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Don Haig, hayatına bir kadın girene kadar eğlence gezegeni Fyon'un kumsalında yaşıyor ve içip sızmaktan başka bir şey düşünmüyordu. Bu kadın, koca evrende gördüğü en güzel kadındı... Don'un bütün yaşantısını kökünden değiştiren bir kadındı...
Kadın, küçük bir bebekten başka bir şey değişdi, ama gözlerinden sürekli yaşlar boşanıyor ve Don Haig'in yaşantısını değiştiriyor, ona anlayamadığı bir güç kazandırıyordu...
Fakat Don, bu bebek kadının ne kadar büyük tehlikeler yaratabileceğini hissediyordu. Kadının süper-sırrını bulup ortaya çıkarttığı zaman kendi hayatının sona ereceğini bilemezdi...
Mahkûmlar gezegenine adımını atar atmaz, bebeğin önemini kavramıştı. Karşılaştığı herkes, bu ağlayan bebeği eline geçirmek istiyordu, ama onu Don'un arzusu olmadan kimse elinden alamazdı...
Kadın, küçük bir bebekten başka bir şey değişdi, ama gözlerinden sürekli yaşlar boşanıyor ve Don Haig'in yaşantısını değiştiriyor, ona anlayamadığı bir güç kazandırıyordu...
Fakat Don, bu bebek kadının ne kadar büyük tehlikeler yaratabileceğini hissediyordu. Kadının süper-sırrını bulup ortaya çıkarttığı zaman kendi hayatının sona ereceğini bilemezdi...
Mahkûmlar gezegenine adımını atar atmaz, bebeğin önemini kavramıştı. Karşılaştığı herkes, bu ağlayan bebeği eline geçirmek istiyordu, ama onu Don'un arzusu olmadan kimse elinden alamazdı...
- GenresScience Fiction
160 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1956
38 people want to read
About the author
Margaret St. Clair
155 books58 followersMargaret St. Clair (February 17, 1911 Huchinson, Kansas - November 22, 1995 Santa Rosa, CA) was an American science fiction writer, who also wrote under the pseudonyms Idris Seabright and Wilton Hazzard.
Born as Margaret Neeley, she married Eric St. Clair in 1932, whom she met while attending the University of California, Berkeley. In 1934 she graduated with a Master of Arts in Greek classics.
She started writing science fiction with the short story "Rocket to Limbo" in 1946. Her most creative period was during the 1950s, when she wrote such acclaimed stories as "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" (1951), "Brightness Falls from the Air" (1951), "An Egg a Month from All Over" (1952), and "Horrer Howce" (1956). She largely stopped writing short stories after 1960. The Best of Margaret St. Clair (1985) is a representative sampler of her short fiction.
Apart from more than 100 short stories, St. Clair also wrote nine novels. Of interest beyond science fiction is her 1963 novel Sign of the Labrys, for its early use of Wicca elements in fiction.
Her interests included witchcraft, nudism, and feminism. She and her husband decided to remain childless.
Born as Margaret Neeley, she married Eric St. Clair in 1932, whom she met while attending the University of California, Berkeley. In 1934 she graduated with a Master of Arts in Greek classics.
She started writing science fiction with the short story "Rocket to Limbo" in 1946. Her most creative period was during the 1950s, when she wrote such acclaimed stories as "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" (1951), "Brightness Falls from the Air" (1951), "An Egg a Month from All Over" (1952), and "Horrer Howce" (1956). She largely stopped writing short stories after 1960. The Best of Margaret St. Clair (1985) is a representative sampler of her short fiction.
Apart from more than 100 short stories, St. Clair also wrote nine novels. Of interest beyond science fiction is her 1963 novel Sign of the Labrys, for its early use of Wicca elements in fiction.
Her interests included witchcraft, nudism, and feminism. She and her husband decided to remain childless.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 25, 2019
140817: why have i never heard of this? if you did not have the author name this could be an excellent early philip k dick. uses the usual tropes of sf pulps but immediately subverts them. protagonist is slacker known for drinking, plot a mystery to him as well, paranoia does not mean you have no enemies, big changes in small packages... not a word in excess. not a character rounded. concise, quick, comic, quirky... best of the woman-authored ace paperbacks (1956) i have yet read in current project...
June 1, 2017
Agent of the Unknown was originally published in Startling Stories in 1951. This was an abridged form and the full novel was issued as part of an Ace double book five years later with Philip K. Dick's The World Jones Made. As this novel was written in the midst of her most prolific writing period, it seems the best place to end the series.
