Zenna Henderson was one of the better known woman science fiction writers of the 1950s and 1960s. One of her early stories, “Ararat,” published 1952 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, became the start of perhaps her best known work, the stories of the People.

The first six of them, all dating to the 1950s, were brought together in 1961 as Pilgrimage. This is a fix-up, tied together with a framing narrative about a young woman whose intended suicide is interrupted by one of the People, and who then witnesses the telling of incidents from the People’s history. But there’s more continuity than the framing narrative; the later stories refer back to the earlier and reintroduce some of their characters.

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The fact that people are not ruled by any god frees them to rule themselves. The fact that fate is blind frees people to take their fate into their own hands. The fact that the race has no purpose frees its individual members to pursue their own purposes. And so, the fact that bare human life is without intrinsic value does not mean human endeavor is pointless. Just as a worthless chunk of stone can be sculpted into a precious work of art, so too can a raw, common life become great by what its owner makes of it. And that endeavor is the key to life — with no god, no other value to existence — a man’s own endeavor is everything.

— from Children of the Dragon, by Frank Robinson

There are no dragons in this novel, as I first thought when I bought Children of the Dragon back in 1978. There are no wizards or witches, no magic, no strange beasts or monsters. This is alternate-world fiction, without any of the usual fantasy tropes. Probably the first or one of the first novels that later would be labeled Grimdark, for this certainly is a grim and dark novel.

Sadly, Robinson wrote only this one “fantasy” novel. He wrote no sequels, no other fantasy. The cover reads “Frank Robinson,” but inside the book his name is Frank S. Robinson, and that is the name under which the book is copyrighted. He also wrote a few other fiction and non-fiction books under that name, but he was not prolific. (His agent was Virginia Kidd, a high-profile agent in her day, to whom he dedicated this novel. She also represented science fiction writer Avram Davidson.)

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