Search Worlds Without End

Originally appeared in Ace Double D-150 (1956).

Don Haig had been content to lie around and drink in the synthetic beauty of the pleasure planetoid Fyon, until a woman came into his life. A woman more beautiful and more perfect than any other female in the galaxy. A woman who brought about a curious change in Don.

For she was a pocket-sized doll -- a very strange and miraculous puppet who shed constant tears and held powers that Don never even dreamed of.

But what Don did know was that dangerous alien forces were swiftly focussing on him and his living puppet .. and that he had to discover the doll's super-scientific secret before his own life was smashed to atoms!

A fascinating blend of science fiction, fantasy, and the special kind or sorcery that only Margaret St. Clair can summon. A collection of the best stories from a renowned author's long and distinguished career in the science fiction field.

Table of Contents:

• Change the Sky - (1955)
• Beaulieu - (1957)
• Marriage Manual - (1954)
• Age of Prophecy - (1951)
• Then Fly Our Greetings - (1951)
• An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas - (1961)
• Stawdust - (1956)
• Thirsty God - (1953)
• The Altruists - (1953)
• Shore Leave - (1974)
• The Wines of Earth - (1957)
• Asking - (1955)
• Graveyard Shift - (1959)
• Fort Iron - (1955)
• The Goddess on the Street Corner - (1953)
• An Egg a Month from All Over - (1952)
• The Death of Each Day - (1958)
• Lazarus - (1955)

This short story originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1953. It has been published in a number of anthologies over the years, most recently in The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. It is included in the collection The Best of Margaret St. Clair (1985).

Earth was a weird and dire place after the plagues. The few humans who survived could not bear the touch of each other; they lived in the enormous, endless caverns hacked out of the bowels of the earth for the bombs that never came.

And on one man rested the hopes of the world, though he did not know it. Sam Sewell only knew he had to journey, despite forbidding perils from the darkness of the past, into the ultimate fastnesses of the unknown to rescue the timeless wisdom of the witch Despoina...

A wildly fanciful, terrifyingly realistic novel of a fantastic future!

From the back cover: Women are wrting science-fiction! Original! Brilliant!! Dazzling!!! Women are closer to the primitive than men. They are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They possess a buried memory of humankind's obscure and ancient past which can emerge to uniquely color and flavor a novel. Such a woman is Margaret St. Clair, author of this novel. Such a novel is this, Sign of the Labrys, the story of a doomed world of the future, saved by recourse to ageless, immemorial rites... Fresh! Imaginative! Inventive!

Table of Contents:

• Idris' Pig (1964)
• The Gardener (1949)
• Child of Void (1949)
• Hathor's Pets (1950)
• The Pillows (1950)
• The Listening Child (1950)
• Brightness Falls from the Air (1951)
• The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles (1951)
• The Causes (1952)
• An Egg a Month from All Over (1952)
• Prott (1953)
• New Ritual (1953)
• Brenda (1954)
• Short in the Chest (1954)
• Horrer Howce (1956)
• The Wines of Earth (1957)
• The Invested Libido (1958)
• The Nuse Man (1960)
• An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas (1961)
• Wryneck, Draw Me (1980)

Like so many others before him, reluctant Sam MacGregor was sent on a pilgrimage for the Grail Vision by the Dancers: androids grown from the cells of one man, with the powers of hypnotism and illusion--androids who held the tribes of the Republic of California in thrall.

But soon Sam began to doubt his own identity, for he experienced, in close succession, extra-lives in different corridors of time and space.

And he could not know whom his search would destroy: the Dancers . . . or himself.

Before the dawn of man . . . there was a covenant between the land and the sea people--a covenant long forgotten by those who stayed on shore, but indelibly etched in the minds of the others--the dolphins of Altair.

Now the covenant had been broken. Dolphins were being wantonly sacrificed in the name of scientific research, their waters increasingly polluted, their number dangerously diminished. They had to find allies and strike back. Allies willing to sever their own earthly bonds for the sake of their sea brothers--willing, if necessary, to execute the destruction of the whole human race . . . .

They called it Underearth. It was a kind of Hell in reverse--a world of cold, darkness and dread existing unsuspected beneath Earth's surface, peopled by weird half-human creatures who had once been men and women.

Aldridge found the fantastic entrance to it in his desperate search for Carol, the beautiful, mysterious girl he loved. All he knew was that she had vanished into the Otherworld and that he had to find her.

