Dragonwriter

by Dragonwriter- A Tribute to Anne McCaffrey

  But Anne was insistent. There is a deeper difference, and it goes to the heart of what makes her tales science fiction, after all. The characters in her Pern epic start out dwelling in a feudal setting, all right. But unlike the endlessly repeated trope protagonists in all those Tolkien-clone universes, most of them don’t want to!

  Moreover, they don’t intend to—not for any longer than they must.

  In the course of Anne McCaffrey’s fictional universe—as the stories unfold—people discover relics of an older time and learn that things weren’t always this way—with peasant-serfs tied to the rocky land, wracked by filth, pestilence, and arbitrary rule by hereditary lords, with gender and class roles stiffly predefined and strictly enforced, with people staring in occasional wonder at the great dragonriders who protect them from raining death.

  Sure, their condition is eased by a myriad of lovely traditions and crafts, reflecting the makeshift creativity of brave folk, by improvising—making the best of things across centuries of darkness. As a fallback position, feudalism can be a preferable stopgap to keep from tumbling all the way down to caveman or tribal existence . . . or extinction. Despite all of its wretched aspects, including deep and inherent injustice, feudalism has another side; its horrors can be moderated and softened, even livened by the ingenuity and pride of clever, brave folk. And McCaffrey’s Pernese characters—in one deeply moving tale after another—brilliantly illustrate both sides.

  Only, during the span of many novels, they come to discover a core truth: that things could be better.

  That once upon a time they were better.

  That their civilization fell, long ago, from a height so great that people once voyaged between stars, cured disease, led unconstrained lives, pondered secrets of the universe . . . and even made dragons.

  Moreover—and here is what distinguishes the characters of an Anne McCaffrey novel from those who live in similar situations penned by other authors—as soon as they realize how much they’ve lost, they start wanting to get all of those things back.

  By the third Dragonriders novel, where they find cryptic remnants from the interstellar times—and as more relics and clues are uncovered in later books—Anne’s characters know that there’s a different way. People don’t have to live in grimy ignorance and violence, even lightened by clever medieval arts. It will be a long climb back, but they itch to get their hands on flush toilets, movable type, computers, and democracy. And one thing is certain—they are going to quit being feudal, just as soon as they can.

  Perhaps when they become starfarers once again, they will remember fondly the lore that stitched them together during the long Dark Age. They may keep singing the songs, and even doff their hats to the scion of a lordly family or the current dragonmaster . . . so long as they have helped bring the renaissance and truly merit honor. Oh, but if those high and mighty ones get in the way? Try to obstruct?

  I pity the fools.

  Oh, sure. Feudalism tugs at something deep within us. Those images of lords and secretive mages and so on resonate in our hearts because we’re all descended from the harems of guys who managed to pull off that trick of grabbing for themselves a pinnacle of inherited power. Why else would we, the heirs of enlightenment heroes, like Franklin and Lincoln and Edison, who finally ended the 6,000-year feudal hell, run off to fantasy flicks filled with bickering kings and elves and wizards and masters of arcane arts? We all have magic crystals on our tables that let us peer at distant lands, sift through all the world’s knowledge, and converse with folk all around the globe. But how much more romantic to imagine that only a dozen demigods and mages had palantírs, instead of five billion peasant citizens!

  No, there is clearly something deeply appealing about those old ways, the symbols and terrors and pastoral pleasures and songs. Anne McCaffrey certainly made good use of those resonating themes, and more power to her!

  But Anne’s notion of the time flow of wisdom was always aimed forward, rooted in a love and gratitude and belief in progress, in our ability to raise better generations, in a hope that more wondrous days will come.

  She was a science fiction author—one of the best. And I’m proud to say she was my friend.

  DAVID BRIN is a scientist, tech speaker/consultant, and author. His new novel about our survival in the near future is Existence. A film by Kevin Costner was based on The Postman. His sixteen novels, including New York Times bestsellers and Hugo Award winners, have been translated into more than twenty languages. Earth foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare, and the World Wide Web. David appears frequently on shows such as Nova, The Universe, and Life After People, speaking about science and future trends. His non-fiction book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

  Read this,” Mum said, thrusting Carpe Diem into my hands. Son or not, when Anne McCaffrey thrusts a book into your hands, you read it. Later that night, she was roused by the sound of me rustling through her bookshelves looking for more!

  Mum totally loved the Liaden universe. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are an amazing writing team and, as you’ll see, very important to Anne McCaffrey.

  Why Are You Reading This Stupid Shirt?

  Remembering AnnieMac

  SHARON LEE and STEVE MILLER

  WE TREASURE TWO photographs of Anne McCaffrey, here in the Lee and Miller household. Both of them show Anne enjoying herself immensely, posing with authority and just a little bit of ’tude.

