2016 read #36: Message from the Eocene by Margaret St. Clair.

Message from the Eocene by Margaret St. Clair
114 pages
Published 1964
Read April 29
Rating: ★½ out of 5

Last month I derived some minor enjoyment from an Ace Double -- a pair of quaint Martian adventures penned by Leigh Brackett (1, 2). They weren't high literature, or even all that good even by genre fiction standards, but they were pulpy and dumb and fun. Flush with tax return money around the same time, I went ahead and ordered more Ace Doubles, picking up a few flimsy novels by Margaret St. Clair, one of the few female sci-fi writers from midcentury (or at least one of the few I've heard of). I can't recall if I'd seen her name praised or merely mentioned as a woman who had existed and written sci-fi, but I had heard of her somewhere, and that was enough.

With my predilections, it was natural that I latched onto Message from the Eocene -- I love stories involving, no matter how tangentially, the geological past (enough so that I recently read a dismal horror novel because it had a trilobite on the cover). Could this be a lost classic of deep time fiction?

Alas, Message from the Eocene is a lot of things -- hot mess, primarily -- but it is neither a lost classic nor a novel of deep time. I mean, sure, ostensibly, it begins with an alien being named Tharg stumbling along the summits of what we would now term the Archean Earth (or possibly the Hadean), but that has no more connection to the Eocene than it does to Disneyland. The writing in this early section, especially, is so execrable and amateurish that only sheer obstinacy kept me turning pages. "I'm under attack by unknown forces! My thoughts turn to the myths of a lost race that marooned my people here on Earth, but such things are silly and the mere thought of such twaddle angers me! It only crossed my mind as heavy-handed exposition before it transpires that the ancient lost race has returned after all!" I could have written better exposition when I was 14.

Message briefly improves as it transmogrifies into a rural English ghost story (Tharg's disembodied consciousness producing poltergeist phenomena for a poor Quaker family, easily the best segment of the book), and has the distinction of novelty in the next section, which is the only bit of science fiction I've ever read set on New Caledonia. It's also somewhat progressive by the racist standards of the time (though still coming across as pretty racist by modern standards). The rest of the volume declines with some rather absurd logic and clumsy structuring, petering out abruptly with humanity poised to take the next step in its psychic-consciousness evolution.

All this talk of ancient disembodied consciousnesses and the psychic maturation of the human race, populated with a diverse cast, with a climactic moment of personal psychic evolution, sounds familiar. In fact, for at least half of Message I was bemused by how much it seemed to presage Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile (1, 2, 3, 4) and Galactic Milieu books (1, 2, 3). Unnecessarily convoluted and tortured by an inability to properly convey such heady concepts within the context of good storytelling, St. Clair's Message nonetheless seems suspiciously close to the spirit of May's later work. I'm not implying anything untoward, but I wouldn't be surprised if this muddled little novella helped inspired May's also muddled but more assured worldbuilding effort. It's an interesting link to speculate about, at the very least -- and perhaps the only reason I'm glad I read this inept mess of a tale.