Nothing in my experience has affected me more deeply than my discovery via the internet that a lot of people remembered this story from the 1970s, had often reread it, and were eager to share it with new generations of young people. The publication of a new hardcover edition in 2001 brought it new fans who will soon be giving it to children of their own, and I hope this 2018 edition will connect me with even more readers. It includes some very minor wording changes, mainly to replace generic masculine pronouns—which were the only thing that dated the book—with gender-neutral language.
To the many readers who have sent me email, I want to express my thanks. And to those who haven’t yet found me on the web, I want to extend an invitation to visit my site. It is particularly important to me that you read the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page about this book because it clears up some issues that I have found are often confusing to readers. There is also an essay that discusses these issues in detail, which I hope you will read if you are a teacher or librarian.
Enchantress from the Stars is about relationships between different peoples on different worlds that have been evolving for different lengths of time. There are many things in it that also apply to relationships among people of our own world—but also things that do not. Some readers have felt that the Service in the story is rather high-handed in declaring that certain peoples are more “mature” than others and that the mature ones should not help those less fortunate. This would certainly be true if they weren’t different species. We of Earth are all members of the same species, and our planet’s various cultures have all been evolving for the same length of time; we cannot say that some are more “advanced” than the rest. But this is not true of species on other worlds which, if there are any, must be far apart in age and stage of evolution.
There are people, including some of the scientists hoping to detect interstellar radio signals, who think that if we could make contact with older species they would tell us how to solve Earth’s problems, so that we wouldn’t need to work toward solving them ourselves. On the other hand, many people fear that if we met advanced species of aliens they would very likely be hostile and might even invade Earth. I don’t believe either of these things would happen, and I do believe that how we feel about our place in the universe is important. Whether or not we ever meet any extraterrestrials, how we picture their attitude toward us affects our feelings about our own world.
My website is at www.sylviaengdahl.com. If you would like to talk about the story, do write to me through the contact page there. I enjoy hearing from readers!