Customer Reviews

Sign Of The Labrys

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This story takes place in the future after a decimating plague has reduced humanity to living in caverns. The main character ends up working with some Wiccans who are being hunted by the FBY. The pacing is a bit slow, but the story is well-written and will appeal to anyone who finds enjoyment in the old Weird Tales pulp.

Margaret St. Clair was one of the first openly female Science Fiction authors to be accepted by the (literal) old boys' network of the genre. Sure, there were Andre Norton and Leigh Bracket, and a little later D.C. Fontana, but their pen names were designed to disguise their gender. Margaret St. Clair defied the establishment, and the odds, and was in her lifetime a successful writer of more-that-usually-thoughtful potboilers. She was also a practicing occultist, greatly influenced by the works of Margaret Murray, Charles Leland and of course Sir James Fraser. She was not a Wiccan until several years after the publication of the book brought her to the attention of such Witchy notables as Raymond Buckland and Ed Fitch.

"Sign of the Labrys" is probably the best-written of all St. Clair's books; from the moment I read its intriguing first line, "There was a fungus that they ate, that grew in the clefts of the caves," I was hooked. Its style is approached only by her even more mysterious but somewhat confusing "Dancers of Noyo." It takes place some years after a world-wide (as far as anyone knows -- communications no longer work) plague of mutagenic yeasts has killed or radically altered all life. Dogs are extinct. Trees are extinct, but what used to be broccoli has taken their place. And most humans have died of one or another of the virus strains still floating around. The few humans in the U.S. are living in an enormous underground city excavated out of Carlsbad Caverns. It was designed to hold the entire population short-term through a nuclear attack (this is Cold-War Sci-Fi,) so the accommodations and provisions will last the survivors a couple of lifetimes. The few jobs still being bothered with are the Federal Bureau of Yeasts -- the closest thing they have to a government, and it's creepy -- and burying the dead. Enter our hero, Sam Sewell, a bulldozer operator for the burial crews, who discovers over the course of a psychedelic, intiatory journey to the underworld that he has 'witch blood;' that is, he's the reincarnation of a former Witch and is now being brought willy-nilly back into the Craft. Along the way, he and his new associates discover the secrets of the caves, the reason for the oppressive rise of the FBY, and the astonishing answer to where the deadly yeasts came from.

I recommend "Sign of the Labrys" not only to Witches and other occultists, but to anyone interested in a look at a transition time in American popular culture -- big changes were happening both in Science Fiction and in our spiritual awareness. As the jacket blurb breathlessly noted "Women [were] writing Science Fiction!" Alternative religion, as it's now called, suddenly ceased, in the mid 1960's, to be the province of turbaned gurus and hennaed old ladies. Margaret St. Clair was one of the precious few who gave us hints where to look. And entertained us mightily along the way.