his redeploying “The House that Jack Built”—not forcing himself to repeat events each time, but uses that to create a sense of an inevitable outcome.

Sandra J. Lindow’s “Creation: Dark Matter Dating App” [Asimov’s] is a charming misinterpretation of a scientific sentence.

Nisa Malli’s “Abeona, Goddess of Outward Journeys, Pilots the Interstellar Ark” [Spectral Lit] has what could become a fascinating speculative examination, but it doesn’t feel quite there yet. I gather it’s a problematic A.I., but we need sharper details (same number of words, just sharper—not so much sharper images but the effect she wants).

Caroline Mao‘s “when my father reprograms my mother {” [Strange Horizons] is effective, even moving, but it never quite arrives.

“The Certainty of Seeing” by Michelle Muenzler [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] captures a moment of revisiting an ailing patient (through a psychological time travel) although we aren’t given much context.

Jason O’Toole’s “Samsara” [The Scrib Arts Journal] suggests that reincarnation means you should give your kids cupcakes, which will benefit you somehow. I wanted this to work, but we need more dots to connect.

Uche Ogbuji’s “Kolanut or kola tree  Íjè [Kola Journey]” [FIYAH Literary Magazine] has interesting translations and cultural aspects. As a poem, it is at its strongest when it comes up with lovely strange descriptions; “no sick greengray” “a shovel breath” “toes spadeing the soil.” Some are simply strange ones: dialogue croaked and “She grimaces while replying:” The kolanut is kind of a totem that carries freight although it doesn’t quite get to that and could probably use more development. There’s a lot of bandying back and forth since a third (?) of the poem is in a different language. I decided to search and replace to see if that helped and notice that could have conveyed a different culture just by substituting “Until the dawn!” for goodnight. That way we’re not floundering for the primary sense of what’s happening (unless confusion is called for), but we are within this culture and should hear the phrases as the other native characters hear it. I know there are other hypotheses, but poetry has barriers enough. Let people enter the poem smoothly. Use cognates if you have them unless you mean to exclude (but then why a poem?) and I don’t think Uche Ogbuji means to do that, especially given the translations provided.

Christina Olson [from her prize-winning Rattle chapbook, The Last Mastadon] has some science poems that offer bright, little moments and occasionally nice structure, but the whole doesn’t quite click for me.

Terrie Leigh Relf hints in “Revisiting the origins of language” [Space & Time Magazine] (if one compares the title to the ending) that language was created as a poem to lost love, which is sweet.

“The Ghosts of Those” by Ron Riekki [Star*Line] is a non-speculative poem about PTSD in the aging with some word- rhythm (“emptied, struggling for words, for worlds, / for wars other than the faded wars, the fading wars,”) and fun word pairings (“in my farmhouse mind, strange-keeled, fog-queened,”), but again it’s not speculative.

WC Roberts captures an intriguing scenario and atmosphere in “Phobos and Deimos” [Chrome Bairn] but it needs more time percolating.

Marge Simon’s “The Snow Globe” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] captures a tender moment between lovers who only come alive when it's shaken. Through a confusion of pronouns, it sets up the boy to be the man inside—neat trick.

Christina Sng in “Styx” [Spectral Realms] admirably takes something should stir horror and turns it into something tender. Quite a feat.

“Three of Swords, King of Cups” by Ali Trotta [Fireside Fiction] presents an extended metaphor that mostly works although it might have be shortened to greater effect.

Jacqueline West discusses “Lady Macbeth’s Green Gown” [Liminality] in the 1888 play which “was sewn / all over with real green beetle wings.” What a beautiful found image.

Fran Wilde’s “The Unseen” [Fireside Fiction] talks about fog in a pleasant manner—better fare than most novelists. The best lines: “it takes the distance first, / that mountain we always said we’d climb” although it isn’t really speculative. Scientific? Maybe?

Review: The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair (3 of 3)

 [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.

Review: The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair (2 of 3)

[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 Greenber’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).

Review: The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair (1 of 3)

Like many SF writers from previous generations, Margaret St. Clair is overlooked. Even all-consuming critics like John Clute miss out on some of St. Clair’s strengths (see his commentary at SFE) 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 few classic story by Margaret St. Clair 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 appears here and part three here.]