(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: dark flutter)
St. Clair biography, non-spoiler discussion
Good evening, and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature-history podcast. I’m Nate, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, J.M. and Gretchen. This month, we are taking a look at Galaxy Magazine. You can check out previous segments for a background on the magazine, as well as stories by Katherine MacLean, C.M. Kornbluth, Zenna Henderson, and R.A. Lafferty. This segment will be focusing on Margaret St. Clair.
Margaret St. Clair was born on February 17, 1911, as Eva Margaret Neeley in Hutchinson, Kansas. Her father was George A. Neeley, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Kansas’s 7th District for the Democratic Party. The 7th District was abolished in 1943, but at the time of his service, namely January 9, 1912, to March 3, 1915, it comprised most of the rural counties in southwestern Kansas. At one point, the district contained Wichita, but it was redistricted out in 1907. So, for all the listeners doing Manilla Road tourism by pilgrimaging to Herman Hill, the site was never represented by Congressman George A. Neeley.
Young Margaret spent some time in D.C. as a child and was possibly picked up and kissed by President Taft. She was an only child and learned to read and write at age four, and put it to pretty good use, citing Hawthorne’s “Tanglewood Tales” as being read to her before she could read. Others she specifically cites as having read as a young child were the “Oz” books, George MacDonald’s two Curdie books, “The Princess and the Goblin” and “The Princess and Curdie,” and “At the Back of the North Wind,” as well as various works from Kipling, Stevenson, and Thackeray. For science fiction, she read “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” in fifth grade, H.G. Wells’s “Men Like Gods” around age twelve, and, of course, Burroughs’s Barsoom and Tarzan novels.
JM:
She did a sequel to a Lord Dunsany story. It’s really fun. I think it’s in “The Weird.” There’s both the Lord Dunsany story, “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles,” and a bunch of stories later, because it goes chronological, there’s the Margaret St. Clair story, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles.” It’s like a fun little sequel story to that. It’s just really fun to have them in the same book. A lot of her stories are really short, like “Roberta,” which we’re doing tonight. That could be a downside, but we’ll talk about that later on when we talk about this story. Usually I think it’s cool.
Nate:
Yeah, it’s always interesting to see when authors follow up some of their favorite authors, like we talked about with Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, and I’m sure there are tons of other examples out there that we could cite of that happening.
But she did indeed become a fan of the weird early on, specifically Weird Tales. She wrote into the magazine in 1934, which was published in the June issue of that year, and I want to read her letter in its entirety because it’s pretty great:
Margaret St. Clair of Berkeley, California, writes, “I’ve been a good, quiet, uncomplaining reader of Weird Tales for about ten years, ever since I was twelve. But the prospect of another story by Edmond Hamilton moves me to hysterical outcry. He makes me want to scream and bite my nails. ‘Captured thirty-six suns,’ indeed! His style is nothing but exclamation marks. His idea of drama is something involving a fantastic number of light speeds. He is, in the words of one of my favorite comic strip characters, flies in my soup. He is science fiction at its worst. All Weird Tales needs to make the science fiction atmosphere perfect is a letter from Forrest J Ackerman and a story by Hamilton. Oh, and another gripe. I dislike the blurbs you are printing at the first of the stories. They’re just a waste of space. I hate vampire and werewolf stories. My blood refuses to congeal for any number of undead, clammily hooting about. There was a time when I could be made to shiver at the mention of garlic, but now it’s just something to put in salad. Things like ‘Shambleau’ are what I like. As long as Weird Tales prints stories by Clark Ashton Smith, however, I’ll keep on reading it. His tales have a rounded, jewel-like self-containedness that is artistically a delight. And Smith’s drawings, I think, are by far the best in the magazine.
JM:
Hear, hear.
Nate:
"In conclusion, Jules de Grandin is a pain in the neck."
JM:
Yeah, it’s really neat seeing what other writers think when they’re younger, especially when they’re writing in and commenting on other people’s stories. It’s just really neat to see that critical reception of the time and see what they like, what they don’t like, that sort of thing. And it’s nice to see that a lot of them didn’t hold back, right, with what they had to say. It’s pretty cool. I like that.
Nate:
Yeah, and that’s why those reader forums are so cool in those magazines, because a lot of future authors themselves would write into the magazines. So you kind of get that interesting feedback loop.
But yeah, as noted by the Weird Tales letter, she was in California at this time, where she moved with her mother in 1928. Her father had died in 1919 in the influenza epidemic. Margaret earned a Master of Arts in Greek classics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1934. Euripides’ “Electra” was what spawned her lifelong interest in Greek things, and she listed Boccaccio, Lord Dunsany, as we already mentioned, and Kipling as her main adult influences, specifically citing Kipling’s “Wireless” as a model of everything a short story should be, which we had previously covered on the podcast. So it’s cool to see that she was a big fan of that story, too.
She says, “Most novels seem entirely too long to me, but I make an exception for Dickens.” And she notes that she disliked “Alice in Wonderland,” Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” Scott’s “Ivanhoe,” so she’s in good company with Mark Twain there, and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Of “Ivanhoe,” she says that she was, “astonished to find the other children discussing Ivanhoe as if it were a real book with real characters.” And yeah, some of the dialogue is a little bit stilted in the modern era.
For her own writing, she says that she, “wrote several full-length mystery novels in the thirties and sold none of them.” Her first sales were in the mid-1940s to the detective circuit, her first sale being to Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine. Her second sale, “The Perfectionist,” was to Mystery Book Magazine, where it appeared in 1946 and was translated into many languages and served as the basis for a play and TV adaptation.
