The Hieros Gamos Of Sam And An Smith

Author: Josephine Saxton

"Hieros gamos" means holy marriage, and this is the story of an intense emotional bond that develops between the two characters at the heart of this extraordinary fable. The story starts with a nameless boy wandering through a city curiously devoid of life, the shops are intact, food is available, but people and animals are so scarce that the sound of a bird can reduce him to tears. Then he finds the body of a woman who has just given birth and realises that he must look after the baby. The two make their home in a department story, and at some point the boy is given a pile of books. What follows is a tale of slow intellectual growth and exploration as the relationship between the pair develops. Events keep circling around themselves, and much of the story is told through metaphor and allusion, so that we can never be quite sure if things are actually happening or if this is just the way that the boy sees them. Why it's on the list: Sly, oblique, poetic, filled with references to the works of Jung and Ouspensky, the work of Josephine Saxton occupies a very different place on the sf spectrum than most writers, which may perhaps be why she has not written as much as she should or received the acclaim she deserves. Nevertheless, anyone prepared to venture into the heady waters of her work is in for real delight. And this subtle fable indicates that new wave science fiction could take its intellectual inspiration from a much wider range of sources than the sf that went before.