Episode Details

There was time now—plenty of time on this strange, dark planet—for those erudite exiles from frozen Earth to ponder the value of man's accumulated knowledge.

Today's story is "The Dancers," by Margaret St Clair. It appeared in the January 1952 issue of Planet Stories on pages 76 to 80.

It appeared under the pen name of Wilton Hazzard.

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Margaret St. Clair (17 February 1911, Hutchinson, Kansas – 22 November 1995, Santa Rosa, California) was an American fantasy and science fiction writer who also wrote under the pseudonyms Idris Seabright and (on one occasion) Wilton Hazzard.

St. Clair wrote and published, by her own count, some 130 short stories. She first tried her hand at detective and mystery stories, and the so-called 'quality' stories, before finding her niche writing fantasy and science fiction for pulp magazines. She wrote "Unlike most pulp writers, I have no special ambitions to make the pages of the slick magazines. I feel that the pulps at their best touch a genuine folk tradition and have a balladic quality which the slicks lack."

Her early output included the Oona and Jick series of eight stories published from 1947 to 1949, chronicling the comic misadventures of "housewife of the future" Oona and her devoted husband Jick. The stories were ostensibly set in an idealized future but cast a satirical look at post-war domestic life, with its focus on acquiring labor-saving household devices and "keeping up with the Joneses."

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If there's a story you'd like me to narrate, or a genre you'd like me to include more of, please let me know at goldenagefiction@proton.me.

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Music: "Mesmerizing Galaxy" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.