But shortly after her stint in the detective and mystery world, she switched to science fiction and fantasy, which she, in part, discusses in a two-part series in Writer’s Digest. Her first science fiction sale was “Rocket to Limbo,” which appeared in Fantastic Adventures in 1946. She said it felt natural to write it, as she’d been reading it, that being science fiction, all of her life, and that other women like C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett were doing it, so why couldn’t she?
One of her stories, “Short in the Chest,” got an amusing rejection from Horace Gold, saying, quote, “If you want to put me out of business, Margaret, I wish you’d do it with French postcards,” which she attributes to the prudish nature of some of the science fiction magazines in the 1950s. But this one eventually found its way into Fantastic Universe in the July 1954 issue.
She wrote about 130 stories altogether, as well as eight novels that she did publish. Her later novels, starting with “Sign of the Labrys” from 1963, heavily featured Wicca as a plot element, of which she and her husband were practitioners themselves, being initiated in 1966. Her husband, Eric St. Clair, was also a writer, having written about 100 stories, a couple of which are science fiction and appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, though it seems like he was mostly a children’s author.
In 1981, she wrote for “Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science Fiction Writers,” saying, “I sometimes wonder what will happen to science fiction in the next two decades. I imagine it will continue to attract public favor and perhaps continue its inroads on the market for detective fiction. But the popularity of the Gothic tale among women shows that much of the reading public still likes its fictional entertainment conservative. Perhaps we will witness a split in reading preferences along sexual lines. Some current science fiction seems to me to have little to offer anyone except an engineer. Or science fiction in the shorter lengths might become extinct through a combination of public dislike for short fiction and public fondness for factual articles. If short science fiction does survive, it might be in a form so heavily illustrated as to be little more than a pretentious comic strip. There must be possibilities for the future I haven’t considered. One thing is certain: whatever the case is at the end of the second decade, this particular writer won’t be around to see.”
So she passed away on November 22, 1995. While she was correct that she did not see the end of that decade, it remains debatable whether or not short-form science fiction still "survives" and what that means exactly.
So as I mentioned earlier, she had two articles published in Writer’s Digest in 1947: “Twenty-Seven Captured Suns” from July of 1947 and “Supplement to Twenty-Seven Captured Suns” later in Writer’s Digest in September 1947, where she basically talks about what it’s like being a science fiction writer and how to get your stuff published, which I think is a really interesting set of articles. In the first one, she covers all the major science fiction magazines, their vibes, and different markets. In the supplement, she talks about all the various fanzines and fandom-related things, as well as gives examples of plots for each market.
She opens up the first article by saying, “Why is science fiction fun to write? At first blush, it doesn’t seem attractive, particularly for a woman. It appears rarefied and unapproachable, awesomely scientific. One tends to feel that one should have at least a B.Sc. before tackling it. Why not stick to the detective stories? Why bother with this stuff?”
She goes on to say, “The typical science fiction fan is young, male, though there are some devoted feminine ones, literate, quite intelligent, interested in ideas. His mental horizon is broader than that of the average citizen. He is strongly aware of what his likes and dislikes are, and the writer who succeeds in pleasing him will hear of it. In my belief, the science fiction fan is a definitely superior type, but I may be prejudiced.”
And yeah, it’s interesting that she notes that the science fiction community has just such a large fandom attached to it, and basically notes that the science fiction world is really the only writing environment where there’s just such a huge prevalence of fanzines and fandom culture.
JM:
Yeah, I think that’s pretty cool. Hearing her talk about this is really interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, it definitely is. It’s also really interesting that she notes how pedantic the readers of detective and mystery fiction are, which is one of the reasons she switched to science fiction. I mean, we talked about how some of the letters to Amazing were really pedantic about the errors in science and some of those early Amazing stories. But she says when she writes detective fiction, she has to worry about real-world locations and actual police procedures and stuff like that. Some of the readers of that genre stuff at the time were really, I guess, sticklers for factual reality. Whereas in science fiction, she could just make stuff up. And it doesn’t matter if you’re coming from the sixth dimension, because nobody knows what that is.
JM:
Right.
Nate:
So at some point, when you’re dealing with future extrapolated tech, as long as it sounds plausible enough and convincing, that’s good enough. So yeah, it’s kind of an interesting contrast there. But I guess on the subject of Amazing, she says that she shall, “only say that I wish Mr. Palmer would dump the whole thing in the bay and go back to presenting his readers with a title page on which five or six names of authors occur instead of only one, that of Mr. Shaver.”
So I think she and a lot of other writers and fans at the time were really getting disillusioned by the Amazing Shaver mysteries, which might be an interesting thing to cover on the podcast later. I know we’ve alluded to it several times.
JM:
I think early on, we were more covering themes and we would have kind of been more likely to do it. But now I feel like we’ve moved on to a different level. At the same time, it would be good to kind of revisit our old level of doing things, where we’re like, who cares if it’s not good? We’ll talk about this because it’s important or whatever. We even discussed possibly looking for really, really bad examples of pulp science fiction from some of the magazines and just having a fun episode where we talk about them and trash them and stuff like that. But who knows if we’ll actually do something like that. It seems kind of fun, but at the same time, nowadays everybody’s being snarky like that, and I don’t know. I have a little bit of a misgiving about doing that. But at the same time, once you get into it, yeah, it’s pretty fun, right? But I’m the kind of person who, when I see that “Mystery Science Theater 3000” does a movie, I just kind of want to watch the original movie. I don’t want to hear the robots talking about it.
Nate:
So yeah, that’s the same. But yeah, the Shaver stuff is historically important bad stuff, because it really does seem like Amazing shot themselves in the foot big time. Pretty much killed their reputation in the science fiction community.
