Josephine Saxton (1935– ) is an English writer most notably associated with both the New Wave movement and the rise of feminist science fiction. Her novel Queen of the States (1986) was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, losing to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. She began publishing science fiction with “The Wall” for Science Fantasy 78 in 1965, and her first three novels—The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung of Mrs. Amelia Mortimer and Friends (1970), and Group Feast (1971)—established her very rapidly as a unique and surreal writer invested in allegory and the interior life of her characters. Often, these early works feature an attempted quest that is badly botched or terminated without success.
In the 1980s, Saxon published The Travails of Jane Saint (1980), The Consciousness Machine (1980), and Jane Saint and the Backlash: The Further Travails of Jane Saint (1989). Both Travails and Further Travails were later released in expanded editions with additional related stories. Queen of the States—“States” can be interpreted as referring to the United States or to various sorts of mental breakdown—comes very close to a savage reductionism: the SF/fantasy escapades of the female protagonist default constantly to delusion, for she is imprisoned in a mental institution. Most of Saxon’s short stories, from 1966 to 1985, have been collected in The Power of Time (1985). Little Tours of Hell: Tall Tales of Food and Holidays (1986) includes no science fiction but does include some horror fiction. Her most recent book, Gardening Down a Rabbit Hole (1996), is a memoir of her gardening experiences.
Throughout Saxton’s work from the 1980s, there is a deep understanding, in a feminist sense, of the constraints binding women to a male-oriented reality. Equally, there is a sense of the author’s trust in her own subconscious and the images arising from that subconscious in the creation of her fiction. Her novels and stories are unruly in the best way, much less stylized and formal than Angela Carter’s, but containing that same sense of wildness and unpredictability. Saxton clearly had no interest in following safe or established approaches to structure, plot, or characterization—and in experimenting she often hit upon sui generis ways to tell stories. At the same time Saxton un-domesticated domestic themes, writing about ordinary women and their lives in a way similar to Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm, but from a less realistic stance and in a more phantasmagorical style.
Roz Kaveney, editor of Saxton’s The Power of Time, described Saxton’s work as “a combination of surrealism, occultism, feminism and a sort of bloody-minded Midlands Englishness, and quite wonderful.” John Crowley was inspired by Saxton’s work to write a love story (“Exogamy”) with speculative elements—influenced in particular by The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith.
“The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky” (1981) is classic Saxton: a take-no-prisoners examination of biotech experimentation and the follies of capitalist societies in the grips of decadent extremes. It is sharp, incisive, darkly inventive, and an excellent example of the capabilities of this brilliant but underrated writer.