In the past year or so I’ve put together an informal series on the first three published short fictions by female authors who are new(ish) to me and/or whose most famous SF novels fall mostly outside the post-WWII to mid-1980s focus of my reading adventures. So far I’ve featured Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), Nancy Kress (1948-), Melisa Michaels (1946-2019), Lee Killough (1942-), and Eleanor Arnason (1942). I do not expect transformative or brilliant things from first stories. Rather, it’s a way to get a sense of subject matter and concerns that first motivated authors to put pen to paper.

Today I’ve selected Josephine Saxton (1935-), an author whom I’ve long known about–I reviewed The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969) back in 2012–but never read any more of her work. Due to Rich Horton’s review of Saxton’s Vector for Seven (1970), my interest in an important voice of the English New Wave movement suddenly rekindled. Her 60s and 70s stories appeared in many of the influential New Wave (and adjacent) anthologies–including Judith Merril’s England Swings SF (1969), Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions 1 (1971), Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker’s Quark/3 (1971), and Damon Knight’s Orbit 9 (1971).

In her first three stories, Saxton deploys sculpted landscapes as metaphysical traps that allegorize the internal struggles of her characters. In the language of the New Wave, inner space manifests as a nightmarish landscape that one must try to traverse. Her prose, even in her weakest tales, is measured and poetic. See SF Encyclopedia for discussion of her later fiction.

Let me know which Josephine Saxton fictions–perhaps from much later in her career–resonate with you.

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4/5 (Good)

“The Wall” first appeared Science Fantasy, ed. Kyril Bonfiglioli (November 1965). You can read it online here. It also appeared in Saxton’s collection The Power of Time (1985), which is where I read it.

“The Wall” is an auspicious beginning to an illustrious career! Set in a sculpted valley like a shallow bowl that places the human struggle in heightened relief, “The Wall” imagines a landscape split into two halves by “some change in the light, in the atmosphere, in the colours of air and the earth” (97). At closer look, a wall filled with “lumps of glittering faceted hardness” (97) bifurcates the world. Metal rapiers prevent passage over the barrier. But at a single point a small hole pierces through the wall and on either side of the hole lived a man and a woman. He hunts for rabbits and keeps his fingernails “specklessly white” (98). She, a mother in “another life,” carries her the accoutrements of her beauty regime in a bamboo beach bag (99). Very much in love, the couple spend their hours talking through the hole, and, while physically taxing, manage to stretch their hands through the crevasse and touch.

But the can be no physical consummation of their passion. They know the wall cannot be breached. And so they decide to set off to find a new life. As they walk away from the wall up the sides of the valley they can see each other’s identical movements. Each encounter a lover and each give in to their passions. And each feels shame. And each returns to the hole. And those desperately in love will do desperate things. And the cycle resets.

There’s a poetic simplicity to it all. Like Calvino’s adept descriptions of imaginary places in Invisible Cities (1972), Saxton’s sculpted world, as if a stage, allows a concise morality play to unfold. It lays bare the powerful pull that only over the wall can real happiness lie.

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3/5 (Average)

“Ne Déjà Vu Pas” first appeared in England Swings SF, ed. Judith Merril (1968). If you have an Internet Archive account, you can read it online here. As Rich Horton points out, England Swings SF was Judith Merril’s “attempt to showcase the [English New Wave movement] for American readers.”

“Ne Déjà Vu Pas” is the most overtly New Wave story of the three (unsurprising as it featured in Merril’s anthology). Replete with typographical experimentation (sentences placed entirely backwards), Saxton imagines a nightmarish “net of an insulating strip” in between the positive and negative half of the universe that does not experience time (33). The space pilot Kitten, “female, young, and full of curiosity,” in her relentless search for new experiences sets of to go anywhere but “where I have been before” finds herself trapped in the net (31). Whenever someone enters the liminal zone the other version of yourself in the other half of the universe is pulled into the net. Kitten, for some reason no longer female, cannot tolerate the other version of herself pulled into the zone. She spends her days increasingly delusional, imagining that they might be the origin of God.

I did not find “Ne Déjà Vu Pas” entirely successful. Unlike “The Wall,” Saxton does not effectively convey the strange liminal zone Kitten finds herself trapped within. There are some intriguing scenes observing those aging backwards in the negative universe. The social commentary–the aimless trapped in the ultimate aimless world–is more of an afterthought.

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2.75/5 (Below Average)

“Nothing Much to Relate” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Edward L. Ferman (November 1967). You can read it here. It was not collected elsewhere.

I’m a sucker for science fiction that aims a piercing eye towards the experiences of housewives and the domestic existence. I am fascinated by fantastical transformation of the daily interaction with home and family. Like the maniacal badgering of the sentient home-keeping computer in Clifford D. Simak’s The Werewolf Principle (1967), science fictional extrapolations bring the uncanny into the everyday life. I also have multiple interrelated reasons related to the power of historical narratives. At the most basic level, propaganda in the 50s and 60s proclaimed the white single-family home as a triumphant symbol of capitalist success. Nothing encapsulates this view more than Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev’s hilarious (and terrifying) 1959 “Kitchen Debate” at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. And science fiction became an arena for the dissection of the experience of 50s and 60s life.

And one experience often ignored was that of the housewife. Betty Friedan dissected the widespread unhappiness of post-WWII white women in the monumental The Feminine Mystique (1963). And, in a handful of cases, science fiction from the era embodied many of her arguments: Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), Carol Emshwiller’s “Love Me Again” (1956) and “Adapted” (1961), Ann Warren Griffith’s “Captive Audience” (1953), Kate Wilhelm’s “The Downstairs Room” (1968), and Josephine Saxton’s “Nothing Much to Relate” (1967) come to mind.

“Nothing Much to Relate,” told with a deliberately uncanny lightness, describes the life of Liz, housewife with a new child, who discovers a mysterious pile of “automatic” writing which she apparently wrote during a séance. She is desperate for any type of escape from her domestic existence characterized by the incisive criticism of her husband wants her to take up swimming to lose weight (she points out that she can’t swim with a baby in her arms) and the responsibilities of keeping house. The ghost that reached out to her was that of a young man, obsessed with alternative ways to live and Eastern mysticism, that discovered a “real” secret. Liz’s friend Rosalind chalks the tale up to post-natal depression or sneaking psychiatric drugs prescribed by her psychiatrist husband. But even Rosalind, newly pregnant and also stuck at home, suggests she “better go round to the address you got, and investigate” (69).

In this instance, I am far more interested in the historical context of “Nothing Much to Relate” than the story itself which is far from Saxton’s best. There are some solid elements: the commentary on life was told with a hilarious snark and incision and the repackaging of Eastern mysticism as exotic suburban escape and solace reminded me of contemporary obsessions with Reiki (“holistic”) healing and Yoga.

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