Henderson is best known for her series of stories about the People, a race of aliens physically indistinguishable from humans but endowed with psi powers and an acute moral sense setting them apart from the norm. Although generally accepted as one of the standards of the genre, her fiction actually has few of the customary trappings of science fiction. Unlike the stories her peers were writing in the 1950s and 1960s, which most typically pit characters against outlandish mechanical monsters, Henderson's stories explore human nature, the relationships between People and people, humans and the natural environment. Above all, her stories diffuse a warm humanism celebrating man's potential for compassion as well as his tendency to destroy the unfamiliar. The mildly religious undertone pervading her work expresses her profound respect for the sanctity of the individual.
Henderson's first volume, Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961), is a novelization of the first six stories about the People, all of which appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1952 and 1959. In an interview with Paul Walker, Henderson said that the People stories began as "a story about some people who crossed the Atlantic by 'lifting' from their home in Transylvania." Gradually, the theme of interstellar refugees emerged from the horror tale.
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