Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Twenty Three: Margaret St. Clair
This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.
Margaret St. Clair
Born in Kansas in 1911, St. Clair (nee Neeley) had a fairly “lonely and bookish” upbringing after her father died when she was 7 years old, but otherwise doesn’t seem to have been plagued by the trials and tribulations that many of the authors in this series have had. She moved to California, where she graduated from UC Berkeley and married Eric St. Clair, and the two of them did lot of travelling. She was also interested in Wicca, which certainly informs her writing. She died in 1995, but didn’t have any more publications from 1971 onwards. She’s the third and final woman to feature in Appendix N
The Sign of the Labrys
As we’ve seen before with fellow female writers Norton and Brackett, St. Clair’s protagonist in this story is a man. Sam Sewell lives on Level C of a largely abandoned bunker complex built to withstand a nuclear war. Instead, however, humanity has been devastated by a series of deadly yeast plagues, with only a handful of survivors. Sewell avoids people where he can, taking his choice from living quarters, stockpiled food, and the strange purple fungus that he finds so ripe and delicious.
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| I can smell a cache of yeast cakes a mile off. |
His life is turned upside-down after a visit from Ames, a man from the FBY (which is never spelled out, but is presumably a play on FBI but with Y for Yeast), who is seeking a mysterious woman called Despoina, who lives below on Level H. This begins Sewell’s quest, as he descends the levels of the complex, through the strange laboratories of Level F, and the false outdoors of Level G populated by rich and vapid people akin to Homer’s Lotus-Eaters. Things become more and more hallucinatory as he descends to H, where he undergoes strange rituals before an FBY raid messes things up.
The descent to H forms a quest of sorts, but is only the first half of the book. When Sewell recovers from his hallucinatory state, he discovers that the scientist Kyra is his half sister, and unlocks his powers of witchcraft. Here St. Clair’s interest in Wicca really takes centre stage as the FBY become more autocratic and Sewell and Despoina wage a shadow war via various forms of The Craft.
It reminded me, towards the end, of some of Pat Mills’ writing for 2000AD, especially the serial Finn where a coven of witches fight against the oppressive Order of Dagon (the rich and powerful of modern Britain) and their hidden Lovecraftian masters. Here there’s no great conspiracy behind the FBY, just human nature and propensity for the powerful to hoard resources, but the concepts are similar.
The Shadow People
There’s more underground wanderings in this one, but with a different flavour. We follow Dick Aldridge as he tries to find what happened to his girlfriend Carol in late Sixties San Francisco. With my 1001 Albums project, I’ve not long come out of the flower-power/psychedelia era and into the more cynical early Seventies, and this novel has a similar sentiment. The flower-child stuff didn’t bring about world peace, but instead the world descended into further bloodshed and unrest, leaving a sense of profound disillusion. Some turned to drug-induced escape, others to comfortable middle-class conformity, some to profound cynicism.
St Clair blends these sentiments with fantasy. Aldridge ends up pursuing Carol into a strange and gloomy underworld, like Orpheus. Although populated by “elves”, this is no bright faerie realm, but a series of cold, dank tunnels where the inhabitants are shadowy creatures that subsist either on human flesh or the strange “atter-corn”, left in bowls through the Otherworld by other elven figures. Most of the elves seems insubstantial apart from the figure of the Grey Dwarf, who rides other beings, and Hood, a green elf that lives mainly in the surface world.
Aldridge rescues Carol but is tricked into eating atter-corn, preventing him from returning to the surface cross the magical rivers that forms a barrier to all elven kind. Here, St Clair takes on another hallucinatory journey for Aldridge’s sojourn in the Otherworld. It’s hinted that the atter-corn is tainted by a kind of ergot rye, as it induces alternating hallucinations where the eater thinks he is a sequence of animals, followed by long periods of depressive torpor. Eventually, with the help of Merlin’s sword, Aldridge frees himself from Otherworld and returns to the surface.
Here, like The Sign Of The Labrys, the novel enters its next phase, as three years have passed since he left and the surface world has become a grim police state full of shortages, curfews, and violence. He is reunited with Carole, and with the figure Fay who directed him to the Otherworld in the first place. The Gray Dwarf and Hood return, with plans to conquer the surface world, but more problems are caused by the authorities than the elves.
Although the Shadow People of the title may refer to the barely substantial elves, it also refers to the central characters Aldridge, Carole, and Fay who become shadowy fugitives in the new world, and also the people of the grim depressed modern world – it’s suggestive that the Grey Dwarf has, in some sense, already conquered the surface world by making it as empty of joy as his cold underground realm. The ending is pretty abrupt, which is quite common to many of the stories in this list.
