These 5 short stories and short novel from Margaret St. Clair, range in time from 1949 to 1964, and vary wildly in quality, type and tone. Even the short novel, Message from the Eocene, begins as an SF story about an alien attempting to deliver a book from the stars to a city while beset by lightning bolts hurled by another alien race, on an Earth before life began. From there, without leaving the main character, it becomes a haunted house story in the 1800s, then another haunting in the 1960s, and I won't spoil how it ends, except to say that everything seems to be made up as St. Clair goes along, the ending most of all. The writing style of the opening and final episodes seem straight from 1930s American SF, while the middle episodes read more in line with the late 1950s. Two stars at best for Message as a curio.

The five stories in Three Worlds of Futurity (Venus, Mars, and Earth) are more interesting. In chronological order. I can't decide if Idris' Pig (originally The Sacred Martian Pig in Startling Stories) was meant to be a spoof or a screwball comedy. The setting is pure Brackett planetary romance, but the plot is pure Bringing Up Baby, as the hapless hero, duped into delivering a stinky miniature living Martian pig, is dragged along for quite a ride by a lively but mysterious woman. Idris by the way was a pen name of St. Clair's. The Everlasting Food is from 1950 (Thrilling Wonder Stories) but reads like 1930. It is set on Venus, and is about a man whose Senhedin wife loses her race's special self-defining Seeing and what happens next. Like Message, it's fantasy, in the guise of SF. The Island of the Hands from 1952 is a "what happens if you can make you wish come true" story from Weird Tales. With the next story, The Rages (Rations of Tantalus in Fantastic Universe) from 1954 is dramatically different and more modern. The SF idea is standard: a future where almost everyone depends on pills to manage everything, including "the cycle," but most critically, euphoria pills to manage episodes of rage that eventually destroy one's personality. Not surprisingly the hero begins to learn that perhaps the pills are making things worse. What's really surprising is how explicit the discussion of sexual urges and repression are in this story. In the earlier stories, following pulp formula and, apparently St. Clair's own personal interests, nudity is prominent but sex pretty absent. In The Rages, the very first paragraph lays the foundation for the study of perfect appearance versus sweaty sex. The hero rising in the morning considers his wife in bed, with whom he has not had intercourse in years: "Love is beautiful, wholesome, lovely, a wonderful experience. So they both thought. But somehow... And then, love might have rumpled the bed." Finally, Roberta (1962) is a typical Galaxy short story, in the vein of Bester's Fondly Fahrenheit. Three stars for this collection, for the last two stories primarily. ( )