#166 Four futures: The Ace Double novels of Margaret St. Clair (1956 - 1964)

This is an exploration of four short novels by a neglected female writer of SF who sought to subvert the genre from within.

One happy development in recent years is the growing awareness of the contribution of women writers to the development of classic science fiction. Today, writers like Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore, and Andre Norton are fairly well known in genre circles. Readers and explorers of past decades continue to rediscover women writers, and to- hopefully - bring their work to greater prominence. Today's focus is on one such writer - Margaret St. Clair.

The Ace Doubles line was a long-running and now highly collectible fixture of western, crime, and SF publishing from 1952 to 1978. Published in the unusual dos-a-dos format, they bound together two novels, generally by two different authors. Of the eight novels that St. Clair published, half saw print in this special format - one of them joined with an early book by Philip K. Dick.

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