I can’t narrow it down more than to say that I found Andre Norton’s Dread Companion on a library shelf during middle school. The cover blurb told me it was a tale of a woman living on another planet far in the future who was hired to take care of two children who had an “imaginary” friend that was something far more sinister.

I didn’t expect that it would be about faeries in space.

The blurb was a fairly accurate description of the set-up: Kilda is a young woman trying to find her place in the world. Her father was a spacer who had no interest in settling down with the woman who got pregnant during their brief political marriage. And her mother didn’t want to be saddled with a child like Kilda who was more interested in exploring and learning science and so forth than she was in being pretty and having babies of her own… Continue reading Changelings on Distant Worlds – more of why I love sf/f →