Review: The Travails of Jane Saint and Other Stories, by Josephine Saxton
by Rich Horton
I had read a good deal of Saxton's work as part of the process of awarding her the Cordwainer Smith award last year, but I hadn't read the Jane Saint stories. These are two short novels (or long novellas), published in 1980 and 1989. The latter story, "Jane Saint and the Backlash", was one of the last stories Saxton published ... her fiction career ended in 1992. Jane Saint was introduced in 1979, when the first chapter of the first Jane Saint novella was published in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's significant original anthology Amazons!, which contained stories about woman warriors, nearly all by women. The full novella, The Travails of Jane Saint, appeared as a slim volume from Virgin Books in 1980, and then was collected in the Women's Press paperback The Travails of Jane Saint and Other Stories in 1986. That volume is available as an ebook from Gateway/Orion.
"The Travails of Jane Saint" (34,000 words)
"Woe, Blight, and, in Heaven, Laughs" (4600 words) (first appeared in Pulsar 1 in 1978)
"Gordon’s Women" (3800 words) (first appeared in a French anthology, Femmes au futur, in 1976)
"The Message" (16100 words) (first published in this book)
"Heads Africa, Tails America" (5300 words) (first appeared in Orbit 9 in 1971)
"The Pollyanna Enzyme" (4600 words) (first published in this book)
"The Travails of Jane Saint" is introduced as "ten parts of the history of Jane Saint, Heroine of the Revolution, who journeyed in strange places and had adventures on her Quest. This is the true record of the beings she met on her travels along the way, and of what she endeavoured to accomplish for this world." Which is pretty accurate. Jane Saint is a revolutionary against a misogynistic and authoritarian near future regime, and is being brainwashed by the authorities, but mentally escapes to another world. There she searches for her three daughters, and for a "kodebook", and also she wants to learn how to make life better for women in her world. In a series of episodes, she meets a flying monster named Zilp, a talking dog named Merleau Ponty, a man named Hugh who claims to be her husband, an old couple trying to summon an Anthroparion, a Nazi airship pilot, and more, and indeed has a variety of adventures. The story bounces along nicely, and is very funny on occasion, and also full of on point sarcastic observations about the place of women in the world. It's a good piece, fun and trenchant by turns, though I don't think it's at the level of her best work.
"Woe, Blight, and, in Heaven, Laughs" is set in a depressing future in which a dying young woman named Lucille lives with her evil stepmother, Queenie, who is obsessed with being the most beautiful woman around. And Lucille escapes, with the help of a man named Hunter, and ends up with a team of seven mutants ... yes, it's a somewhat goofy Snow White variation. Amusing but not much more.
"Gordon's Women" is one of the most purely science-fictional stories I've seen from Saxton. Gordon is one of four men sharing a new planet that is apparently being terraformed. He is served by a great many beautiful women, who do whatever he bids, on pain of immediate death if they displease him. So far, so very creepy ... and then there's a sharp switcheroo. It's a nice short SF piece, not a major work but just fine.
"The Message" concerns a middle-aged woman, who lives alone in what seems to be London, hardly every going out because the modern world distresses her. She is in the hospital at the start of the story, for minor surgery, but checks herself out, only to have a "message" foisted on her by a another patient who is dying. As she wanders the neighborhood, trying to find a place to deliver the message, she encounters a variety of the people she's been avoiding -- young people, men, black people, Indisns, etc. ... all the while looking to deliver the message. By the end, it's clear the message is really for her, and it's really a way of fixing her lonely and crabbed existence (or so I took it). The story goes on a bit too long for my taste -- otherwise it sort of resembles some of her novels, partly by an obsession with food, and more because of the notion of a mysterious journey to personal growth.
"Heads Africa, Tails America" is the most experimental of these stories, with the main character -- named "Josephine" -- thinking about visiting Africa, remembering a visit to America, obsessing about the weather in England, recalling scenes with a variety of men she knows -- it's a strange piece, very much almost a cliché of the worst notions people back in 1971 had about Orbit fiction.
"The Pollyanna Enzyme" is forthrightly an end of the world story -- in a somewhat depressing nearish future, the Earth is infected with the title compound (?) which will lead to the death of everyone in a matter of a couple of weeks, but which also makes everyone unnaturally happy and peaceful. Not bad stuff, again.This collection isn't really major Saxton, but it's solid work, and worth reading.
"The Message" sounds fascinating. I have a running list on SF an race -- who knows, maybe a later project -- which I'll have to put it on.
ReplyDeleteI've been meaning to read more of her work after featuring her first three published short fictions... and The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith years and years ago.