For years I've been seeing mentions of Margaret St. Clair's Sign of the Labrys and The Shadow People. Both appear in the “Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading” of the Dungeon Master's Guide, and both are relatively obscure. I was always attracted to their covers, but was unable to just walk to the local library and borrow them.

Something had gotten into me yesterday, and I decided to hunt both down—in their ebook form. I am quite confident there was nothing special in the print version, besides beautiful covers that is, since they were plain small-sized paperback.

Few hours later, and I procured Sign of the Labrys (1963), The Dolphins of Altair (1967), The Shadow People (1969), and The Dancers of Noyo (1973) novels. According to St. Clair's Wikipedia page, the last three form some sort of loose trilogy. Their ebook covers are quite underwhelming so I downloaded the originals from the web instead.

I opened the Sign of the Labrys, “just to check it out,” read first few paragraphs, and realised I couldn't just put it down. I finished it in a couple of hours.

Mild spoilers ahead.

I greatly enjoyed the “implicit” writing style, atmosphere, and post-apocalyptic setting. Things are casually introduced without too much—or any—explanation, leaving it up to the reader to fill in the blanks.

The whole thing reads like an extended dungeon delve, with main character sometimes being alone, and sometimes allying with one or more individuals. Exploration is very focused on corridors, doors, chambers, and implied threat.

D&D tropes I noticed:

• Character(s) travel down and up the tiered levels of a large subterranean complex.
• It is explicit that deeper levels hold more resources than the upper levels but are also more dangerous.
• Each level has “guardians” of various sorts.
• Exploration is described by providing lengths of corridors, doors, and sizes of areas; almost reading like an example of play, and eerily similar to how I write in the session reports.
• Secret doors and passageways that shortcut the dungeon levels or lead to secret areas with treasure.
• Thematic dungeon levels: a workers' level, laboratory level, pleasure level, engine level, etc.
• Factions: each level has at least one dominant faction, plus several smaller factions.
• Spellcasting. Mostly illusory magic.
• Main character levels up as he travels deeper. He also then has to spend time training to unlock new abilities.
• There is a lot of resting.

Perhaps I read it too quickly, but I do not remember any single character that fits the description of hairy monster featured on the cover.

The novel didn't feel dated at all. In fact, a plague that make peoples' lungs fill with liquid, resulting them in choking to death, sounded very contemporary.

All in all, Sign of the Labrys was quite an enjoyable read. It was fascinating witnessing what might have contributed to Gary's view on dungeons and dungeon delving. I am very much looking forward to reading The Shadow People too.

#Reading #AppendixN #Fantasy #ScienceFiction

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