SAXTON, Josephine (Mary Howard)

(1935-)

   UK writer who began publishing sf with "The Wall" for Science Fantasy in 1965, and whose first 3 novels - The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969 US), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung [sic] of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends (1970 US) and Group Feast (1971 US) - established her very rapidly as an inventive creator of sf FABULATIONS. Each of these books presents narratives whose outcomes are more readable as allegories of their protagonists' moral fates than of any physical journey, though the image of what might be called the bollixed quest is central to her work. These journeys are described - often in some detail, as in Vector for Seven - in a register of perilous ambivalence, half INNER SPACE, half mutable and frustrating external world. When JS returned to publishing novels in the 1980s, titles like The Travails of Jane Saint (1980; exp as coll vt The Travails of Jane Saint and Other Stories 1986) and The Consciousness Machine; Jane Saint and the Backlash: The Further Travailsof Jane Saint (coll 1989) clearly demonstrated the fundamental continuity of her vision. Queen of the States (1986) - a clever title in which "States" can be interpreted as referring to the USA or to various sorts ofmental 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. Perhaps even more clearly than before, these later books are governed by a FEMINIST sense of the constraints binding women to mundane, male-ordained reality - a sense that goes far to explain the wildness of JS's protagonists and the lungeing movements of her prose. Her non-Jane Saint short stories, which tend to a slantwise but pointed lightness of touch, have been assembled in The Power of Time (coll 1985) and Little Tours of Hell: Tall Tales of Foodand Holidays (coll 1986).

   JC

   See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; PERCEPTION.