Friday Friyay: 'The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales' by Margaret St. Clair

Hello all, I hope you're having a lovely Friday! I'm trying to get back into these weekly posts and I must say I have missed these Friday posts quite a bit. I love seeing what everyone is reading and getting little teasers for it! The book I'm sharing today is one of the books in my personal "Backlog Challenge" in which I try to catch up on the enormous mountain of ARCs and books I still need to read. That book is The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair. 

Introduced and edited by horror fiction great Ramsey Campbell, this newly assembled anthology is the only short story collection in print of works by the pioneering science-fiction writer Margaret St. Clair. Seventeen tales of compelling strangeness include "The Gardener," "Child of Void," "Hathor's Pets," "The Causes," "Brenda," and "The Invested Libido."

Book Beginnings is at home on Rose City Reader, hosted by Gilion Dumas, and Friday 56 at Freda's Voice, hosted by Freda. I'll also be joining the Book Blogger Hop, hosted by Billy over at Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer.

BB:

From 'Rocket to Limbo'

Millie waved to Herbert, who was getting into the 'copter, and flashed him a wide, insincere smile.

The big chump, she was thinking, don't 'copters ever have wrecks? %1

I love this opening and I'm wholly on Millie's side. I support women's rights, but also women's wrongs. This tale is honestly kind of hilarious and it was a beautiful example of St. Clair's style. Her whole point with SciFi was that if people don't understand technology now, they won't understand it properly in the future either, and so you get people like Millie and Herbert with their 'copters and fancy gadgets, and yet they're still just humans.

F56:

From 'The Island of the Hands'

Not long after the search for his wife was officially abandoned, Dirk began to have the dreams. Night after night with the compass in his brain pointing, nearly three months of nights, until he began to wonder whether grief for Joan - to soon lost, too well loved - was breaching the wall of sanity in him. 56%

I thought the contrast between this quote and the one above was too good to now share. St. Clair shows the heartbreak so clearly here. The way this story deals with love, its ability to strengthen you but also its enormous hold over us, is quite something.

I absolutely raced through this collection this week, so if the teasers intrigue you enough, do pop over to my review.

BBH:

This week's question comes from Billy himself:

What questions would you ask any author if you had the chance?

Ooh, I feel like I could go two ways with this question! As in 'what question would I ask X author' and 'what question would I ask authors in general'. For the first, if I could include authors who have passed, I think I might want to talk to Ursula K LeGuin and ask her how she managed to convey such human depth and empathy in her writing. Or maybe I'd raise Tolkien from the dead and talk about Old English literature... For the second, I think with each author, I would be fascinated to know how they go from "idea" to "work in progress". Not how they finish a novel, but how they actually transmute these random ideas and inspirations and flashes of themes into the fact of sitting at your desk and writing it. Because that is the hurdle I am so far incapable of crossing xD

That's it for me this week! What do you think of the teasers from Margaret St. Clair's stories? And what would you ask any author? I hope you have a lovely weekend!