JM:
Yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
I mean, considering we have discussed Amazing in other episodes where we looked at when it was rising, would it be interesting to examine the fall of Amazing and how, as you said, people became disillusioned with it?
Nate:
Yeah, and it does follow up on some hollow-earth themes that we covered early on.
Yeah, so this one, “Roberta,” was published in October of 1962 in Galaxy. I wanted to take a look at this one specifically because it’s one of the earliest science fiction stories that deal with gender transition as far as building on real-world medical gender transition. You can definitely tell that it is early in the timeline here.
So I kind of want to soapbox and monologue a bit before we actually get into the story and just give a little bit of historical background as far as gender transition goes. Early surgeries were performed in the 1930s in Germany. Harry Benjamin, who is one of the major medical practitioners of early transgender medical science, starts practicing in 1938. The earliest recorded transition involving hormones is using testosterone for Michael Dillon, and then Val Barry receives estrogen treatment in 1949. But in 1952 and 1953, Christine Jorgensen’s case was very, very publicized, as she received both hormones and surgery done in Denmark under the care of Christian Hamburger, which is just a pretty hilarious name in general. This was the case that really brought both hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, and sex reassignment surgery, or SRS, into mainstream awareness in the United States.
In the late 1960s, specifically 1966, Harry Benjamin published the book “The Transsexual Phenomenon,” where he refers to himself personally treating 152 people. So there are probably only a couple of hundred transgender people in the world who received medical treatment at the time, as opposed to the millions of transgender people who have received medical treatment in the world today. So it was something very, very new and not in the popular consciousness in the way that it is today. Certainly the cases were more outliers of very, very severe gender dysphoria at the time.
So I think St. Clair is treating it as very much a novelty here. You can tell, or at least I can tell by her writing in the story, that she really doesn’t get it. There’s only so much I can excuse by its being new at the time. Proust was writing his seven-volume masterpiece “In Search of Lost Time” in the 1910s, and while he doesn’t explicitly frame his experiences as being transgender, he definitely gets it with that opening monologue in the beginning of book four. Likewise, in the 1960s science fiction world, a little bit closer in time and a little bit closer to the genre, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness,” again, doesn’t explicitly frame it in the terms of transgender experience, but she definitely gets it and understands what’s going on. If that novel were written today, she might frame it a little bit differently as far as the language.
JM:
It’s been a long time since I read “The Left Hand of Darkness,” and while I think that you’re probably right that maybe her perception of it is a bit less — well, I mean, we’ll talk about it when we talk about the story. I don’t know how negative she really felt about any of this, honestly, because the story is so short that it just kind of leaves you wondering about a lot of things. That could be both good or bad. But yeah, in Le Guin’s book, I feel like this is a natural process of the people of the planet, right? So it’s not quite the same thing. I kind of feel like St. Clair is looking at it more from the perspective of how tricky and problematic it’s been for everyone who’s tried to do it up to that point. I feel like “Roberta” is of its time and place, and that’s actually not a mark against it. I feel like it’s actually kind of important because of that.
Nate:
Well, I think what is a mark against it, in my book anyway, is that she’s very much writing about this subject matter as an outsider, whereas Le Guin clearly is not. She feels some of this stuff in her core, and even while it comes out different in her fiction, you can tell she is wrestling with these same kinds of feelings, even though her expression of it is a bit different. I mean, we’ve all read “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, right? You could easily imagine if a white author wrote that book, you might be able to end up with the same kind of plot, but the language and the understanding of what it’s like to feel that way would just be off. And this feels off to me.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Very much so.
Gretchen:
I feel like going into the story, obviously we will get more into it, because it is a very short story, so it’s hard to say too much detail without spoiling the whole thing. But I think that there is in it a kernel of a really interesting idea about the trans experience. I think there is something really fascinating that, if executed well, could be a great work. But I feel like just the way that St. Clair writes it, it comes off more as exploitative. I think that it’s because, as you said, Nate, she is tackling it from perhaps a less situated position. She is an outsider in this experience in a way that other authors wouldn’t have been.
Nate:
Right, exactly. And I think the way you do a story like this, which is why the story is so frustrating, is that, as you said, she gets very, very close to doing something that I think would be a really good horror story. This is basically a horror story at its core. The way you do a good trans horror story is you make the dysphoria the monster, in a sense, whatever form that takes, if it’s personified or if it takes some kind of external form. And I guess the trope, which again is still a very new trope at this point, but you can see previous examples here of “Psycho,” and then that carries on to “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Sleepaway Camp,” and I’m sure there are a billion others where you make the trans person themselves the monster. In this story, she kind of does both. So I mean, she’s like 50% there. But the fact that this just doesn’t get all the way there makes it clear that she’s kind of writing it from an outsider perspective.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do think that this story has a more nuanced take than, perhaps, “The Silence of the Lambs,” at least in its depiction of a trans experience. I think there’s something about it where, like, you’re right, she’s halfway there. There is something that I feel like, because of this trope and this connection between the monstrous and this villainous side and the transness, it’s like, I feel like if it was one or the other, it would have been more interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. And she did get some pushback over the story. So she wrote, “I was once accused of making a vicious and ignorant attack on sex-change operations because in a story of mine, ‘Roberta,’ written a number of years ago, I had the hero driven to a series of murders in his vain attempts to extirpate the masculine elements in himself. At least I suppose this was why the story was blameworthy. Readers ought to realize that fiction is fiction, and though one tries to make it basically true to probability and human nature, the cases that it presents may be neither typical nor universal.”
So I wasn’t really that impressed with her waving away the criticism of this. The idea of, you know, “Relax, it’s just fiction,” is really never a good defense.
Gretchen:
I also feel like it’s very telling that she still refers to Roberta in the masculine.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
As a man.
