Book Review: Dolphins of Altair by Margaret St. Clair

 

Dolphins of Altair by Margaret St. Clair

188 pages, Paperback

Published, 1967 by Dell

 

 

Margaret St. Clair was born (Eva Margaret Neely) in 1911. She is one of the trailblazers whose work I discovered through Lisa Yazsek’s groundbreaking anthology The Future is Female. I can’t say I remember her story from that book, but I remembered her name. I saw it on the spine of this think paperback on the shelf at Verbatim Books here in San Diego. Her father was just elected to Congress shortly before she was born. The charmed DC childhood only till 1919. When her father died of Influenza she and her moved to the Midwest and eventually Los Angeles. She met her future husband Eric St.Clair.

While earning her master’s degree in Greek classics from Cal-Berkeley in the early 30s.  They settled in a small bay area town, raised Dachshunds, and ran a plant nursery.

She started writing pulp fiction in the post-war era starting with a noir Detective story before turning the major focus of her output to Science Fiction publishing more than 70 stories that decade alone.  Her Short story Mrs. Hawk was turned into an episode of Thriller (hosted by Boris Karloff) you can watch on YouTube, Rod Serling turned two of her stories into a Night Gallery episode. In 1966 she and her husband became Wiccan. 

I checked out the Thriller episode, it is a weird and comedic episode about a figure from Greek mythology who has a pig farm where she is abducting men and turning them into pigs. The acting in the episode is hilarious and over the top. Still how cool that it was based on one of her stories. 

So Dolphins of Altair sounds like the kinda of ecological science fiction I dig whether it is the brutal and realistic nightmares of John Brunner or Kim Stanley Robinson or the weirder takes of Ray Nayler I like when genre tackles our relationship with nature. In the case of Nayler his last two books I loved because they ask what does it mean to be an earthling. This novel is like a 60s pulpy version of that message.

So yeah compared to the message being made in a modern context it's pretty corny. That however is the fun of reading classic Science Fiction.

“Before the dawn of man . . .
. . . there was a covenant between the land and the sea people - a covenant long forgotten by those who stayed on shore but indelibly etched in the minds of others - the dolphins of Altair.
Now the covenant had been broken. Dolphins were being wantonly sacrificed in the name of scientific research, their waters increasingly polluted, and their number dangerously diminished. They had to find allies and strike back. Allies willing to sever their own earthly bonds for the sake of their sea brothers - willing, if necessary, to execute the destruction of the whole human race . ..”

Considered by many to be the first of a "psychedelic" era for her writing there are moments where I felt lost. The human characters are riding Dolphins and communicating with them in the form of a telepathic connection. There were times when I was lost if they were underwater and using telepathy or talking. I was lost for chunks of the book. When I found the narrative threads there were interesting moments to connect to. This book has all kinds of weird elements that include telepathic dolphins, ecological sabotage, alien ancestry, military experiments, 60s counterculture, interplanetary exchanges, and major disaster vibes.  It also is a very California book.

The first part of the novel involves human characters working with Dolphins to sabotage and free captive Dolphins to help them with their plan. You see the Dolphins believe the covenant between land and sea is broken enough that they can fight back. The Dolphins call the humans splits, it took me a time or two to realize they were referring to people with legs. Their plan for freeing the Dolphins includes causing an earthquake, it becomes clear they have control over nature in an intense way.

One of the most interesting ideas is expressed when Dolphins explain to their human friends what the covenant means to them. It is expressed in a poem, one that has been passed down through generations telepathically from one generation of Dolphins to another. It is here that they suggest this poem is older than life on Earth…Yeah I mean where this is going is right in the title of the book.  

When we are introduced to the radical Dolphin's plan to save the sea people you could imagine this happened because…

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It would take the heat off the sea people and their human allies – If the polar ice caps were to melt.”

Cue the piano to express deep shock. This ends and chapter and want to quote how the next chapter starts.

“I think we would laugh at him, except that, after all, he had already engineered an earthquake.”

The final act of the book is where it comes together as a disaster piece and at that point, the novel is fully in my favorite sub-genre the weird end-of-the-world novel. The Dolphins of Altair is funky very 60s Science Fiction novel, while the cover says it is a brilliant triumph I would not go that far. It is strange enough, and thought-provoking enough to get a light thumbs up from me. I was too confused at times to go with a masterpiece, compared to our modern genre the characters and prose are thin, but I prefer that, so that was not the problem.

I think many genre writers don’t trust their readers, maybe St.Clair trusted her readers a bit too much. I want to read her other novels so take that as a sign that she was up to plenty of good stuff.