Collected Stories – Zenna Henderson

Belated Reviews #12: Zenna Henderson

I’d been meaning to cover Zenna Henderson, and since there’s been so much discussion of her stories recently, this might be a good time for it. Naturally, I’ll be duplicating much of what’s already been posted.

Zenna Henderson is another of those authors with a small but special body of work. In her case, it’s four anthologies and change worth of short stories written in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Her writing is fairly consistent: If you sample any of her anthologies and like what you find, you’ll probably like all of them. They’re good enough, and different enough, that if you haven’t read any of her stories before, you should give them a try.

The cover art on my copy of “Pilgrimage” is appropriate – a vaguely American-Gothic-like setting, with a space ship in the background. Her stories play themselves out (with a few exceptions) in rural or small-town America, in the world of back roads and one-room school-houses. Zenna Henderson’s stories are almost completely devoid of melodrama, of villains, of violence: People living their lives as best they can are more than capable of providing themselves and each other with all the troubles and challenges an author could need.

There’s a low-key but constant spiritual dimension to Henderson’s writing. This is something science fiction has trouble with: It tends to either ignore religion completely, to feature characters whose entire lives revolve around their faiths, or to be about religion. Henderson opts for the more mundane picture of people who take faith for granted, but don’t go through life making a fuss about it.

So who says aliens have to land in Washington and time-travellers have to land on the Titanic? Henderson’s low-key approach to science fiction works just fine. She’s no stylist (she has the occasional bad habit of making a subtle point and then driving it home with a sledge hammer), but she has a way of focusing a story on just a few people and making what happens to them matter.

About half her stories are about the “People”. Early in this century a space ship, fleeing a dying planet, crashed. Most of the survivors – essentially human, but possessing psychic powers – made a life for themselves, quietly, unobtrusively, cautiously. Others were scattered during the crash, and had to live alone among Earth’s people. Most of these stories are collected in two fixup novels (anthologies with a framing story added).

Pilgrimage (****-) is probably the better place to start. It consists of half a dozen stories about the People, and the various adjustments they’ve made to fit into their new world. My favorite stories from this book are the first two. “Ararat” introduces the People, in a story about a village of telepaths and telekinetics who must keep their secret from the new teacher. “Gilead” is the story of two half-breeds who don’t know that there are others of their kind, and must learn to cope with their abilities.

The second People anthology, The People: No Different Flesh (***+), fills out much of the missing background. I didn’t enjoy it as much (though “Shadow on the Moon” – about an old man desperate to get to the moon, and a couple of kids who just might be able to help – is my favorite People story). But if you enjoyed the first anthology, you’ll enjoy the second one.

“Pilgrimage” spawned a disappointing telefilm titled “The People”, with William Shatner miscast as a member of the cast. It’s based primarily upon “Pottage” – the most depressing story in “Pilgrimage” – with bits and pieces from the other stories. Except for the melodramatic and improbable villains, the children’s movie “Escape to Witch Mountain” does a much better job of capturing the spirit of the stories. I don’t recall any attribution to Henderson’s stories, but I’d be very surprised if they didn’t inspire that movie.

Zenna Henderson’s other short stories appear in two other anthologies, Holding Wonder (***+) and The Anything Box (***+). (The rating system doesn’t work that well for anthologies. These books contain a few excellent stories, more good stories, and virtually no bad ones.) They include another People story (“The Indelible Kind”, in “Holding Wonder”), but some of the others are more memorable. There’s “The Closest School”, about some law- abiding aliens who send their daughter to start grade one. (Some people can be open-minded about color, and still want to draw the line at purple.) There’s “The Taste of Aunt Sophronia”, about a low-tech solution to a high- tech plague. “Subcommittee” is about an interstellar peace conference that isn’t going well – and bored children on both sides. There’s “Walking Aunt Daid”: Aunt Daid got her name when great-great-grampa remarked that she should have been dead a long time ago. “The Last Step” is about an unlikable teacher who makes a bad mistake.

You see the pattern, of course. Stories about children, stories about school, stories about people in very ordinary situations, encountering or living with the extraordinary. It’s a quiet kind of science fiction, and a pleasant change of pace.

A number of later stories haven’t been anthologized yet. “Thrumthing and Out” (F&SF, 10/72), “Katie-Mary’s Trip” (F&SF, 1/75 – my introduction to the notion that Zenna Henderson could write a bad story), “The First Stroke” (F&SF, 10/77), “Tell Us a Story” (F&SF, 10/80), “There Was a Garden”, in “Cassandra Rising” (1978, edited by Alice Laurance), and “Old… As a Garment” in “Speculations” (1982, edited by Isaac Asmov and Alice Laurance). (So much bibliography’s been posted lately, it would be churlish not to use some of it. :)

(Actually, someone posted recently that there is a British anthology titled “The People Collection”, which includes the previously anthologized People stories and “Katie-Mary’s Trip”. It was also said to include “Incident After” and “The Walls” – two stories from “Holding Wonder” which I’ve never thought of as being People stories – and not “Tell Us a Story.”)

Dani Zweig da…@netcom.com

If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you! – Dorothy Parker