Agent begins with Don Haing waking up on the beach. He's hung-over again and desperately in need of a drink. Don's a beach bum, who makes his money finding objects tourists have left in the sand and selling them to anyone who will buy. But this is no regular beach. He's stuck on Fyon, an artificial planetoid created as a resort for the wealthy. Needless to say, the novel takes place in the distant future.
But Don's luck has changed: he's found the most wonderful miniature doll buried in the sand on the beach where he sleeps every night. No bigger than the length of his hand, the doll resemblesthe perfect form of a nude woman. And she's weeping, or at least seems to be weeping. Sure this doll will bring him some cash, Don takes it to his friend Kunitz, who lives in a small house by the beach. Kunitz informs him the doll is priceless; the only other one like it exists in a museum on Earth. Both were made by Vulcan, a master craftsman who lives on the edge of galaxy.
Although Don wants to sell the doll, he discovers he can't. A tourist who tries to take it off him gets an electrical shock. Soon, Don notices that his alcohol craving has disappeared. He takes a job as a short-order cook at a local bar and shows the doll to the bar owner. Once the bar owner sees the doll, he too becomes fascinated with it. It's not long before everyone Don meets wants the doll. Eventually, The SSP, the only organized force in the galaxy, starts sending out agents who are determined to get the doll away from Don at any cost.
St. Clair shows her classics background in this novel. The craftsman who makes the doll is known as Vulcan (Roman god of metal work). One of the villains in the story has the name Mulciber (another title for Vulcan). The prison planetoid where the SSP takes their victims is known as Phelegthon, one of the five underworld rivers in Greek mythology. The final appearance of Vulcan at the novel's conclusion resembles something out of Bulfinch.
One again, the future looks bleak. Most of the people can't read, using "isotypes". After a plague, known as pyrexia, has killed the bulk of humanity, the SSP (Special Serum Purveyance) remains the only government in the galaxy. The SSP controls all scientific research with an iron fist and rigidly hunts down any mutants. Psychotropic drugs keep the population in line. But change is coming.
A solid book with a powerful conclusion.
April 2, 2023
They don't write 'em like this anymore ... You may decide for yourself if that's a good thing, or a bad thing.
This novella from the mid-1950s is a novelty because it's a "two-fer" -- Agent of the Unknown is back-to-back with a lesser-known Philip K. Dick novel. (When I say "back-to-back," the two novels are upside-down, relative to each other -- you read one, turn it over, and read the other. Cute. Seeing only the back cover, my husband asked, hesitantly, Why are you reading that book upside-down? Bless him, I think he was worried about me .... )
Anyway, enough about Interesting Publishing Wheezes of the 1950s -- what about the novel?
Well, yeah. Interesting. Sort of. Actually, it's terrible. At 126 pages, it's either a failed novel, that rushes through what could be its best points, or an overblown novella, that tries to cram too much in. Either way, sadly, unsatisfactory. But it IS interesting in a "Whither SF?" sort of way.
I say "sadly" unsatisfactory, because it has some nice, sophisticated touches that hint at better things to come for SF (and, perhaps, better things that Margaret St Clair could be capable of). Published in 1956, St Clair was writing at a time when the New Wave would change SF forever. Authors like J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Ursula LeGuin, and M. John Harrison would up SF's game in characterization, world building and attitude, shaking it out of the "golly gosh gee whiz" of the Golden Age. And I say this as someone who likes nothing better than a bit of golly gosh gee whiz. The New Wave kept the wonder, and added new levels of darkness, more realistic psychology, and a good helping of political and social relevance, thus re-booting Space Opera with a more mature, darker core.
In Agent of the Unknown, St Clair incorporates some of this darkness. For example, the protagonist, Don Haig, is an alcoholic beach bum, sleeping in a lean-to on the sugary-sand beach of (oh, yeah, and I have to quote here) "the pleasure planetoid Foyn," waking each dawn to an alcohol haze, and schemes for how he will mooch the price of a drink off the other permanent residents of this down on its luck tourist destination.
So, immediately, St Claire is making some brave choices here: Don isn't your typical Golden Era protagonist, all noble instincts and chiselled jaw. He's a drunk, he's a mess, and at the beginning of the novel, only interested in where his next drink is coming from. Don is a sad case. And Foyn ("the pleasure planetoid" .... ) isn't much better; no Star Trek's Risa, glossy and harmless Las Vegas of the Stars, but a dark spot on humankind's expansion into the galaxy, a sad place where flotsam like Don wash up and are exploited or sneered at by the 1%.