Nate:
And then that’s pretty much one of the major tells that she’s coming to this from the outside, I guess, is that she constantly does that in text in this story, which again is unfortunate because she does get close to writing a good horror story in this vein. But it’s also, again, not atypical of the time. I was talking about “The Passion of New Eve” by Angela Carter a couple episodes back. Yeah, that’s definitely a major problem with that story as well, even though that story is just way more out there and crazy and sensationalist than this one, even though this gets fairly sensationalist at times.
But yeah, so that’s kind of my soapbox monologue on this. I didn’t hate this, but it definitely kind of irked me the wrong way. It always is less than ideal when somebody writes about subjects like this from the outside. This never really lands correctly with somebody who is legitimately wrestling with these feelings. And I think that at the time, since there was a documented number of cases, probably in the dozens, maybe a couple hundred at most, of people who underwent gender transition, as far as medical transition goes at this time, then she probably thought it was a lot more rare than it is.
JM:
Yeah, Wendy Carlos hadn’t yet, as far as I know. And that was actually the first time I ever heard about somebody doing that, because my dad had a bunch of the albums, and he was trying to explain to me what happened with why Wendy wasn’t Walter anymore. And I don’t know that my dad necessarily has the greatest understanding of this either.
And I’ve been quiet up till now, more or less. I guess I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know that I fully understand the trans experience. I’m certainly not afraid of it or anything like that. I’m not bothered by it, but I can’t speak for somebody who is experiencing that. I would never want to.
Now, I will say that I’ve read a lot of Margaret St. Clair up till now, and she’s another writer where I’ve read only short stories, not any of the longer works. And yeah, I really, really like her a lot. I really think she’s good. I don’t know, I guess maybe I would say this isn’t the best place to start with her, but I didn’t dislike this story.
The thing with a lot of her stuff is that it is very short, and it leaves you questioning a lot of things. And I think when I finished this story, I really found myself thinking, well, she could have taken this so much further in so many different directions if she wanted to make it longer. But she didn’t. This story was written over fifty-something years ago now. Let’s just take it for what it is.
Yeah, I kind of wondered, how much further could this go? Is she going to continue to be a murderous psychopath, or is it going to be something else? Is something going to be realized here? And we never know, right? It’s the kind of thing where she seems to do this on purpose, because a lot of her stories are so short, and she just wants to leave you with a feeling and leave you kind of thinking about it and wondering about it.
It’s interesting hearing the quote and everything and what might have been said about this. And yeah, I mean, it is maybe unfortunate that at the very end she, that is St. Clair, misgenders the protagonist, but at the same time, you almost kind of get the feeling that she’s doing that to clear up any possible confusion that the readers might have at the very end of the story. Because I do think for the first half or so, maybe less, most people reading it now or then would be pretty confused. So she’s trying to kind of clarify all that. Maybe she doesn’t know how to do that without misgendering the protagonist at the very end.
But there’s a lot that could be said about this story. And again, I kind of find myself in a position where I feel like I want to come down on her side, because I like so much of the other stuff that she’s written, and she’s written some really amazing short stories. Maybe I would have chosen a different one to start with on the podcast.
And it’s funny because, I mean, as we’re doing this, this is not the first time this has happened. We’ve covered Lafferty, for example. When we do this together, the three of us, when I pick something, and it’s something that I know, I hope in my heart that it’s something that you guys will really like. And I guess in this situation, it’s like, well, I knew Margaret St. Clair, but I hadn’t read this particular story. Coming at this from the perspective of somebody who’s read probably a good two dozen of her short stories by now, I maybe feel a little differently about this, maybe a little more willing to come down on the positive side. But we’ll see.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, the reason I chose this wasn’t necessarily because it was an introduction to Margaret St. Clair. I wanted to do specifically something that deals with transgender themes and how they may be portrayed in a magazine like Galaxy. It just so happened that the person who wrote this story was Margaret St. Clair. I mean, it could have been Nelson Bond for all I know, you know what I mean? But this is the story that was written and published, and it really is one of the earliest stories dealing with this theme.
JM:
It’s an important story for that reason, if nothing else, right?
Nate:
Right, yeah.
So I mean, that’s why I wanted to cover this.
Gretchen:
I will say myself, like many of the authors that we have covered in this episode, I had not read any St. Clair before this. But like Kornbluth, I had come into the story having seen some of her works adapted for “Night Gallery.” I do think that those episodes are really interesting. There is the episode “Brenda,” which is adapted from her work, and rewatching it, you have a character who is pretty unlikable, an outsider character whom you’re asked to sympathize with because of this loneliness that she feels, and there is a complexity to her.
In part, I would like to feel that this is what “Roberta” could offer. But at the same time, I feel like seeing that done much better and executed in a better way, I think it feels maybe a little disappointing that this story isn’t as complex as a story like that. I still have enjoyed the other works that — because I also did read in the Galaxy compilation, they have another story by St. Clair, “Horrer Howce.” And I really enjoyed that. I think that is a really good story and really interesting with its metaphors. I think I would be interested in reading more of St. Clair, but this definitely, to me, is the weakest of the stories that we’ve read for this episode.
Nate:
Yeah, I would agree. And my criticism here isn’t to say that Margaret St. Clair is a bad writer or a bad person, but that she, in this, oversteps her bounds a little bit. She wrote 130 short stories, and not every one of them is going to be a hit. Sometimes she writes in areas where she doesn’t really know the subject matter. She doesn’t feel it personally. And that’s very, very clear from reading this.
It’s kind of unfortunate that this is one of the first major stories to deal with this theme, but we’re a history podcast, so it’s good to talk about how this plays out in the course of science fiction history. And I think it’s relatively important to talk about that and to bring that out in our discussions here, because yeah, it’s an important subject to me personally.
