Vintage Treasures: The Collections of Zenna Henderson: The Anything Box and Holding Wonder
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I’m not intimately familiar with the work of Zenna Henderson…. but I know she is extremely highly regarded by those who are familiar with her, and that’s pretty telling.
She’s remembered today primarily for her stories of The People, an spacefaring alien race with strange metal powers that covertly settles in the American southwest after the destruction of their home planet. The stories appeared, like most of her short fiction, chiefly in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; they were collected Pilgrimage: The Book Of The People (1961), People: No Different Flesh (1966), and in two omnibus volumes, The People Collection (1991) and the NESFA Press book Ingathering: The Complete People Stories (1995).
Much of her other short fiction was gathered in two handsome paperback collections: The Anything Box (1965) and Holding Wonder (1971). Her first published story was “Come On, Wagon!” in the December 1951 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, dozens more appeared over the next 30 years, until her death in 1983. Henderson was an elementary school teacher in rural Arizona for much of her adult life, in places as diverse as a “semi-ghost mining town” in Fort Huachuca, and a Japanese internment camp in Sacaton, Arizona, and many of her stories are narrated by elementary teachers. She was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although later in life she described herself as Methodist. She never published a novel, which perhaps is why she’s virtually forgotten today.
Thursday, June 14: as good a day as any to begin an adventure. I walked downtown that afternoon under looming clouds to Concordia University’s EV Building, where I picked up my accreditation for the 2016 edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival. I’d been looking forward to writing about this year’s festival for Black Gate virtually since last year’s had ended. Now things were finally about to begin. A laminated press pass, a festival schedule, a thick program book: the guide to the adventure unfolding over the next three weeks, to fantasy and horror and science fiction and a lot more.
