Margaret St. Clair (1911–1995) was a highly idiosyncratic and original US writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her career began with “Rocket to Limbo” for Fantastic Adventures in November 1946, and by 1950 she had published about thirty stories, most of them vigorous planetary adventures and planetary romances. St. Clair also published a series of highly regarded stories (including “Prott”) under the pen name “Idris Seabright,” almost exclusively in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The Seabright name for whatever reason became attached to stories that were more seamless and fantastical, and St. Clair became better known for them than work published under her own name.
Her early work could feel conventional at times but had already begun to push back against one central impulse of pulp science fiction: the need to reassure through effective problem-solving and showing humankind as in control of the universe. She also always had a dark, healthy sense of the absurd, on full display in stories like “Hathor’s Pets” (1950) and the Lord Dunsany–inspired “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” (1951), which mixed horror and humor.
In her classic work, St. Clair demands rereading in much the same way as Vladimir Nabokov and James Tiptree Jr.: the stories contain traps and mazes and hidden doors. St. Clair sometimes expressed a disappointment with the self-importance of the science fiction field as she knew it (“Is it a sacred cause?”). In part, St. Clair thought the field didn’t always understand or reward sophisticated humor, too invested in a headlong rush toward the earnest. But St. Clair would likely have remained “elusive,” as critic John Clute puts it, no matter what the scene. St. Clair was definitely not a joiner or likely to be comfortable in any club.
St. Clair and her husband became Wiccans in the 1950s, and she chiefly identifies in her introduction to The Best of Margaret St. Clair as a “long-time civil libertarian,” her political sympathies with “the democratic left.” But some additional clues to the dual delicacy and bloody-mindedness of her fiction find expression in another part of her introduction: “Most of the sense impressions of my childhood were pleasant…I remember the taste of Mallard ducks—too pretty to kill, with their lovely plumage, but luscious eating—domestic chicken and wild squirrel…Things had more flavor then.”
In “Prott” (1953), a scientist-observer becomes more and more obsessed with the titular aliens once he starts observing them, with implications both funny and disturbing. “Prott” is classic St. Clair: darkly absurd, at times horrific, and engaged in playing out the implications of its own twisted logic no matter where it leads. The story is one of the most original collected in this anthology.