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sisteray's review
5.0
Oh man, I love Margaret St. Clair’s short stories. After recently tearing through The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales I was drawn back in to finding more of her works. This collection, despite some duplication, was well worth getting. As usual her stories are wild.
She will start with a bonkers concept and spin it out in a plausible and human way. Her work feels so ahead of her time, yet it also has a foot firmly rooted in 50s pulp to allow for her to be as goofball as she’d like.
I’d joked that her 50s stories were all under the influence of weed and her 60s stuff under mushrooms. And with these stories she’s more explicit about drug use (interesting enough not down with uppers, which is a good stance) and it seems like it’s more peyote than mushrooms.
These stories are a bit more sexually aware than the other collection. But it all felt positive and human rather than exploitive.
There are also a couple adventure romps in this that I wasn’t expecting that reminded me of Charles Stross or Kim Newman.
Her writing seems so foundational to later Sci-fi and speculative greats, that surely some authors must have read her work before venturing out on their own. Yet she remains in obscurity.
I really can’t say enough good things about her work.
She will start with a bonkers concept and spin it out in a plausible and human way. Her work feels so ahead of her time, yet it also has a foot firmly rooted in 50s pulp to allow for her to be as goofball as she’d like.
I’d joked that her 50s stories were all under the influence of weed and her 60s stuff under mushrooms. And with these stories she’s more explicit about drug use (interesting enough not down with uppers, which is a good stance) and it seems like it’s more peyote than mushrooms.
These stories are a bit more sexually aware than the other collection. But it all felt positive and human rather than exploitive.
There are also a couple adventure romps in this that I wasn’t expecting that reminded me of Charles Stross or Kim Newman.
Her writing seems so foundational to later Sci-fi and speculative greats, that surely some authors must have read her work before venturing out on their own. Yet she remains in obscurity.
I really can’t say enough good things about her work.
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