And now we come to the final post for this year’s A to Z challenge. Well, apart from my thoughts on this year, anyway.
The author I’m going to discuss today is the late Zenna Henderson. She was also a teacher, which seems to have inspired her work. There were a lot of children and young people in her stories.
She is best known for her stories of the People, though she wrote others. I admit I haven’t read anywhere near all of them, but you can get a volume of all of them collected, Ingathering. I bought it in print for my sister, who is a huge fan of the People stories, and have downloaded it in ebook form myself.
So, who are the People? They are aliens who fled from their planet when it was destroyed and came to live on Earth. They look completely human, and some of their stories are seen from their viewpoint. But they have powers humans don’t have, such as telepathy and telekinesis. However, they try not to use their powers, to avoid the chance of being noticed. That makes their lives difficult. They are very healthy, though, and tend not to get sick at all.
The first story I read was “Pottage”. In it, a young teacher comes to a small town, Bendo, to take a new job. Her students are People. They are unhappy. They shuffle along. There is a reason for that - what if they fly? They talk to each other about the Home, which they can remember, despite never having been there. They aren’t supposed to, but they do. Anything that might get them noticed is absolutely forbidden. Not a way to enjoy life on their new world.
The teacher actually knows about the People, as she has a friend who was a member and was hoping to find others. She decides to help her students.
There was a film called The People based on this story, with Kim Darby as the teacher and William Shatner as the local doctor, who has to make a living as a vet, because the humans never get sick. You can find it on YouTube if interested.
In fact, Kim Darby and William Shatner had been together in a Star Trek episode, “Miri”. In that episode she was a child on a planet where there were only children. This is because adults had all died horribly in the course of an experiment to extend life. Children were unaffected till they reached puberty, but the experiment did work on them and these kids are about a hundred years old. Of course, Dr McCoy comes up with a vaccine for them, and Kirk tries persuading them, through Miri, to accept it.
So, there, in this Trek episode is another - young - woman in speculative fiction.
I do recommend anything by Zenna Henderson. The stories are so very gentle and thoughtful! You can buy them on Amazon in both print and Kindle format, but mostly in Kindle, as I suspect the print versions are out of print. Apple Books has all of them.
Well, that’s it for 2026. I hope you enjoyed reading my posts as much as I did writing them. Tomorrow I will write my thoughts.
Good night!
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