(SFF Bingo): Ingathering: The Complete People Stories, by Zenna Henderson

This was found via a serendipitous Reddit rec: another poster asked for books with a big technological gap, and a reply mentioned Steerswoman, Sylvia Louise Engdahl ("Enchantress from the Stars," which I haven't read, but crosses over with "Children of the Star" eventually), and this, a series of related short stories gathered together in an anthology. Given how much I loved the tropes in Steerswoman and Children of the Star, it was like...clearly this person has superlative taste and I need to try this as well. And then I saw it was also a Yuletide fandom (hi cahn!) okay, the world of SFF is small-ish and people have tropes they like. :) So I'm posting this on December 19 but probably keeping it locked until after reveals, surprise, Madness treat!

Premise: there was another world full of humans living a mostly-idyllic, pastoral, life, with lots of psychic powers, levitation, etc. They're also explicitly Christian (their version of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" is "the Power, the Presence, and the Name"). But God, or the universe, decides they've had things too easy and haven't developed their gifts like they should, and plans to destroy the planet. The People have to build spaceships, scatter into semi-related groups, and evacuate, crash-landing on Earth in the Arizona Territory in the 1890s. From there, some of them find each other and live in isolated communities where they can levitate freely; others are separated and grow up with psychic powers they don't understand, searching for others like them. The stories range in time from the evacuation to the late 60s/early 70s timeframe; they often involve children and teachers in one-room schoolhouses, miners and ranchers dealing with floods and fires in the canyons, etc. This is a big volume that was preceded by two smaller anthologies, so both of those contribute "frame stories" that interweave with the main narratives, about Earth humans who meet and react to The People. (Like Engdahl's "Stewards of the Flame," the People are just "the People," their homeworld was "The Home," anyone who's not part of the People is an Outsider, etc.)

The o/Outsider POVs are the best, if you're looking for something like Steerswoman or Children of the Star in which an uninformed character has to gradually figure out what's going on. "Captivity," "No Different Flesh," "The Indelible Kind," and "That Boy" are probably the standouts in this regard. The first stories to be published, "Ararat" and "Gilead," are from the perspectives of People who already take their differences in stride, while "Pottage" is narrated by an Outsider who just happened to go to teacher school with one of the People who blabbed; these are more anticlimactic, and overall the stories can get samey. These kinds of POVs do allow a couple cute moments like "no levitating at the table, kids."

While the stories are definitely pro-Christianity, they also don't shy away from portraying the evils of fundamentalist religion and narrow-minded people who do terrible things in God's name ("That Boy," "Angels Unawares," "Tell Us A Story"), and that contrast is part of what makes them powerful.

"I felt the same feeling coming from him that you can feel around some highly-religious person who knows God only as a stern implacable vengeful deity, impatient of worthless man, waiting only for an unguarded moment to strike him down in his sin. I wondered who or what his God was that prisoned him so cruelly."

"It can't be! Not in this day and age!"
"It can be," said Nils. "In any age when people pervert goodness, love, and obedience and set up a god small enough to fit their shrunken souls."

"He tried to kill you!" I burst out, impatient with her compassion.
"He thought he would never be able to come into the Presence because of me," she said quickly. "What might I have done if I had believed that of him?"

Versus:

“This good gift of food you have given us. But the best gift is—well, I knew it was the same everywhere, but to hear you sing to Them—” softly she echoed, “Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—Though you named them other—that is the best gift you have given. Thank you.”
Nathan wound the tattered rope around his hand again, shy to hear her speak so freely of such things. 

“Always, at Home, we were Called before we went back into the Presence. So we had time for our farewells and to put things in order and to give our families and friends the personal things we wanted them to have. And, most important, time to cleanse ourselves of anything that might make it hard to return to the Presence that sent us forth.”

(This story is set circa 1891.) I would have loved hearing even more about the People's theology--are they familiar with the Crucifixion? Do they have revelations about things happening on other planets?--but I'll settle for what we got.

Some of the stories can be weird about disability. I get that people who are telekinetic and communicate telepathically don't really need to have healthy eyes to have a good sense of what's going on around them, but they do if they want to make sure Outsiders don't know what's up. So "X went blind in the car/spaceship crash and he can't see but he compensates for it other ways" is an okay trope, if repetitive. However, Obla from "Jordan": "deaf, blind, voiceless, armless, legless," seems like an over-the-top caricature. The narrator describes her as "more an expression of myself than a separate person. An expression that was hidden and precious," which is weird and dehumanizing. Similarly, in "Wilderness," the narrator (an Outsider, but starting to show signs of telepathy) meets one of the People who's trying to help an intellectually-disabled twelve-year-old. When the child tries to describe this, she says "He makes it almost straight but it bends again...He said don’t tell." Which at first comes off as "okay it's super creepy but maybe it sounded less creepy in 1956?") And then, nope, other characters are creepy and assuming the worst :/

-This is only mentioned once and raises so many questions, I need the fic:

 

“What does he think I’m going to do, drop another Hiroshima bomb?”

I checked firmly the surge of remembered sorrow at his words. “One of us was there in that plane,” I said. “Remember?”

“But he didn’t use any of the Designs or Persuasions in the dropping of the Bomb—”

“No. If he had, we probably never would have been able to help him out of the Darkness afterward.”

-"If I live seven more years, I’ll not only be of age but I’ll see the Turn of the Century! Imagine putting 19 in front of your years instead of 18!" hahaha kids never change :D

-There's a plot device where a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem saves the day, yay poetry nerds :D

-The Wikipedia article on the anthology quotes a review that says ""Katie-Mary's Trip", "an attempt to bring The People into the [19]60s", deviates from the author's "normal, plain style" and is the only story that "does not work"." At first I was like, "there are stories in the 1890s and stories in the 1950s, what's so bad about writing a story set in the 60s or 70s?" Then I got to the story, whose opening paragraphs are:

 

See—we’ve got this pad, like—you know?—an old farmhouse with a broad porch all around it. The local yokels call it the hippy-joint, and when the local fuzz need something to fill out a shift, they cruise up and down in front of the place and make like busy.

Now, I know it’s not for real—this hippy bit. Not here. Lots of dudes and chicks stop here on their way to the Coast where the Real is. But they never stay here—not the McCoy. They all drift on in a day or two except the ones that can’t or won’t conform. They can’t buy the whole bit and so they drop out—too individual. Listen, if you think conforming is for squares or the establishment—think twice. You conform to the hippy thing or, brother, you’re out!

Sorry, reviewer, you were right. This does not work.

-Is this where Zenna from "Steerswoman" got her name?

Overall, while "The People" can be repetitive, even the books it was compared to aren't perfect either! Noren's adolescent angst can be a little over-the-top at times, and "Steerswoman" hasn't touched on "what do religious people believe/know about other worlds and what implications does that have for the story" as much as I would be curious about. So while maybe I wasn't at the right time in my life to fully appreciate "The People," or maybe I set my expectations too high, there's lots of profound food for thought.

Bingo: I plan to use it for five short stories. Could probably count for mundane jobs (lots of teachers), maybe indie press (this was re-published by the New England Science Fiction Association press).