JM:
That’s definitely fair. I can kind of see, I guess, why somebody might think a little negatively of this. But at the same time, I also feel like maybe despite everything, and despite the fact that she’s painting her protagonist as being a psychopath, I do think that there’s a certain amount of sympathy within those few pages. And I don’t think we’re supposed to find her reprehensible, necessarily, one hundred percent. I think her desperation and fear, feeling like she has to be on the run from everything and all that, comes through in the story.
And I also really like the way St. Clair does this pretty often, but she starts the story in medias res, and you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on as you go. You’re piecing it together little bit by little bit. And I will say occasionally St. Clair is — and again, I’m thinking of another story that I read since reading “Roberta.” It reminded me a lot of “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, but it was a short story, and it was different. It was just kind of a vague connection.
But I’ve said before on the podcast, because I was reading a Margaret St. Clair short story collection, that some stuff she did reminded me a fair bit of Bradbury. But it’s its own thing. I mean, one of the reviews I read of one of her collections talks about how all these men, authors who write the introductions to her work and stuff, all they can do is compare her to other writers. And I kind of get that. I kind of feel like it’s unfair to compare her that much to Bradbury.
But I do feel like, despite the praise that I also feel for Bradbury, and despite even Lafferty saying how much he likes Bradbury, and I get that, something like “Fahrenheit 451” is not a very subtle book. And sometimes I feel like maybe St. Clair is kind of like that. She’s trying to make some kind of statement, and she’s a bit on the nose. It could be a little more complex, but maybe because she’s writing in such a short format and she wants to get something across, she’s a little bit like this story, I can’t remember the name of it now, but it was basically another world like “The Space Merchants” by Kornbluth and Pohl, where advertising basically runs everything, and the family groups get a new mother and father, and they rotate, and the family groups are everything. They’re supposed to be into whatever’s new, and they’re all supposed to memorize advertising slogans, and it’s a game they play every night where they’re supposed to memorize all their slogans. And the biggest dream is for the youngest child to be an ad man or something when he grows up.
Her story is basically like, well, this girl wants something different, and she wants the old doll. She doesn’t care about the new stuff, and she’s like an outsider because she wants that connection with that thing that she knew. She doesn’t care about the slogans. She doesn’t want the new stuff. And then at the end, it spreads to one of the boy children, and he’s got all these books about becoming a great advertising person, and he’s just sad in the end. It’s not the most subtle social commentary, I guess, but it’s cool that it’s there. I don’t necessarily fault it for that. And again, when you’re working with a format that’s deliberately short, sometimes maybe you have to be very pointed with this kind of stuff.
I don’t really know how strongly she feels about this, if she feels like dysphoria leads to suicidal, murderous thoughts and all this stuff. And I don’t know, right? Some of the comments that the character makes toward the end seem to ring true to me, like all this stuff about masks and stuff like that, and how, like, when do you stop? When do you stop running? When can you possibly take off the last mask? I don’t know, it doesn’t seem totally out of bounds to me. But again, I don’t know. I can’t pretend to have a full understanding of the depth of this subject, especially from a contemporary perspective.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the reasons why this story is frustrating, because it does come close to really landing. But just a lot of the things with how she writes it, and just how it comes off, you can tell that she’s going on other people’s accounts rather than experiencing these feelings herself. It definitely lands differently when that’s the case, and that’s very, very obvious to me reading this.
(music: turbulent piercing)
spoiler summary and discussion
Nate:
All right, so this is really quite short. This is another one of these stories that you could probably read in like ten minutes. So Robert and Roberta are in an intense dialogue with one another. Married? No, not quite, but two voices in one head. Robert has undergone a sex-change operation, but it sounds like Roberta, her new name, is also dueling personalities within the same body, a bit reminiscent of “The Soul-Giver.”
Rodvorello Dlag shows up with a ticket off Earth to go to Vega, and like all Vegans — I never really know how say it “VEE-gans” or “VAY-gans”; “VEE-gans” just makes it sound like he’s not eating meat — but from the star system Vega, he’s a collector. And she’s going to be part of his collection, as Dlag says that he collects imitation things, which is an incredibly rude thing to say to a trans woman. In her mind, Dlag starts to resemble Robert, so she just shoots him in the forehead, killing him near instantly.
But now what? Roberta stuffs him in a chest, and after putting on makeup and giving herself an HRT injection, the voice of Robert comes back. So Roberta is going crazy. She thought she killed him, but Robert tells her, don’t kill anybody else.
If she kills herself, she’ll surely make Robert go away permanently. She tries the paring knife to do so, but is interrupted by the door buzzer. The knife falls into the garbage disposal, and it’s Clement Thomas at the door. So Clement Thomas was her SRS surgeon, whose performance of the operation was quite illegal, and he says if he goes to the authorities, he could clear his conscience, but it would mean trouble for her.
Roberta’s confused. What’s illegal about an abortion? This startles Thomas, who asks her, don’t you remember? She’d approached him six months prior, desperately wanting SRS. And of course, it’s not Clement Thomas, it’s Robert again. So she again shoots Robert, this time in the throat. He dies slowly and painfully in a series of convulsions, “masculine knots,” and again she stuffs him in the same chest where she’s stuffed Robert number one.
The voice of Robert comes back. They have to run to survive, but no matter where they go, Robert will always be there. And the story ends with her saying, “I’ll kill you yet, Robert,” with Roberta cursing to herself.