Besides Don's personal hard times, the universe he lives in doesn't sound that great -- a mysterious cult called the SSP is the Big Bad, kidnapping and, one assumes, killing people with even the mildest genetic mutation. It's a given that they have a network of spies and informants who instill fear, even in this backwater, and it's hinted that they have manipulated a galaxy-wide population to limit intellectual curiosity and destroy literacy. (A nice, genuinely prescient touch: most people are illiterate, relying on emoji-like ideograms for communicating.)
BUT, while brave choices are good, they really need to hang on the scaffolding of a story that works, and (preferably) plausible world-building. I felt that St Clair was making it up as she went along, with plot points large and details small --throwing things at the page and seeing if they stick. Don has become a hunted man, and needs to hide from the Big Bads, the SSP? His new girlfriend of 5 minutes conveniently remembers that
... I think I could hide you in the hemisphere. It's out in the water, you know -- an underwater sphere-shaped projected field that the technicians who made Foyn built ... I think it's safe ...
Of course it is, dear!! This thing that no one knew about, or mentioned, until just this minute ...
Agent of the Unknown is only interesting as a historical relic, and as a hint at Things to Come, for SF. But, fair dues, it certainly made me want to learn more about Margaret St. Clair.
This novella from the mid-1950s is a novelty because it's a "two-fer" -- Agent of the Unknown is back-to-back with a lesser-known Philip K. Dick novel. (When I say "back-to-back," the two novels are upside-down, relative to each other -- you read one, turn it over, and read the other. Cute. Seeing only the back cover, my husband asked, hesitantly, Why are you reading that book upside-down? Bless him, I think he was worried about me .... )
Anyway, enough about Interesting Publishing Wheezes of the 1950s -- what about the novel?
Well, yeah. Interesting. Sort of. Actually, it's terrible. At 126 pages, it's either a failed novel, that rushes through what could be its best points, or an overblown novella, that tries to cram too much in. Either way, sadly, unsatisfactory. But it IS interesting in a "Whither SF?" sort of way.
I say "sadly" unsatisfactory, because it has some nice, sophisticated touches that hint at better things to come for SF (and, perhaps, better things that Margaret St Clair could be capable of). Published in 1956, St Clair was writing at a time when the New Wave would change SF forever. Authors like J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Ursula LeGuin, and M. John Harrison would up SF's game in characterization, world building and attitude, shaking it out of the "golly gosh gee whiz" of the Golden Age. And I say this as someone who likes nothing better than a bit of golly gosh gee whiz. The New Wave kept the wonder, and added new levels of darkness, more realistic psychology, and a good helping of political and social relevance, thus re-booting Space Opera with a more mature, darker core.
In Agent of the Unknown, St Clair incorporates some of this darkness. For example, the protagonist, Don Haig, is an alcoholic beach bum, sleeping in a lean-to on the sugary-sand beach of (oh, yeah, and I have to quote here) "the pleasure planetoid Foyn," waking each dawn to an alcohol haze, and schemes for how he will mooch the price of a drink off the other permanent residents of this down on its luck tourist destination.
So, immediately, St Claire is making some brave choices here: Don isn't your typical Golden Era protagonist, all noble instincts and chiselled jaw. He's a drunk, he's a mess, and at the beginning of the novel, only interested in where his next drink is coming from. Don is a sad case. And Foyn ("the pleasure planetoid" .... ) isn't much better; no Star Trek's Risa, glossy and harmless Las Vegas of the Stars, but a dark spot on humankind's expansion into the galaxy, a sad place where flotsam like Don wash up and are exploited or sneered at by the 1%.
Besides Don's personal hard times, the universe he lives in doesn't sound that great -- a mysterious cult called the SSP is the Big Bad, kidnapping and, one assumes, killing people with even the mildest genetic mutation. It's a given that they have a network of spies and informants who instill fear, even in this backwater, and it's hinted that they have manipulated a galaxy-wide population to limit intellectual curiosity and destroy literacy. (A nice, genuinely prescient touch: most people are illiterate, relying on emoji-like ideograms for communicating.)
BUT, while brave choices are good, they really need to hang on the scaffolding of a story that works, and (preferably) plausible world-building. I felt that St Clair was making it up as she went along, with plot points large and details small --throwing things at the page and seeing if they stick. Don has become a hunted man, and needs to hide from the Big Bads, the SSP? His new girlfriend of 5 minutes conveniently remembers that
... I think I could hide you in the hemisphere. It's out in the water, you know -- an underwater sphere-shaped projected field that the technicians who made Foyn built ... I think it's safe ...
Of course it is, dear!! This thing that no one knew about, or mentioned, until just this minute ...
Agent of the Unknown is only interesting as a historical relic, and as a hint at Things to Come, for SF. But, fair dues, it certainly made me want to learn more about Margaret St. Clair.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews