People as they oughta be...perhaps

kw: book reviews, fantasy, paranormal powers, otherness

Few are the tales I re-read. Fewer still the ones I re-enjoy time and time again. Zenna Henderson's "People" stories are among those elite few. Many think them too sentimental, even mawkish. They suit me perfectly, perhaps because I'm a very sentimental bloke myself. Others decry the open piety of the People, which is often contrasted to narrow, bitter fundamentalism...but not always: where the People encounter "earthlings" of genuine piety, they are welcomed as people of faith.

Considering that most "christian" religion consists of wholly unbiblical sentimentality (who hasn't heard, "Oh, a loving God would never do that!"?), and that fundamentalism is typically insecurity in disguise, it is no surprise that publishers prefer writers who never mention religion. It is almost true that "rational Christian" is an oxymoron...almost.

Zenna Henderson's People seem to me like Mormons without the polygamy, but with super powers, which they wisely keep in check. They are unfailingly reserved, unwilling to inflict their difference on an unknowing populace, and even less willing to become subject to curious (tending to hostile) scrutiny. As she came from a Mormon background (see the Wikipedia biography), this makes sense.

The 2005 printing of Ingathering: The Complete People Stories returns these classic tales to print after a generation. Paranormal powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, levitation—are the most common fantasy element of otherwise "science fiction" stories.

The growing field of universal saga SF, which deals in epic, mythic-scale story lines and ultra-technological (though largely undescribed) toolkits, commonly "explains" superpowers via the high-tech kit. Ms Henderson's People have powers that aren't explained at any level, they just are.

To use an analogy, most fish sense sound and vibration, and a very few create sounds they use for echolocation, like bats; only toothed whales also use sound as a powerful weapon. To a fish, the sonic stun beam of a dolphin must seem like a super power. To the dolphin, it's a useful hunting weapon, normal as can be.

The root of all of Henderson's stories, of the People and otherwise, is coping with being different, whether as an individual or as a social minority. Her last People story, "Katie-Mary's Trip," faces People differences with the Hippie counterculture (which she consistently misspells "hippy"); two "different" groups are thus contrasted. To me, the effort fails in this case. She couldn't get inside the hippie mind, as she could both the People mind and that of their persecutors (These last bear a singular resemblance to those who persecuted the Mormons in the 1840s).

The rest of her stories succeed, often wildly. They take the "aliens among us" theme from the angle of the alien, trying to live unnoticed in a very different world. There are more ways to tackle this notion than you might at first imagine. Setting aside "bridging material," there are seventeen stories in this collection. Sixteen at least are gems.