So again, very, very short. It’s very, very much in a horror-story mode here, with the grisly murders that our protagonist commits. And again, yeah, this is frustrating to me because she does go into the idea that the dysphoria itself can be the monster, and manifests itself as this disembodied voice of something that she just can’t kill, that she wants to get rid of. But I don’t know, there’s something with her prose. It just does not land one hundred percent in the way that I think it could in the hands of a different author.
Gretchen:
What I find really interesting about this story is, it is interesting, this idea of dysphoria that is haunting her, haunting Roberta. But I think also what’s really interesting, especially because the two people that she kills are these people who are from her life before she transitioned and got this surgery to present as a woman, is that in here is a very interesting idea that relates to the trans experience. There will always be sort of this before coming out and after, where even though, for someone who is trans, they may have always been the person that they are when they come out, there will always be this identity that people placed upon them beforehand. Robert will always exist in the minds of the people who knew Roberta before she came out. And I think that is a really interesting idea that St. Clair hints at with this, but I do think that the execution just falls for me.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, there are little things like that where, again, if framed slightly differently, I think this could have been a really, really strong and powerful story. Because, like you said, yeah, the seeds and the kernels are here for sure, but it just doesn’t land in the way that it could, I don’t think. And yeah, I mean, you could even do something with this exact same plot. Like I said with the “Invisible Man” comparison, if you imagine a white author writing that, yeah, maybe you could get something similar plot-wise, but just the vibes would be off, and they definitely feel a little bit off to me here. Not necessarily anything wrong with the plot as is, per se.
I mean, yeah, making the dysphoria the monster this early on, I think, is a really good choice to do, and it’s how you should do this story. And even the fact that she’s a murderer isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself.
Gretchen:
Especially when I think that the people she does murder in the story are people who are obviously trying to exploit her. They are people who are trying to exploit her specifically because she is trans and because they know she’s trans. These are very discriminatory experiences for her. And I think that, yeah, if that had been done well, it would have been a really great story.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it just makes me think of “Hellraiser.” You know, I mean, the kind of point of the story is Frank tries to live a heteronormative life after coming back from hell, I guess. “The Hellbound Heart” isn’t really super explicit about it, but it’s very obvious that it is due to queerness that he is condemned to hell and torment. He claws his way out and tries to live in the normal world in a heteronormative relationship. And by doing so, he kills everybody that he cares about and destroys everything he loves.
The fact that Frank is the murderous monster works in the context of the story because the horror comes from a legitimate place of wrestling with the queer experience and the external struggles that it brings about. It feels authentic and really powerful for the reason that Barker himself is gay and writing about the story from a place of sincerity rather than outsider sensationalism, which definitely seems to be, to me anyway, where St. Clair is coming from with this one.
JM:
The story’s only, I don’t know how many pages long it’ll be, but maybe not even ten pages, right? And I was bewildered for maybe almost half of it, just totally scratching my head like, wow, this is interesting, what’s happening, right? And I thought that maybe Robert was her husband or something like that, and he was speaking to her from beyond, or something like that. What’s going on, right? And eventually, yeah, I kind of pieced it together. I’m like, oh, okay, so I think I kind of get it now. And then, yeah, at the end, it’s kind of confirmed.
But yeah, I mean, actually, I did enjoy that aspect. And I also think she reacts kind of naturally. The Vegan guy shows up and he’s like, I helped you get this operation because now you’re an imitation person. And what do you do when somebody tells you that to your face? I don’t know, you go and shoot them, right? I don’t know, it sort of makes sense to me.
So I don’t know, I like this story. It’s kind of frustrating because once I figured it out, once I’m like, oh, so that’s what’s going on, all of a sudden I thought to myself, oh, so this is going to be a novel, right? We’re going to find out about her journey, how she gets to travel, and what’s going to go on, what’s going to happen to Robert’s voice. Is it going to disappear? And it’s like, no, no, it’s over, right? That’s it. Normally I have to be like, yeah, I’m happy with that, right? I’m happy with the length of the story. But yeah, this could definitely have been something more, right? It could have been a lot more.
I’m not necessarily sure if I’m unhappy with the length. I don’t know. I can see why perhaps the fact that it’s undeveloped might be contributing to negative feelings about the story, because I do really think that just when you realize what’s happening, that’s when it’s over. And I do think maybe that in itself is a worthy thing to do, but it’s also a limitation here because, especially from a 2026 perspective, maybe we would like to go further. Maybe we would like to see where she can take this concept, and maybe after a 200-page novel, we could decide how Margaret St. Clair really feels about this, and what’s going to happen to the protagonist, and whether it’s going to be a horror story throughout, right? Because it’s like a horror story for ten pages, but lots of things are horror for ten pages, and then they’re something else.
And yeah, I guess it’s too brief. Knowing Margaret St. Clair, or at least knowing her work, knowing that she’s a really cool writer and she’s very creative and unpredictable, and she does often end her stuff in this way where you’re left uncertain about a lot of things. She doesn’t really end things in a pat way, and she doesn’t do the traditional thing where there’s a twist at the end and you’re like, oh no, the twist, right? She doesn’t really do that. She ends things in a way where you’re kind of just left, what’s next? You’re wondering what’s next. And I admire that in a lot of ways.
But yeah, I guess I have to admit that after reading this, I did feel like, when I read my stuff electronically, sometimes I have no idea when something is going to finish. And so when I read this story, I didn’t know how short it was exactly. And I’m kind of thinking to myself, wow, this is really interesting. How far is this going to go? And then it’s just over.
And I guess I did feel like, wow, I liked it, that’s cool. I enjoyed the disorientation, and then coming to the end of this disorientation and realizing what this was really all about. But I also wanted more, right? I wanted to know where she could take this, and she didn’t take it anywhere. So I guess, to me, that’s the negative side of the story, because yeah, I think that she could have.
