A Great Read

As many of you know, I am now reading Zenna Henderson’s The Ingathering. You don’t remember that author? Do you remember the old TV mini-series with Kim Darby and William Shatner called The People? This book contains all of her short stories about The People.
I had originally read her short stories about The People in the old Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction pulps when I was between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. I loved her stories then, but didn’t realize there were far more. Neither did I realize how much her writing would later influence mine. It has been a shock reading the stories that I had not read.
She uses religion in her stories and the way she uses it, you have no doubt that she is referring to the Triune God. She gave the People mind abilities like I gave the Justines. I did not, however, give any of my other world beings the ability to “lift.” That is the ability to move around the world without walking; nor, do my beings from other planets have the ability to mind connect across the world. I did destroy one planet, but not the planet of the alien from Thalia. The Justine planet was destroyed, but the Justines did not relocate to Earth as The People did.
The People came to Earth and settled here. Like my Thalian alien, they intermarried with Earth beings and created a different genetic pattern. My alien, however, does not stay on Earth. He returns to Thalia to right the wrongs inflicted by the Justines and their allies the Krepyons.
Ms. Henderson had her beings possess the ability to gather sunlight, create heat, and make metal and cloth materials flow. It was a surprise to find that Ms. Henderson missed one very important scientific achievement in an advanced society. She still has the sex of the unborn unknown. This when X-Rays was well known. Of course, it was also well known that X-Rays could be harmful.
She does have a beautiful way of working children into her adult stories. You can see the limitations of the child, but the innate intelligence is there and the other world abilities.
My stories do have far more sex, more violence, and there is cursing from certain characters. Her stories do not contain sex, other than implied. There may be violence in a natural disaster, accident, someone giving details about an incident, and there are but one or two words that would be in the cursing category. The clean manner in which she wrote must be attributed to the era that she started writing these stories. That was the 1950’s before most of our mores changed.
She did mix some of the early history of the United States with the early arrival of the People to this planet. My first three novels of the stranded alien on Earth do contain American history from the 1840’s through 1949. When my alien and his Earth family return for a visit and reunion, you will find one chapter from the 1950’s and then the vibes and details from the late 1970’s. The other novels take place on other planets and some of the history of Thalia are in the Maca Chronicles and the history of the planet Tonath are in Man, True Man. That will be the case in the next novel set on the planet Tonath.
Perhaps I should be writing more about my own novels, but it is such a pleasure to read well-written stories that stir the imagination of what could be. My short stories in the four Twisted Tales anthologies are just that; short stories that are finished at the end except for the stories about the vampire Valda. Her stories are scattered through The Twisted Tales From The Northwest to Twisted Tales From A Skewed Mind. I’m not sure why she kept making an appearance, but like the long-lived creatures of the night that she is, she keeps returning.
If this has aroused your interest in the Chronicles of the Maca, start with Earthbound. If you like short stories, any of the Twisted Tales will fill your need. You’ll find them all listed here on Goodreads or at https://www.amazon.com/Mari-Collier/e...