Pilgrimage

Henderson is an alright writer, but <i>Pilgrimage</i> feels like drinking warm milk, mostly because I can't imagine anyone doing so and not falling immediately asleep.

Following the diaspora of a crashed alien ship on Earth, this is a fix-up of previously published short stories, with an interstitial narrative where the stories are told to a struggling Outsider, a human that learns about the aliens as we do. The People, as the aliens are called, are essentially identical to humans externally but posses a number of powers that distinguish and potentially endanger them if revealed around humans, including but not limited to: levitation, telekinesis, and telepathy. The stories themselves mostly revolve around children with these extraordinary powers that have differing levels of knowledge about their past; genetic memory is assumed to be true, as some of these children have memories of their home world even though they crashed on Earth three generations ago. Isolated groups of the People slowly reconnect and gather their strength with the hopes of returning to 'the Home' and reconnecting with the 'Presence'.

Obviously there's some very thinly veiled Christian allegory here. The People are often ostracized for their differences and yearn for a promised land where there will be no persecution. It's mentioned several times that the humans of Earth could posses the same powers of the People, if only they knew about and followed the 'Presence' more closely. These all allegories are drawn rather hamfistedly, so strong and on the nose as to be overwhelming. I wish that Henderson had used a more subtle approach here, but as it stands this was a negative for the book because of the execution of it

I commend Henderson though for her focus on children and teaching, a world in which she was well versed. The children and women she writes are strong in character, capable, and emotionally/mentally intelligent. To write these characters in the 1950's was kind of ahead of it's time, much like Henderson never using a male pseudonym. Henderson seems like an interesting character, and in a somewhat limited way that bleeds into the work, though I wish it did more so.   

Maybe these stories would've been more tolerable if you read them as they were initially published, as one-offs in a magazine once every few months. Stacked together like this though they melt into a morass of some of the most sleepy and gentle writing that I've read. Warm, slow, emotional, repetitive, and sickeningly sweet. In a way it could be viewed as a progenitor to the wave of mundane SF works that are currently very in vogue. Unfortunately the stories are so similar in structure and conclusion to one another that they are tedious and predictable from the start. It's not bad per se, but extraordinarily anodyne. I wish I could like it more, and maybe I could've if I was at a different stage in my life.