On This Day: Margaret St Clair

On this day, twenty-one years ago, Margaret St Clair died.

Her science fiction career began with ‘Rocket to Limbo’for Fantastic Adventures in November 1946, and she became a prolific writer of short fiction during the next decade and a half – both under her own name and under the pseudonym Idris Seabright. As The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes:

The Idris Seabright stories appeared almost exclusively in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning with “The Listening Child” (December 1950 F&SF) and ending with ‘Graveyard Shift’ (February 1959 F&SF): St Clair became temporarily better known for these than for the works published under her own name. They were smoother-textured than her pulp adventures and oriented more towards Fantasy, even Slick Fantasy in tales like ‘The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles’ (October 1951 F&SF), and were less confrontational than her signed work.

So well-received were her Seabright stories that F&SF editor Anthony Boucher once uipped that Margaret’s husband, Eric St Clair, was ‘enviably married to two of my favourite science fiction writers’.

After which (informative, we hope) preamble, we are delighted to announce that SF Gateway has acquired rights in Margaret St Clair‘s eight novels:

1. Agent of the Unknown
2. The Green Queen
3. The Games of Neith
4. Sign of the Labrys
5. Message from the Eocene
6. The Dolphins of Altair
7. The Shadow People
8. The Dancers of Noyo

and three collections:
1. Three Worlds of Futurity
2. Change the Sky and Other Stories
3. The Best of Margaret St Clair

We are busily gathering scanning copies and will be publishing as soon as we can in the New Year.