HENDERSON, Zenna

(1917-1983)

   US writer and schoolteacher who frequently used her teaching experience in Arizona and elsewhere as a base for her stories; perhaps significantly, given her treatment of ALIENS as emblems of our better selves, during WWII she taught interned Japanese-Americans in a relocation camp. Her first story was "Come on, Wagon!" for FSF - the magazine with which she is mostly strongly associated - in 1951; soon after, with "Ararat" (1952), she began publishing in FSF the series of stories aboutThe People which comprises her central achievement. Put together with framing devices as PILGRIMAGE: THE BOOK OF THE PEOPLE (fixup 1961) and The People: No Different Flesh (coll of linked stories 1966) - and assembledas The People Collection (omni 1991 UK) - the sequence recounts over a long timespan the arduous experiences of a group of aliens with PSI POWERS who have been shipwrecked on Earth and must try to survive as well and fully as possible; although outwardly indistinguishable from humans, they are morally superior. A further story, "The Indelible Kind" (1968), appears with unconnected stories in Holding Wonder (coll 1971); this collection, along with The Anything Box (coll 1965), assembles most of ZH's stories independent of The People. The same decorous warmth infusesall her work, sometimes overly reducing tensions and contrasts, but usually demonstrating her humane talent to advantage, though her wholesomeness can be vitiating.

   JC

   See also: CHILDREN IN SF; ESP; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; PASTORAL; SUPERMAN; WOMEN SF WRITERS.