Queen of the States was published by the Women’s Press in their science fiction series. Josephine was born in Halifax in 1935, and left school at the age of 15. She began writing science fiction in the mid 1960s. Her early novels include 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).
This novel resembles an origami paper flexahedron that constantly changes in your hands. Just when you think you have got the hang of it, it changes shape again. Few science fiction novels begin with a quote from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which gives you a strong hint that this novel is not going to be space opera. It begins with a road, a car and a driver…
Magdalen Hayward drove the car along a narrow road at a steady forty-five miles an hour. The way became more difficult as she went higher, towards the moors. To her left there were some remarkable rock formations standing out against the evening sky and she decided to explore them. She enjoyed scrambling over rocks. She gained a sense of freedom from being high up in barren country, alone. It was marvellous not to have people restricting, telling her what to do or not…but she would not even think of that.
Magdalen’s moorland excursion doesn’t end in a tea shop, though, but by being kidnapped by aliens. Nice aliens, though, who are curious about humans – as this is their first encounter with our odd species – and are happy to provide Magdalen with fine wines and dining. But then she wakes up in Twelve Trees, a hospital for people for mental health problems where she insists she is the Queen of America. Returning to her cosy room in the alien craft (they have provided marching carpets and wallpaper), the insect-sized aliens tell Magdalen that her experiences are objectively true:
You have seven concentric selves, all interlocking, making forty-nine states of being, each with seven level of intensity and each in contact with the forty-nine states plus contact with the origianl seven at all times and places, and a central consciousness which cas freely move about to any point in this network at any one time.
For the rest of the novel we follow Magdalen as she tumbles from one state to another: the alien craft; the hospital; the Royal Train crossing Dakota; herself as a child in a cot ; a souk in Morocco, a bar in New York, a party with an attractive lover provided by the aliens…
We also encounter her accident-prone husband, Clive, attempting to be unfaithful with bi-sexual Moira; nasty Nurse Gerhard, who steals hats from her patients ; Mrs Thornton, conjured up by the aliens to take tea with Magdalen; Dr Abel Murgatroyd, who sees a flying saucer and experiences ecstatic conversion to anti-psychiatry.
And then we meet violet-haired Miriam Goldsmith, married to unfaithful Clive, who goes to see a psychiatrist about the dreams she is having, “super-real” dreams in which she is another person called Magdalen:
She thinks things like”There must be a better state of being than this.” and then she sort of floats off into a different if not better sate of being…She goes elsewhere. Not escaping , just like trying on new clothes. She’s very strong , she’s very good, centrally, I mean, very. Full of love, but quite often gets herself ripped off , gets things tolen from her – not objects: acts, feelings, energy… She’s quite crazy at times, believes weird things. Like being Queen of America…
At the end of the novels the aliens send Magdalen back to Earth, and she sets off a journey away from her past and into tbe future…
So there we are, a kaleidoscope of a novel that seems to be influenced by R D Laing‘s anti-psychaiatric thinking. Although aliens pop up, they are just a MacGuffiin, this is a novel about inner space, not outer space. I am not even sure that is really science fiction, but Magdalen (or possibly Miriam) is a likeable companion for the length of the novel and I would be happy to read more of Jospehine’s work.
By the way, did I mention Rupert Bear makes some cameo appearances?
Fantasies of Possibility 