  The first photo was taken by Steve, in 1978, when Anne was Guest of Honor at BaltiCon 12. She has one arm casually slung around the domed head of a familiar ’bot, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other. Her head is up, her expression mischievous, and she’s wearing a very fannish sweatshirt, or a long-sleeved T-shirt, that puts forth these cosmic questions:

  Why is man on this planet?

  Why is space infinite?

  Why are we doomed?

  Why are you reading this stupid shirt?

  In 1978, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller were not yet a team, though it happened that they both did, in very different capacities, attend BaltiCon 12.

  Steve was a member of the concom (a fannish word for “convention committee”) and as such had contributed to the decision to bring Anne to BaltiCon as the Guest of Honor. He was also a full-time freelancer, writing fiction, music, and book reviews while stringing for a couple of local Baltimore-area newspapers. He was on the premises at the Hunt Valley Inn early, and as the only member of the press to ask for the honor, Anne granted him an interview and a photo op.

  It was during the interview that Steve snapped the photo described previously; it was used in the Unicorn Times, the local Baltimore arts paper, as the lead photo for his story about BaltiCon.

  After the interview, Steve and Anne toured the convention venue before it filled up, and before the rest of the concom arrived, since she had arrived the night before from Ireland.

  The two hit it off, the way lubricated by the large number of “remember me to Annie!” exhortations Steve delivered from mutual fannish and professional acquaintances. They also found themselves at one regarding the benefits of workshops in writer development, Steve being a Clarion West survivor.

  Since Steve’s first and second pro stories for Amazing had just been published, Anne dispensed advice on good markets and avoidable markets and urged him to join SFWA—the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America—instantly. She also went on at length about how important art was to writers, something she greatly appreciated since Michael Whelan’s cover art for The White Dragon was making waves and bringing increased attention to the book’s upcoming release.

  Now, science fiction conventions don’t just happen, appearing at a hotel some Friday afternoon and evaporating at Sunday midnight. They are the effort of a particular science fiction community, such as the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, and they are run from opening ceremonies to the dead dog party (and fo
r many months of planning before) by volunteers from the community.

  As with all large undertakings, there are sometimes . . . glitches. When a glitch is discovered, members of the community step up to fix whatever’s gone wrong.

  And so, on the morning of the Friday afternoon on which BaltiCon 12 was to begin, it was discovered that a whole file box full of name tags for the preregistered attendees had not yet been typed. (In 1978, we still did these things by typewriter and by hand.) Friday morning is always a frantic pre-con time, with a lot of last-minute tasks and setup to attend to—and the badges shouldn’t have been one of those “last-minute” things.

  There was, on discovery of this lapse, a rather . . . energetic discussion in Ops (a fannish word for “operations office”) regarding how the name tags were to be made ready in time to open the registration table at four. The discussion was so energetic, in fact, that no one noticed that the Guest of Honor had entered the room and had heard the whole kerfuffle.

  “I can,” she said, using all the lung power of a trained singer, “type, you know.”

  There was a period of silence while people caught their breaths and waited for their ears to stop ringing. Then came a gentle objection from the con chair: Surely, they couldn’t ask their Guest of Honor to do gofer work.

  “I’m bored,” was Anne’s answer. “Give me something to do.”

  And so it was, when Sharon arrived at the convention that Friday evening, Anne McCaffrey was sitting behind the registration desk, happily typing the name tags for the on-site registrants, to many of those across the table just another energetic fan making them welcome at the con.

  As Guest of Honor, Anne was, of course, the first and most honored member of the convention, a role she took to with serious playfulness, enjoying the panels and serious side of things, and taking an obvious and more than somewhat fannish delight in the art show and the hucksters room, and later at the numerous evening parties as well. She did this the entire weekend, tirelessly dealing as both pro and fan, with sharp interest in all aspects of her community.

  BaltiCon 12 was Sharon’s second science fiction convention—ever. In addition to being a newbie, she was desperately shy and scarcely spoke to anyone during the entire weekend, least of all to the Guest of Honor. It was a lost opportunity but not a tragedy because Sharon had been introduced to Anne a decade earlier. At the tender age of fifteen, she had purchased Dragonflight—the first, but not the last, book on which she spent the grocery money. In her opinion, it was well worth the price; her mother . . . did not agree.

  As it did to so many readers, Dragonflight spoke to Sharon—dragons! A strong, stubborn, driven female lead! Partnership between male and female!—so, okay, the guy had to be convinced, but, he had been convinced. A hero who could, and did, think!

  It was more than an exciting story with great characters and wonderful world-building, though. It was an affirmation, a promise: Girls could get published, too.

  In 1968? That was huge.

  And it’s not a stretch to say that Dragonflight was directly responsible for Sharon’s attendance at her first-ever science fiction convention, BaltiCon 10 . . . as the winner of the con’s short story contest.

  We’re going to fast-forward thirty years, now.

