Margaret St Clair – författare

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 foll - 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 focusing on him and his living puppet - and that he had to discover the doll''s super-scientific secret before his own life was smashed into atoms.

Bonnar had created the Green Queen thoughtlessly - all part of a day''s work. But when his brain-child became a full-grown Frankenstein''s 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 that 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.

Did she hold the key to ecstasy - or to horror?The people of Gwethym were highly intelligent, rational beings. They worshiped the goddess Neith, not because they believed in such a golden-haired being, but because they recognised 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, in the image of their goddess Neith, walked across the waters of the harbour and into their city! Then their trouble was two-fold. 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?

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 Desponia . . .

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 years, 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 ancient promise from the stars, had to tell them of it. But . . . how?

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 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 . . .

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 count not know whom his search would destroy: the Dancers . . . or himself.

On Venus: An ancient and powerful Venusian race finds its ultimate evolution - but can they accept it?On Mars: The people of the Fourth Planet are eminently reasonable in all things - except for the cult of the Sacred Martian Pig, for which ''fanatic'' would be entirely too reasonable a word.And on Earth: On the unknown world of one or ten centuries from now, the strangest stories of all become haunting, fascinating reality, as we find out that human beings are, after all, the most alien of creatures . . .

Change the Sky is a collection in which you will find:- A man who has spent his life searching for the world of his dreams and got exactly what he wanted- A women who found the people around her so boring she changed them- A righteous minister who preached an old-fashioned Christmas and started an energy crisis - 2000 years in the future

Margaret St Clair is best known for her shorter science fiction and fantasy, much of the latter written under the pen name of Idris Seabright. She has a remarkably ironic sense of humor, and many of her stories have social or philosophical themes. 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)

We’ve increased our temporal range to the point where it’s not at all unusual to meet active and alert people who’ve passed the century mark. Society has done that by a system of care which is pre-prenatal, by seeing to it that every human being grows up in the best possible environment and receives the best possible nutrition, and by prophylactic measures of all possible sorts. In a word, we’ve eliminated from human life all the stresses and strains which can be eliminated. And that’s the nearest to immortality we’ll ever get.