Des Mondes À Profusion

by Margaret St. Clair

Change the Sky is a collection in which you will

- A man who has spent his life searching for the world of his dreams and got exactly what he wanted
- A women who found the people around her so boring she changed them
- A righteous minister who preached an old-fashioned Christmas and started an energy crisis - 2000 years in the future

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fantasy, Collections, Speculative Fiction, Dungeons and Dragons

239 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Margaret St. Clair (February 17, 1911 Huchinson, Kansas - November 22, 1995 Santa Rosa, CA) was an American science fiction writer, who also wrote under the pseudonyms Idris Seabright and Wilton Hazzard.

Born as Margaret Neeley, she married Eric St. Clair in 1932, whom she met while attending the University of California, Berkeley. In 1934 she graduated with a Master of Arts in Greek classics.
She started writing science fiction with the short story "Rocket to Limbo" in 1946. Her most creative period was during the 1950s, when she wrote such acclaimed stories as "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" (1951), "Brightness Falls from the Air" (1951), "An Egg a Month from All Over" (1952), and "Horrer Howce" (1956). She largely stopped writing short stories after 1960. The Best of Margaret St. Clair (1985) is a representative sampler of her short fiction.

Apart from more than 100 short stories, St. Clair also wrote nine novels. Of interest beyond science fiction is her 1963 novel Sign of the Labrys, for its early use of Wicca elements in fiction.

Her interests included witchcraft, nudism, and feminism. She and her husband decided to remain childless.

Reviews

[Graham P · Rating 3 out of 5]

*** 1/2

The Queen of Speculative Uncanny returns with her unique brand of bizarre horror, weird science, perverse fantasies and juvenile head-scratchers. The book opens with 3 odd but interesting mid-1950's selections: Change the Sky (1955) is surrealism as sentimental schmaltz, about a powerful tycoon's wish to return to simpler childhood bliss. Father Knows Best in a time blender. Beaulieu (1957) treads the hitchhiker familiar: an alluring yet deranged phantom-lady chauffeurs a man across the city in this mood piece that feels like a Fritz Leiber tax write-off. Marriage Manual (1953) details an asshole entrepreneur-grunt-explorer who messes with a slurpy-looking alien race who have a propensity for copulating in a highly hedonistic way. When the explorer builds an old school carousel, the aliens take such an admiration of the amusement that their lustful husbands fall wayside with marital neglect. An odd mixture of G-rated alien porn and ham-fisted colonialism.

And now is where the collection starts to take off:

Age of Prophecy • (1951) • novella about an old man adopting a child with super psi powers and then turning him into a violent prophet / angry Jesus type who really hates 'the scientists', and especially the mutant nurses. Off her rocker, that Margaret.

Then Fly Our Greetings • (1951) • government experiment with subliminal projection gone haywire. Citizens degrade into raving lunatics. So much global despair shifting the Earth's orbit into a 4th dimensional farewell purely fueled by repulsion. Both Barrington Bayley and Greg Egan would approve. Brilliant dime-store entropy that equates planets with marbles, a fine combination of cartoon and catastrophe.

An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas • (1961) • Mysterious witch in a bikini lounging under the Joshua tree befriends a minister who wants to ban Christmas because of the invasive neon lights. I'm being serious, and so is Margaret. Then we're shifted into a battle of space-witch vs. crows and ravens, and an anti-corporate message buried under all the nonsensical wonders.

Stawdust • (1956) • Horror SF CLASSIC! A lonely bachelorette is on a spaceship cruise, only to find that each of her fellow travelers are turning into dummies...yes, those kind of dummies, with glass eyes and bodies full of sawdust.

Thirsty God (1953) Man on the run hides in a vast desolate factory some of the alien natives use as a temple. Surely this fugitive didn't expect to become a god, and a repulsive one at that - to hydrate the dancing frog-like Plunps forevermore. At this point, brain melt has been established.

The Altruists (1953) Perpetually lazy space traveler lands on a planet peopled by ugly altruists who do everything for tourists. Just remember on an alien planet, don't mistake those big berries with the altruists eggs. More untrustworthy aliens appear in Shore Leave (1954), a short tale that profiles a race who detest all other forms of life, and seeks a planet with absolute zero growth. Thing is St. Clair has to make these invaders unique, and in this case, they arrive in the form of microscopic geometric shapes. I have never read about a living trapezoid trying to mate with a garden spider.

The Wines of Earth (1957) and Asking (1955) may have been written on Monday to pay for groceries on Friday. Cutesy with little memorable grit to recommend them, however it's Graveyard Shift (1959) that re-establishes the high uncanny standard: a lone night attendant at a 24-hour department store along a nameless Maine highway deals with eccentric customers (of human origin, we think) while feigning off a hairy spider spirit that appears to be of some low-rent Mythos roadkill. Obtuse and nearly brilliant.

Fort Iron (1955) A lazy official is sent to a desert planet outpost, only to uncover an idle fugue that covers the decaying fort, materializing in the form of a white cement-eating fungus. A strange hybrid of Buzatti's The Tartar Steppe and D.G. Compton's The Silent Multitude.

