Who Goes There?

Our first ’60s Galaxy story for this retrospective is by someone who actually did not appear in Galaxy often. The last time I covered Zenna Henderson it was as part of a retrospective on F&SF, the magazine which seemed to be Henderson’s preferred outlet. Henderson made her debut in 1952, as part of a wave of female writers who would help shape ’50s SF as being a very different ball game from the previous decade—indeed also the decade to come after, since there wouldn’t be as many active female SFF writers in the ’60s. Henderson specialized in short fiction, and one reason she lost traction by the end of the ’60s is that she refused to change her tune with the market; her single “novel,” Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, is a fix-up. Given her day job as a schoolteacher, it makes sense that her fiction tends to focus on relationships between adults (specifically parents and teachers) and children, with children especially getting attention, which for the time was novel. SF at the time was, let’s say averse to understanding the day-to-day lives of children, but Henderson’s fiction was a major exception. Today’s story, “Something Bright,” is a standalone work (Henderson’s fiction can be split into two groups: standalone stories and those about “The People”) that I found a good deal more compelling than “Subcommittee,” the last Henderson story I reviewed. This is a good one, and it’s understandably one of her more reprinted stories.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1960 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in The 6th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F (ed. Judith Merril), The Seventh Galaxy Reader (ed. Frederik Pohl), Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, and Frederik Pohl), and the Henderson collections The Anything Box and Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson.

Enhancing Image

The exact year is not given, but right away we’re told that “Something Bright” takes place during “the Depression,” so probably anywhere between 1930 and 1935. Anna is an adult now, but she’s telling us about a strange thing that happened to her when she was eleven years old, living in a “court” that her family shared with an older couple, the Klevitys. Mr. Klevity isn’t around (in fact he doesn’t appear until the story’s end), but Mrs. Klevity is, especially whenever Anna’s mom has to go out for errands. Obviously there is something off about the Klevitys, not least because they somehow have fresh eggs every morning, in an economy where even eggs are treated as a delicacy. The SFnal twist is by itself easy to detect in advamce, to the point where it hardly even counts as a twist; but it’s what Henderson does around the twist that makes it a pretty good story. As such I’m gonna work on the assumption that you, the reader, have already figured out that the Klevitys are aliens in disguise, become come on, we’re all adults here, and the fact that Henderson waits until the back end to confirm our suspicions is merely a formality. This is a story about childhood and memory, far more than it is a story about aliens, yet the SFnal element is integral to its makeup. Both in style and substance it would strike the average reader as “literary”—except for the part about the aliens, of course.

The key ingredient that elevates “Something Bright” is the sense that while it is not autobiographical at face value, there is the strong sense that Henderson is writing about personal experiences that she herself probably had first-hand knowledge of. I’m not sure how much Henderson and Anna share in terms of personality, but we do know that they both spent at least some of their formative years during the Depression, and incidentally each is an older child in a family with five kids. When Henderson/Anna asks at the beginning, “Do you remember the Depression?” she’s being at least partly rhetorical: she absolutely does remember. Despite being only about a dozen pages, the setting is vividly set, with Anna lamenting being the eldest of five kids in a home that amounted to two rooms, in which nobody had any privacy, least of all her mother. We’re not told directly what happened with Anna’s dad, that I can recall anyway, but at one point it’s implied he either went off in search of work or abandoned the family outright. Anna’s mom is effectively a single parent, but that’s where Mrs. Klevity comes in. It would have been commonplace, during the Depression, for kids to either be left to fend for themselves much of the time or to be kept under watch by multiple people who were not their biological parents—out of economic necessity more than anything. You may remember in To Kill a Mockingbird that Scout and her brother Jem are left to their own devices for way longer than what would nowadays be considered a good idea, on account of their single dad only being able to do so much.

“Something Bright” must’ve struck a cord at the time, on account of being reprinted multiple times within just a few years, but it also speaks to today’s post-COVID environment. The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is, along with the housing market crash of 2008, the closest we have to a modern-day analog to the Great Depression. These are times in which the machinery of capitalism comes almost to a grinding halt, in which the system “failed” (but, on the other hand, if we’re to take capitalism as a system that works to benefit a rich minority at the expense of the majority, then it more or less kept working as intended), and in which even the nuclear family as a viable model for child care seemed on the brink of becoming a thing of the past. Ironically the nuclear family, which conservatives love to hold up as being traditional and “natural,” has, for practical reasons, been in fact a fairly modern phenomenon. The idea that two parents would take care of their own biological kids was unviable for many during the Depression, during which you’d be lucky if even one of your parents had a steady job, and said job was unlikely to both pay the bills and feed everyone. Thus in this story we’re given a depiction of a nontraditional family setup, in which the father figure is absent and so Anna and her siblings are left with at least one adult figure in their lives who is a constant and yet is not related to them. Mrs. Klevity sticks out in Anna’s memory not just for her strangeness and her conspicuous and yet unexplained ability to provide for both herself and her husband (Anna points out that the Klevitys have three rooms to themselves, compared to Anna’s two), but also the fact that she at least temporarily acted as a surrogate parent.

There Be Spoilers Here

The back end of “Something Bright” takes a turn towards horror, although it doesn’t quite go there, because it turns out Anna is not in any real danger. Her first encounter with Mrs. Klevity without the disguise, which she hears but does not see, is genuinely chilling, not to mention an unexpected bit of restraint of Henderson’s part. We figured in advance that the Klevitys were not strictly speaking human, but how this reveal is made is what makes the twist memorable despite its predictability. That Anna ultimately helps Mrs. Klevity and her husband (who only shows up at the end to find that his wife has flown the coop, so to speak) go back to wherever it is they came from, and gets something material out of it (the Klevitys leave behind their half of the court and bestow it to Anna’s family, in a thank-you note), makes for a pretty upbeat conclusion. Yet despite it being a happy ending, there’s still a strong eeriness about the whole thing, as if Anna, who is telling us this story many years after the fact, is trying to explain some peculiar childhood trauma that had happened to her. I have to wonder what the context could be that Anna is telling this story to us, since this is not the kind of thing you’d tell to just anyone, but this is a quibble. Then again, when you’re looking back on childhood memories, the line between what really happened and one’s own imagination can be hard to separate. I barely remember my own childhood, as an autistic person who also dissociated a lot, to the point where a lot of what I “remember” might not have actually happened. Our own histories become stranger and more disconnected as time passes, to where they no longer seem real to us.

A Step Farther Out

Henderson working with children as part of her day job is very much reflected here, as it captures a genuineness about childhood experience that very few SF stories at the time had even attempted. The twist is obvious, to the point where I don’t even count it as a spoiler really, but the twist is not why we’re here. When I read “Subcommittee” I was ambivalent about its glorifying of the nuclear family, which probably did not read as old-hat in the early ’60s but which now reads as stuffy and too old-fashioned; but “Something Bright” shows us an alternative family dynamic and doesn’t do anything to demonize it. It also helps that Anna is a likable narrator who relates her past experiences such that you get a vivid impression of what her childhood was like, even if you didn’t (and indeed most people in the US don’t now) go through exactly what she did. I recommend it! It’s very good proto-feminist pew-New Wave SF.

See you next time.