  It’s 1997. Lee and Miller have been a team since mid-1979 and began writing together a few years later. They’ve seen published a handful of collaborative short stories and three novels set in a fictional space that’s come to be called the Liaden Universe®. Their publisher, Del Rey Books—coincidentally, the publisher of the Pern novels—had cut them loose in 1989 due to low sales. They haven’t sold a novel since 1988, though they’ve written rather a number, and—well, not to put too fine a point on it, they are washed-up writers. Their career is, in a word, dead.

  In August, 1997, Sharon accepted employment as the first full-time executive director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.—SFWA—the professional writers organization that Anne had been trying to get Steve to join, way back in 1978.

  SFWA had been used to running on volunteer power, sort of like science fiction convention fandom. As news of her hiring spread throughout the organization, Sharon received many letters from past SFWA volunteers and officers, offering congratulations, condolences, and advice.

  And one day, very soon after she took up her new duties, she received a paper letter from Ireland.

  The return address was Dragonhold-Underhill, County Wicklow.

  Of course, Sharon knew that Anne McCaffrey was a member of SFWA, but it was still kind of . . . cool to receive a letter from that particular address. She opened the envelope, expecting a membership question or perhaps a donation to one of SFWA’s philanthropic funds.

  The letter began:

  Dear Sharon Lee,

  If I say that I am a fan of yours, will you stop reading?

  Sharon blinked, flipped to the second page, and checked the signature:

  Anne McCaffrey

  She flipped back to the first page.

  The letter went on to talk knowledgeably of the first three Liaden books, praising them in the highest possible terms. It was both stunning and warming—who were washed-up writers Lee and Miller to get fan mail from Anne McCaffrey?—and she closed, Anne-like, by mentioning that she had once been SFWA’s secretary-treasurer, responsible for much of the work Sharon now had on her plate as executive director, and offering carte blanche any help she could give—Sharon had only to ask.

  From this start, a correspondence grew up, migrating eventually to email.

  In one of those back-and-forths, Anne wondered why there hadn’t been any more Liaden novels after Carpe Diem. The answer to that was that the publisher had declined to continue the series, citing lack of numbers. “Numbers” is publisher-speak for “units sold.”

  Anne’s opinion was that sometimes it took a book, or a series, “a while” to reach full potential in terms of numbers. This was something that hadn’t occurred to us in quite those terms, but it was borne out by emails we’d started to get from other readers of our first three novels who wondered, as Anne had done, What Happened Next?

  There are a lot of writers who’ll tell you how hard it is to write—and they’re not wrong. But the hardest part of the writer’s job isn’t the writing—it’s sending the finished manuscript out into the world. The assumption must be that it will be rejected—as the overwhelming majority of manuscripts are—so the effort seems not only futile, but masochistic. And it saps the heart right out of you.

  But, now, near the end of 1997, the combination of Anne’s insight and the emails from other readers gave us the courage to consider what, exactly, we might do in order to come back from the dead. After all, we had all of those books written, and readers who wanted to read them.

  The result of those considerations was that, by early 1998, Lee and Miller had a publisher who was enthusiastic and willing to publish their backlist and their front list.

  So it was that we had just finished polishing and submitting the fourth book in the Liaden Universe® series to our new publisher when Anne sent an email, asking what we’d been doing.

  The completion of the novel was reported, and Anne immediately asked to see it, adding, “I take paperclips.”1

  So, the manuscript for Plan B was duly shipped off to Ireland as an email attachment.

  Now Plan B was supposed to have been an action-adventure novel, but there was a scene that was specifically character-building right in the middle of a very intense fight-and-flight situation. Long story short, in the final draft, that character-building section was removed and the edges of the excision smoothed out.

  Remember this.

  The next morning, there was an email from Anne in the inbox. She was full of praise for the novel, the characters, the world-building, but, she thought she would just mention that . . .

  There was a scene missing.

  And she pinpointed the spot in the narrative from which the slow character-bu
ilding section had been excised.

  Lee and Miller explained that, yes, there had been something there, but that it had been cut to make weight.

  From Anne came the direction, “Send it to me.”

  The cut scene was therefore emailed, and when the next batch of mail was downloaded, there was a return note from Anne. It was brief:

  “Put it back.”

  It’s never wise to argue with a force of nature, or with a writer who knows story so well that she could see the place where a scene wasn’t and call it out.

  Anne wasn’t done with us, though.

  No sooner had the cut material been restored and the newly compiled manuscript emailed, with excuses, to our publisher, than another email arrived from Anne, with our former editor at Del Rey, who happened to be Anne’s current and longtime editor, copied on the note.

  Anne waxed effusive about Plan B—it was a wonderful book; she predicted that we’d have no problem selling it (though she knew it had already been placed), and she looked forward with great anticipation to the continuation of both the long-interrupted story and our careers as writers.

  Lee looked at Miller; or perhaps Miller looked at Lee; and one of them said to the other, “She’s going to get us killed.”

  In fact, there was no reply—that Lee and Miller ever heard about—to that note; life went on; in due time Plan B was published, and, of course, the authors sent a signed book to Anne McCaffrey, to thank her for all her many kindnesses.