I don’t necessarily think that she’s a total outsider. I don’t think she’s necessarily unsympathetic toward Roberta. I feel like there is some sympathy there. But again, it’s just over so quick that it’s like, you don’t really get to see anything much after the ultimate revelation of what’s going on. And she again feels the need to clarify it at the very end of the story by doing this misgendering thing. And I guess it’s like, maybe the audience in 1962 did need a bit of that. Maybe they were probably confused by the story for longer than I was.
And I also can’t speak to this experience. I know people who can, but I’m not really comfortable saying that I can relate to it one hundred percent. So perhaps the audience back then would have felt very differently about this, and the fact that it’s one of the first of its kind.
Nate, nobody else besides you has made me want to read “Remembrance of Things Past” as much as you have. I haven’t read that.
Nate:
Well, it’s a million words, you know, quick, easy read. But yeah, it’s one of the best works ever written by anybody. I really can’t recommend it enough. It’s not entirely accurate to say that nothing happens, but yeah, nothing happens in the novel. And it’s amazing. It’s just absolutely amazing. Proust is just an incredible, incredible writer who has no equal.
And yeah, his musings on what he termed homosexuality, which he defines as “invert,” very, very much maps to the transgender experience. And I think volume four — well, it’s hard to say when it was written because Proust was one of these guys who was a serial rewriter, and he would just rewrite and rewrite everything, which is why the entire series survives even though he died before volume five was published. He just had a whole bunch of unfinished drafts that were more or less finished novels. He just kind of rewrote volumes one through four so many times that they slightly changed in different ways over the years.
But yeah, definitely the 1910s when that stuff was being written. So it’s incredibly, incredibly early, before anybody was pursuing medical transition of any kind for sure. But the fact that he obviously felt this stuff is very, very obvious from how it comes off in the writing. And even though he considered himself gay in real life, he lived in a society that repressed it to the point where he felt the urge to fight a duel with somebody who accused him of being gay. So yeah, very, very different time.
But yeah, the fact that he felt those feelings, and you can see Ursula K. Le Guin feeling this stuff, it just comes off different in a way that this doesn’t. And I don’t disagree that St. Clair is ultimately sympathetic to Roberta, but at the same time, sympathy and being an insider, so to speak, aren’t exactly the same thing. And to me, that’s very, very different.
JM:
Yeah, very fair.
Gretchen:
I definitely also do feel that you are supposed to sympathize with Roberta. My experience with St. Clair is pretty limited, but I do feel like seeing “Brenda,” it does seem like St. Clair does have you sympathize with characters that are considered unconventional and considered maybe not too likable, that do have flaws and are very complex. I think it’s more just the presentation of Roberta.
And perhaps I can kind of see, as you were saying, JM, this could also just be the way that Margaret St. Clair had to write this for an audience that would be less familiar with the trans experience and perhaps would maybe not have caught on as clearly. I feel like perhaps just because of my own perspective in 2026, I feel like I pretty quickly caught on to what was happening, but that necessarily wouldn’t be the case in the 1960s. But I still feel the presentation of it almost feels like the fact that she is trans, that Roberta’s trans, is almost a shock in itself. And I feel like it almost sometimes reads as using her transness for shock value.
Nate:
Yeah, and I mean, likewise, I wasn’t really confused by this, just due to my own experiences and all that. But yeah, I mean, there were probably less than 500 people in the world at the time, maybe even less than that, who had medically transitioned. And I think the Christine Jorgensen case was really the only one that was massively publicized.
I mean, I think Wendy Carlos was in the process of transitioning in 1962, but maybe not even that early. And she certainly still didn’t come out for years later. Then Lynn Conway started to transition in the late 1960s, and she didn’t come out until like 2000 or so, until some investigative journalist caught on to her story and basically tried to blackmail her. And she was like, no, fuck you, I’m coming out on my own terms.
So yeah, I mean, it’s not like there were a lot of high-profile cases out there in 1962. So I think that she was really treating this as a novelty, as something that happens very, very, very infrequently. And to be fair, very, very few people did go through this process in the early 1960s, especially compared to now, where there are literally millions of people who have undergone transition in some form or another.
But yeah, I mean, I’m critical of this story, and I’m not saying Margaret St. Clair is a bad person or a bad writer, but to me, it just doesn’t land in the same way that it could have in the hands of a different author. But I think it’s still important to cover and talk about due to the subject matter and due to its place in a magazine like Galaxy.
JM:
Yeah, how cool is it that Galaxy even — like, here we are in 2026, we’re talking about this story in Galaxy from 1962, and we’re covering six stories in this block, and quite a lot of them we’ve had a lot to talk about. I mean, I’ve been reading through some of the Planet Stories stuff, and I really, really enjoy Planet Stories. I enjoy a lot of the stuff in there. Not all the writing is great. Some of it’s kind of bad. I enjoy reading those kinds of stories, but there just isn’t a lot beyond what the story is, right? Like, you can’t really sit here and talk for forty minutes about a ten-page story. This is really cool, I think.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, hitting a Venusian in the head with a club while wearing a loincloth, there’s only so much you can talk about with that. But yeah, these stories have a lot of really interesting ideas in them, and I think that’s one really cool thing that Galaxy was doing at the time, that they’re really trying to differentiate themselves from the pack of the space westerns and the planetary romances, as fun as that stuff can be seventy-five years later in retrospect.
Gretchen:
Yeah, as much as I have been critical of this story, I feel like the ideas in it, and perhaps my thoughts upon it, I think that I will be thinking about the story a little more than some other stories that you might find, as you were saying, in something like Planet Stories, or even some of the other stories that we’ve covered for some of the pulp magazines. I think that, with this one, I do have respect for St. Clair for attempting to cover this subject, even if it perhaps reads differently in our modern day.
