THE ANYTHING BOX by Zenna Henderson

Zenna Henderson is considered to have been something of a pioneer in Science Fiction circles. First publishing in 1951, Henderson joined the narrow ranks of woman publishing in the genre at the time, and she remains an influence on writers of both sexes. This is an anthology of her best short fiction…so how does it stand up?

Rather well, actually. Henderson, in stark contrast to a lot of the popular SF of the 50s, clearly had little time for the tropes of intergalactic war, far-out inventions and buff heroes solving problems by the sheer awesomeness of their brains. Instead, Henderson hones in on moments of quiet, and on characters often overlooked, if not outright forgotten, in a patriarchal society. A rather lot of her protagonists are school teachers (Henderson herself taught classes for many years) and a rather lot more are children. In the titular story, ‘The Anything Box’, a school teacher encounters a child who appears to possess a powerful imagination…she believes she has an invisible box that can allow her to exist in any place, at any time she desires. Ah, but in a careless moment the teacher’s hand brushes an object she cannot see and she finds herself transported to…well, that would be telling. Sounds cute, yes? Somewhat less cut is the tale of ‘Stevie and The Dark’ in which a young lad named Stevie uses his ‘magic’ (ie. a bunch of rocks he picks up from around the river) to trap a Something in the hollow of the tree. The Something is rather nasty, may in fact be the incarnation of Evil itself, and it’s really very, very sore at Stevie for sticking it in a tree.

I will say that Henderson’s structural narratives tend to fall into predictability at times…ie. there’s a child, and the child meets something inexplicably strange, and an adult has to help the child while overcoming their own assumptions about children…But some of these stories still possess a sort of breathless, light-filled charm that just about captures that fading moment of childhood, when you still believed anything was possible. Me like books.