He did find her--but she was strangely changed into an almost mindless automaton. The he learned one more thing: either he or she could escape to the normal world they had known, but not both. And only he could make the choice. . . .

Message from the Eocene

Legacy of a Lost Race

His name was Tharg, but he was not of any life form we know today. He lived so long ago that the planet Earth had not yet shaped itself. Lava seas roiled and churned, volcanoes spouted and grew, and heavy clouds hung in the hydrogen atmosphere, leaving the planet's surface dark and dangerous.

On that world Tharg met his death, or something very much like it. He became a disembodied, totally nonphysical intelligence, cut off from all contact with the life he had known. He "slept" for hundreds of millions of yhears, unconnected with the world, unthinking, hardly existing.

But then he began to awake--for there was new life on Earth, creatures called "human," and Tharg, knowing an anceint promise from the stars, had to tell them of it. But... how?

Three Worlds of Futurity

Collection of short stories:

• The Everlasting Food - (1950) - novelette
• Idris' Pig - (1949) - novella
• The Rages - (1954) - novelette
• Roberta - (1962) - shortstory
• The Island of the Hands - (1952) - shortstory

The Games of Neit

The people of Gwethym were highly intelligent, rational beings. They worshipped the goddess Neith, not because they believed in such a golden-haired being, but because they recognized the need for religion as a counterbalance to human passions.

So when trouble struck their planet, when they discovered an energy leak which was slowly destroying their world, the Gwethymians turned to science for their answer. If their world was to be saved, the solution must come from the logicians.

Or so they thought, until one day a woman, the image of their goddess Neigh, walked across the waters of the harbor and into their city! Then their trouble was twofold. Would there be anything left to save of their world if they waited for the scientists? And if they didn't, if they put their trust in this goddess whom logic told them could not even exist, would they just be sealing their doom that much quicker?

The Earth Gods Are Coming

The Prophets of Earth slept crated in their thousands.

They filled the ship's bomb-bays, lying quietly waiting in their machine-gleaming metal sheaths.

Each individual one was destined to cover a world.

Each individual one lay there, quiescent in its capsule, awaiting the master command that would send it, after the one before and receding the next in line in strict mathematical order, out over a new and unknown world to plunge down to its destined consummation.

The Green Queen

His atomic puppet was out of control!

Bonnar had created the Green Queen thoughtlessly--all part of a day's work. But when his brain-child became a full-grown Frankenstein, a monster embodied in the girl he loved, Bonnar was terrified. For now she threatened to shatter the whole carefully balanced social structure of Viridis--as well to undermine the radioactive world's atomic shield!

Only Bonnar could end the holocaust and turn the all-too-grim reality back to the illusion he had originally intended. But to do that he had to destroy the girl he loved--or be destroyed by her.

Original title: Mistress of Viridis (Universe Science Fiction, March 1955)

Three Thousand Years

They slept for thirty centuries.

Originally serialized in the magazine Astounding in 1938.

The World Jones Made

Floyd Jones is sullen, ungainly, and quite possibly mad, but in a very short time he will rise from telling fortunes at a mutant carnival to convulsing an entire planet. For although Jones has the power to see the future -- a power that makes his life a torment -- his real gift lies elsewhere: in his ability to make people dream again in a world where dreaming has been made illegal, even when the dream is indistinguishable from a nightmare.

In Philip K. Dick's unsettling chronicle of the rise and fall of a postnuclear messiah, readers will find a novel that is as minutely realistic as it is prophetic. For along with its engineered mutants, hermaphroditic sex performers, and protoplasmic drifters from the stars, The World Jones Made gives us nothing less than a deadly accurate reading of our own hunger for belief.

Agent of the Unknown

Don Haig had been content to lie around and drink in the synthetic beauty of the pleasure planetoid Fyon, until a woman came into his life. A woman more beautiful and more perfect than any other female in the galaxy. A woman who brought about a curious change in Don.

For she was a pocket-sized doll -- a very strange and miraculous puppet who shed constant tears and held powers that Don never even dreamed of.

But what Don did know was that dangerous alien forces were swiftly focussing on him and his living puppet... and that he had to discover the doll's super-scientific secret before his own life was smashed to atoms!

One of the original female sci-fi writers, Margaret St. Clair was a trailblazer, writing mainly in the pulp magazines in the 1940s and 50s. St. Clair wrote under her own name and her pseudonym Idris Seabright as well as the house pseudonym of Wilton Hazzard at Planet Stories. Here is a collection of 62 short stories penned by St. Clair up to 1962, including many which have been out of print since before her death.