JM:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s really short, and I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t start with this if you want to read Margaret St. Clair, just in general. But if you want to follow along with us, and you’re just wanting to see an important story in the history of science fiction, maybe, yeah, reading this is not such a bad idea. And obviously, if you come at St. Clair from some of the other stuff — I don’t know, I didn’t really prepare a list of titles — but one of the stories that I was thinking of was “An Egg a Month from All Over,” which is also a really short story.
And when we were going to do this block of episodes, I was thinking, well, we would like to get some Margaret St. Clair on there. I would like to because I really enjoyed her. But again, this is not a story I had read before, and I totally understand why you chose it, Nate. Again, I don’t think I disliked the story, but yeah, maybe I would say she probably has stories that I would suggest you read before this one if you just want to get into a really cool writer.
But again, this story has historical relevance in science fiction, so it’s not necessarily a bad place to start either, depending on your perspective. But yeah, I like Margaret St. Clair a lot, so I’m kind of again in that position where I feel like I have to stand up for the writer, even though you guys like her, you like this story, but you haven’t read anything else yet, and maybe this story paints just a little bit of a negative connotation in a certain sense, maybe.
Nate:
No, I don’t think so. I mean, like I said, she wrote 130 short stories, and not every one of them is going to stick, and that’s totally fine. Not everything has to be a masterpiece.
Gretchen:
Yeah, as I said, after reading the story, I had read “Horrer Howce,” and I thought that was a really good story. It’s sort of the Sturgeon’s Law of short stories of any author, where some are not going to be too great. There are going to be some failures in there.
JM:
Yeah, so there are like two major collections of Margaret St. Clair that I’ve got, and one of them is a shorter one, and it’s got a lot of stories. It’s neat because you can see her grow as a writer, and you can see when she gets into more of the Wiccan stuff in the 1960s and how that influences her writing and stuff like that. It’s pretty neat.
But yeah, there’s her story “Brenda,” which was on “Night Gallery,” which is a really weird one. There’s other stuff from around that. There’s a story — I can’t remember the name of the story, but I remember reading it and thinking like, did Stephen King like this story? This is like him, but it’s from the perspective of a woman who’s raising her family all by herself in the middle of this valley in the middle of nowhere, and these aliens show up. And I really feel like her perspective is pretty awesome, more so than some other writers. I actually really feel like she brings something new, not necessarily feminist, but her perspective is definitely different than what a lot of the men would have been writing at the time.
And she’s not afraid to discuss things that other people wouldn’t discuss, and even talk about kind of sexual subjects in the 1950s, and kind of work around certain aspects in a way that she can still include them in the stories. And she loves weird animals. She was into dog breeding and plant rearing and stuff like that, and a lot of her stories involve animals or weird plants and stuff like that. That’s something that she seems to be really into. So a lot of her stories have weird, unique animals.
She’s got a story in “The Big Book of Science Fiction.” I think it was originally — I’m not sure if it was in Galaxy or not — but it was a story called “Prott.” And it’s basically about people who have been hearing about the Prott, which is this weird life somewhere out in space. They float around in space, and they are telepathic, and they communicate this weird feeling of wanting to be close. It’s almost like a sexual feeling, but anytime any of the humans make telepathic contact with them and start to kind of question that and ask about the feeling, the aliens kind of shy away and they don’t want to talk about it and stuff like that.
I like what she does a lot. Sometimes the social commentary stories are not the subtlest, but I enjoy them too because of how she’s willing to address certain things. And especially during the 1950s, for example, they were very prominent. We talked about this when we did the Kornbluth story, but I kind of feel like there was a video posted on YouTube lately by a commentator that I like. And the video was like, “Were the 1950s Really That Great?” And I guess he got some pushback for the title or something, but he changed the title to something like, “Why Do Conservatives Love the 1950s So Much?” or something like that. And it was a really interesting switch.
I ended up asking my friend, well, neither of us were alive back then, but you’re a little older than I am. Do you really feel like your parents’ generation or my parents’ generation, did they really love the 1950s that much, and why? It’s a really interesting question. But there’s a lot of stuff that we know from the modern era that was just kind of being born back then. There was obviously, again, bringing up the advertising stuff because it seems a big deal with Pohl especially as well. But again, before the 1950s, that was very different. Now, bringing in television and everything else, the whole capitalist attempt to get people to buy lots of stuff really seemed to kick into overdrive. The politics, and the fact that, yeah, in the late 1950s, we got Ayn Rand and her Objectivism, which seems to have been such a big influence on the modern capitalist oligarchs and everything like that.
And the 1950s was a big time, and Galaxy was right there. And yeah, this story is a little bit after that, but Margaret St. Clair had already been writing for a good fifteen years. She had her social commentary stories and everything like that. And I don’t know, this was an interesting one. I enjoyed the discussion. I’m glad that you picked this one, Nate.
So if you guys want to close this one, we can talk about Ted Sturgeon again for the first time since way back in, was it 2021? We did “Ether Breather,” Nate, you and I?
Nate:
It’s been a while, yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, before I was here.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
That was his first story published in Astounding. Not his first story published, because he did a lot of newspaper stuff, but that was way back in 1939. Now we’re looking at 1970, so this is going to be really something special. So really happy to be revisiting Sturgeon, and we’ll be back in just a moment.
Bibliography:
St. Clair, Margaret - "Wight in Space: An Autobiographical Sketch" from "Fantastic Lives - Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science Fiction Writers" (1981)
St. Clair, Margaret - "Twenty-Seven Captured Suns" (1947)
St. Clair, Margaret - "Supplement to Twenty-Seven Captured Suns" (1947)
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