Today, November 1, marks the birth of two writers who are sadly fading into obscurity.

Zenna Henderson, circa 1953

First is Zenna Henderson (1917-1983), one of the leading women in the science fiction field in the 1950s and 1960s. She is best remembered for her stories of The People, aliens who are living in the US and doing their best to blend in.  Fun fact, William Shatner starred in a pilot for TV series based on The People stories that never went into production. But Henderson also wrote a number of non-People stories. Fortunately NESFA press released an omnibus of those stories earlier this year, Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson. NESFA published her collected People stories in 1995, Ingathering: The Complete People Stories. In this day when people think there were no women science fiction and fantasy writers in the 1950s, it’s good to have Henderson’s work coming back into print. Hopefully this new collection will keep  her from further obscurity.

The other writer is one who is still remembered but who has fallen out of print. I’m talking about Gordon R. Dickson (1923-2001).

Dickson is certainly better remembered than Zenna Henderson, but he’s not easy to find on bookstore shelves anymore.  When I was a kid, he books were plentiful, with more being published all the time, or so it seemed.

In science fiction, he’s best remembered for the Childe Cycle, AKA the Dorsai books. I’ve read some of them, but it’s been over a decade since I picked up the last one. In fantasy, Dickson wrote a series of dragon books.  I’ve not read them, so I can’t say much about them. Dickson tended to focus on adventure, often but not exclusively of a military nature. He also wrote over two dozen stand alone novels and numerous short stories. Baen was going to publish a  multivolume collection of his best short stories. At least I think it was supposed to be a multivolume set. The first one appeared in 2017, and there’s been nothing since.

Dickson is a writer I want to read more of.