The Goddess on the Street Corner (1953) is a middling love and suicide story of a mortal bum and immortal goddess getting drunk in a flophouse NYC apartment. Reads like a David Goodis tale in severe detox. And following, An Egg a Month from All Over (1952) contains one of the cruelest and unexpected deaths put to the mid-century pulps. Why the egg hatches a murderous alien bird is beyond us, and the shocking ending feels as desperate and destitute a climax as Kafka's The Trial.

Closing out, Lazarus (1955) takes you on a tour of a factory producing 'fake' meat. But really now, does test-tube sirloin scream so loudly, or is that just a by-product of Juicibeef getting tastier for mass market consumption.

Perhaps a better place to discover St. Clair would be The Hole in the Moon, stories culled by Ramsey Campbell. Not only does that have a wider and weirder swathe, but it won't cost you an arm and a leg on the marketplace.

[Ira (SF Words of Wonder) · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first thoughts reading these stories was that I couldn’t believe almost all of them were written in the 1950’s. St. Clair seemed way ahead of her time with her beautiful prose, deep themes about the human condition and very entertaining endings, most of which can get very dark. There is a quiet tone to a lot of these stories, similar to Bradbury or Simak, yet she still has a distinct voice of her own. Above average overall and grab this one if you see it in a used bookstore because it can be a bit hard to find. Some of my favorites:
• Change the Sky – About virtual worlds
• Age of Prophecy – Post apocalypse and religion
• Thirst God – A guy on Venus hides from some aliens in a shrine and some other aliens start treating him like he’s a god, his biological hydration becomes an issue, hence the name
• The Altruists – A bad human tries to take advantage of some super altruistic aliens, but does he succeed in his mission?
• Wines of Earth – Aliens go to Napa Valley to trade some wine with a local wine maker
• Graveyard Shift – Bloom’s Sportsman Emporium is open 24/7 and strange things happen at night to our graveyard shift worker
• An Egg a Month from all Over – A guy loves his Egg of the Month club and hatching exotic eggs, but he gets in the middle of a feud

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leuke namen van aliens "Blorp" en "Glurp", erg grappig

[Timothy Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third and final of Margaret St. Clair's short story collections. Published over ten years after Three Worlds of Futurity and almost ten years before The Best of Margaret St. Clair. Change the Sky consists mostly of her short fiction from the 1950's. When you consider she published over a 100 stories from the late 1940's till the early 60's, this was a very productive period for her. The stories vary in quality, which is what you can expect from such a prolific author. Only three appear in the other collections.
The best of the lost has to be "The Goddess on the Street Corner". It's a sad tale which would have fitted into The Twilight Zone. The story concerns an alcoholic pensioner who finds an ancient Greek goddess on a city street. He takes her home and feeds her bourbon, hoping to restore the deity's powers. The story has a bitter sweet ending, which was not entirely expected.
Military themes abound. "The Death of Each Day" has a gunner trying to escape a war-torn city in the future. "Then Fly Our Greetings" is about a scientist trying to create a humane weapon and it's horrifying results. "Fort Iron" has an officer trying to restore a sense of purpose in an ancient fort. St. Clair takes a dim view of the military mind. One character describes it as hitching a jet plane to an oxcart.
This is a good representative sample of her work from the end of science fiction's golden age.

[Meg Powers]

What do I say about this book? I'm kind of mixed about St. Clair's stories; the content is creepy and unique sci-fi written in a bland and confusing way-and the confusion of the writing is enhanced by horrible editing. Typos and misspellings abound!
Most of the stories end with Night Gallery-esque twists: I found my inner-monologue repeating a sarcastic "HUH?" at every "he'd been dead for ten years!" sort of conclusion.
Regardless, I think the weirdness of her stories-intergalactic wine tours, carousels used for masturbatory purposes by smug aliens, a woman who accidentally turns everyone around her into sawdust stuffed mannequins-is exciting and very original. The last story, "Lazarus," especially creeped me out with its take on genetically engineered meat.

I say, check out Margaret St. Clair for some really weird and sexed up female-written science fiction. Just be careful to find an edition of her stories that was actually proof-read.

[Sanh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Les trois premières nouvelles étaient franchement difficile à lire. Mais y a quelques pépites de SF dedans qui mériteraient d'etre davantage explorées

[Tbfrank · Rating 2 out of 5]

All but two of these stories were penned in the 1950's. The exceptions were from 1961 and 1974. In general Ms. St. Clair themes involved sex, aliens,human transformations, horror, and human/alien conflicts where mankind generally comes off poorly. The stories have the aura of tales from the Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. The flavor of the period comes through, an era where the world has changed and what passed for normal is suspect, what is real, safe, constant transforms into something scary.

Four of the stories were collected in the Best of Margaret St. Clair. Others of note here include:
Change the Sky - a really early concept of virtual reality
Beaulieu - a man encounters what he thinks may be a valkyrie
Graveyard Shift - a nightmare in a big box store
Shore Leave - tiny alien sailors run amok on Earth
Stawdust - a woman bored with those around her, changes them into actual dummies - worthy of a Dr. Who episode.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the stories were dark, strange and unsettling. However, these mostly very short stories were so well written that I enjoyed them all. I especially liked the last story in this anthology: "Lazarus". Being a vegetarian, I wish meats were grown in vats from cloned cells. Being a little twisted and liking "Soylent Green", I had a great laugh at the ending, which was meant to disturb. An interesting read, although the paperback book I had was so old it was fragile.