{"id":1397,"date":"2018-11-01T20:36:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T01:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/?p=1397"},"modified":"2018-11-01T20:36:50","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T01:36:50","slug":"two-birthdays-zenna-henderson-and-gordon-r-dickson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/two-birthdays-zenna-henderson-and-gordon-r-dickson\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Birthdays: Zenna Henderson and Gordon R. Dickson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two science fiction writers were born on this date, November 1.\u00a0 Zenna Henderson (1917-1983) and Gordon R. Dickson (1923-2001) aren’t as well known as they once were, but they both made significant contributions to the field.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Zenna Henderson wrote sf back in the 1950s and 1960s, you know, back when women didn’t write science fiction<\/a>.\u00a0 Although she wrote a number of stand alone stories, her best known works was a series about The People, aliens who pass as human and live in a community on Earth.\u00a0 There was even a pilot for a television series based on the stories that starred William Shatner in the early 1970s, but the series wasn’t picked up.<\/p>\n

I remember reading one of the People stories in a school textbook when I was a kid.\u00a0 NESFA Press has collected them in a single volume<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You would think that being a successful and critically lauded woman writing sf in the 50s would have garnered Henderson some acclaim these days, but no, that’s not the case.\u00a0 Even though her work often features women protagonists, and women who are middle aged or older, she’s often criticized because her work reflects traditional gender roles (horrors).\u00a0 Can’t have that! Even worse, she shows religious faith in a positive light. Her work must be judged by enlightened contemporary standards, never mind what the standards were when she was writing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The other author born today was Gordon R. Dickson.\u00a0 Dickson is best remembered for the Dorsai series, although if I’m being honest, and I always try to be, that series has never really done anything for me.\u00a0 The last one in that sequence I read was The Final Encyclopedia<\/em>.\u00a0 We were in Kazakhstan, and I had plenty of time on my hands in the afternoons.\u00a0 I found the book to be, not really a slog, but not something to make me read more in the series.\u00a0 (I had read the SFBC omnibus of the first few volumes in high school. They didn’t knock my socks off.)<\/p>\n

But Dickson wrote a lot more than just the Dorsai books.\u00a0 He was prolific in fantasy and science fiction, and he tended to write things in a vein of adventure.\u00a0 Baen was supposed to be publishing a series of collections containing his best short fiction.\u00a0 One volume has appeared, but the project appears to have been put on hold.\u00a0 There are plenty of his books available through other venues.<\/p>\n

Both writers are worth checking out, even though their approaches and philosophies are quite different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two science fiction writers were born on this date, November 1.\u00a0 Zenna Henderson (1917-1983) and Gordon R. Dickson (1923-2001) aren’t as well known as they once were, but they both made significant contributions to the field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[296],"tags":[775,851,850],"class_list":["post-1397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthday","tag-birthday","tag-gordon-r-dickson","tag-zenna-henderson"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P5pJ-mx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1400,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions\/1400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/futurespastandpresent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}