The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles
This is not a suggested story, but one that I have read before, as part of the Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum compilation. Once I discovered that it’s a St Clair story (under one of her noms de plume Idris Seabright) I went and found it again, since it’s only a few pages long. It borrows from Dunsany’s How Nuth Would Practice His Craft On The Gnoles, but this time rather than a thief, it’s a travelling salesman who seeks the ramshackle house of the gnoles. It’s written in a style very similar to Dunsany but, where Dunsany leaves the gnoles unseen, St Clair introduces them as creatures resembling a Jerusalem artichoke with tendrils and gemstone eyes. It’s short, somewhat amusing, and quite a fun continuation of Dunsany.
Change The Sky
I thought after that I was done with Margaret St. Clair, but then Appendix E in the Fifth Edition also includes Change The Sky, which is a collection of short stories. And, as you may know by now, I do like to go above and beyond Appendix N sometimes.
The title story is quite a short one, a science fiction tale with a slightly Philip K Dick feel to it. It revolves around a company that can create virtual reality worlds for rich clients, and their dealings with a particularly fussy individual. The ending is perhaps a little like The Wizard of Oz.
Of the longer stories. The Age of Prophets is set in a post-apocalyptic world, not dissimilar to those of both Brackett’s Long Tomorrow, and Lanier’s Heiro story, where science is a feared and distrusted thing, the populace instead living in superstition and beholden to religious demagogues. The story revolves around the psychic prophet Benjamin, manipulated by his grandfather Tobit and unwittingly caught in a web of political conspiracies – it's pretty good, with some twists but not, as is often the case with short stories, a stinger in the tail.
A Good Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas, meanwhile, is an odd beast that is a little like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, wherein a priest runs afoul of utility companies run from the future that object to his message of turning out the lights during Christmas-time. There are hints that Zoroastrian and Norse gods may be involved as well.
Unlike some short story collections, there’s not really a theme or topic that St Clair likes to return to – except perhaps encounters with the unknown, and maybe the search for happiness. There are a lot of stories where human explorers land on other worlds with strange habits (The Altruists, for example, tells of a narcissist character who tries to exploit a race of aliens that genuinely want to serve other people). Or aliens land on Earth. The Wines of Earth combines both themes, where a vintner is visited by god-like aliens that are disappointed by the quality of the finest wines known to humanity (thanks, Withnail) and present him with a bottle of their own wine, calling to mind the ambrosia of Greek myth.
And talking of which, The Goddess On The Street Corner tells of a lonely man’s encounter with the fading Aphrodite, and how he essentially ruins himself trying to help her. And this, the loss of self, is another theme. In one of my favourites, Fort Iron, a protagonist is an officer posted to a lonely outpost, where lacklustre soldiers fight a pointless war against an unseen enemy while the fort falls to ruin. But the enemy works by converting the “other” to their own form, and it feels a bit like The Martian Chronicles in that respect. A metaphor for war itself, perhaps?
I’ve almost described every story anyway, despite not wanting to on the outset. St Clair lacks the baroque writing style of Dunsany but her tales are similar to his, and similar to Fredric Brown in that they deal with the everyday colliding with the fantastic. Graveyard Shift, about a store clerk working the night shift in order to stop some shadowy monster in the cellar from growing too big, deals matter-of-factly with customers who are troubled by wyverns in the chicken shed and the like.
I liked St Clair’s stories, but many of them felt unfinished, even the short stories didn’t always have that satisfying sting or circularity that a makes a good short story. It’s like she gets so far, and then gives up. That’s not to say that all of the stories in Change The Sky felt unfinished; far from it, quite a few did have the twist. The two full novels, however, felt like they needed another chapter or two, or even a sequel.
That said, they were enjoyable to read. She doesn’t have an instantly recognisable style like some of the authors, but that does mean conversely that she isn’t too arch or clever with her prose to make it hard going at times; it’s a nice balance. Expect collisions between mundane and mysterious, quite often set in an empty decaying world. Expect some hallucinatory experiences between dreams and reality. And expect some references to Wicca.
Inspirations
There are no obvious elements taken from St Clair’s writing that appear in the game. Some say that the concept of the “dungeon” stem from both the underground labyrinths of The Shadow People and The Sign of the Labrys, but other works also feature underground exploration. None present a full underground ecosystem like St Clair does, however.
Perhaps hazards like Yellow Mould are inspired by the fungal colonies of Sign of the Labrys. The yeast takeover recalls the Purple Mould infestation that took down the spaceship in S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Although there are magical elements throughout, there are none that really correlate to D&D. The strange elves of The Shadow People aren’t like any D&D creatures. Even the Grey Dwarf is not really like the duergar (grey dwarves) of D&D which stem more from the duergar of folklore. There’s a magical sword, but this is nothing new.
Could you adapt some of it to a game? Perhaps. Given that most St Clair stories seem to be set in a dark near-future, some tweaks would need to be made. Hallucinatory and otherworldy experiences are hard to run in a game but could be an inspiration for short-term effects. The unknown but invasive enemy of Fort Iron could be an interesting monster idea. The “molded mnxx bird”, from An Egg a Day from All Over, which makes itself a body from found items, could also be an interesting creature design. Beyond that, it’s more a case of immersing the mind in the fantastic.
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