ea buys a bus ticket for as far as her money will take her, and finds herself disembarking in a small desert town. This seems as good a place as any to kill herself. But as she slides over the railing of a high bridge, a stranger pulls her back—and reads her mind.
Frightened and despairing, Lea jumps. She descends slowly, impossibly, to a safe landing. Then she is levitated into the air and carried away against her will. She finds herself in an isolated canyon, trapped by people who possess scary psi powers—and who are not of Earth. Lea had believed her life couldn't get any worse. Was she wrong?
Cougar Canyon is home to the People: human-looking aliens whose ancestors came to Earth fleeing the destruction of their planet. Crash-landing in the 19th-century Wild West, they were pioneers from a place inconceivably more distant than the East Coast or Europe. The accident scattered and separated the aliens, but they all swiftly learned to hide their unearthly abilities to avoid being slaughtered by earthlings. Some of the refugees were so isolated that their psi-burdened, ostracized descendants had no idea they were of unearthly origin.
Lea learns how the People rediscovered who they were, and how they found each other across the vastness of the Southwestern wilderness. And she learns there may be native earthlings who share the shocking powers of the People.
Undeservedly obscure
An important SF writer of the 1950s and '60s, Zenna Henderson (1917-1983) is now shamefully obscure. She was one of the first women to write science fiction, and one of the few female pioneers who didn't write under a masculine or androgynous byline. She was one of the rare mid-century SF writers who incorporated an overtly spiritual sensibility in their stories. She was also one of the first writers of literate, character-driven SF. She may not deserve as much credit as the late Theodore Sturgeon for shaping "soft SF" and literary SF, but she deserves more critical acknowledgment, and a larger readership, than she has received since her death. Her influence has been acknowledged by SF and fantasy writers as diverse, popular and powerful as Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Anne McCaffrey and Connie Willis. Her most important work, written during the 1950s-1970s, is her People series.
Zenna Henderson created the People out of her experiences as a teacher in Arizona and elsewhere—perhaps mostly significantly as a teacher of Japanese-American students in a World War II internment camp. Her fiction illuminates the common humanity of all people, regardless of background, age, race, personality, ability or origin. Her People do not shy away from faith, and her stories do not shy away from sentiment (or, sometimes, sentimentality). Her fiction reflects a deep belief in basic human decency. Perhaps it's no surprise that Henderson is almost forgotten, since her beliefs and attitudes are unfashionable in this more cynical postmodern era, in which the most hard-boiled, violent and brutal SF works are the most likely to earn the critical acclaim and major awards.
Another reason for Ms. Henderson's current obscurity is that she never wrote a traditional novel. Like most SF authors working in the mid-20th century, she wrote only short fiction. It's true that Pilgrimage: The Book of the People and its sequel, The People: No Different Flesh, were marketed as novels, and they are novels, of a sort. But they're not novels by the standards of most modern readers. They're fix-ups. Each collects previously published stories and links them with framing material written especially for that volume. In Pilgrimage, the six stories and novelettes are framed by the story of Lea, but Lea's narrative doesn't provide the traditional novelistic climax and resolution. However, the final story, "Jordan," provides closure to the People's decades-long interstellar quest to become one people again.
