In February, Anne wrote, “Todd, Gigi, and I are going to brainstorm to see if I can get a story up and running. As I said last evening, Todd has queries about why am I writing this? I dunno, and he pointed out that I already had a Helva ghost story which he likes. And it’s a case of parameters.”
I wrote back cheekily, “But the Moreta story is also a helluva good ghost story if still in the early stages of development. It’s important for what it says about Between, too. It’s not just a ghost story. It really advances the understanding of Pern’s second-most interesting feature.”
In mid-March, she had begun to feel that she had hit a roadblock but was determined to press on: “I had the most fascinating dream wherein I was telling myself I was dead and I haven’t finished Moreta’s ghost so how can I leave yet? Ciao now, Padre. Add Joan Harrison [Harry Harrison’s wife] to your prayer well.”
As the story neared completion, Gigi and I agreed that as it stood “Beyond Between” ventured too far beyond the pale of Anne’s normal reserve concerning the supernatural. We advised her to tone down some of the descriptions. A number of “New Age” touches suggested by friends of that persuasion seemed more metaphysically luminous and beckoning than “ghostly.”
The final version was a more subtle statement, but also stronger after Gigi’s judicious tailoring. After reading it, I wrote in July, “I read ‘Beyond Between’ last night. It’s great! Trimmer and more pointed, but sufficiently ambiguous to be an excellent ghost story. Gigi did a masterful job tidying. It’s a story you can be proud of.”
I was not exactly in the majority in that regard, and I was stung by the cattiness of some of the reviews after “Beyond Between” appeared in print. Annie, fortunately, did not pay much attention to such notices as a rule, though she was aware of the groans of literary dismay. Had her turn to the supernatural gone too far?
Devoted fans seemed reluctant to comment, but a number of reviews ranged from tepid to vitriolic. Publishers Weekly dismissed it as “an ill-conceived explanation of what happens when a dragon fails to return from Between, [that] strikes the book’s lone sour note.” Another reviewer opined that “As she is already dead, a story of Moreta’s further adventures was simply disappointing both as a Pern story, as well as just being a story that was not terribly interesting despite my love of Pern.” Even less forgiving was this diatribe: “Anne McCaffrey . . . had no business being in this book. McCaffrey is writing almost everything including her grocery lists by proxy these days, and it shows. She may very well have at one point been a master of this genre, but her time has passed, and she is embarrassing herself.” And, again, “The only total bomb in this [collection] was McCaffrey’s short story explaining what happens to dragons that become lost between. Even fans of the Pern novels should skip this one.”6
“Beyond Between” certainly exposed a raw nerve here and there. Anne’s narrative powers had undoubtedly been lessened by a number of recent health problems. But I suspect that the real venom arose because she had also crossed a well-defined line in the minds of some, perhaps many, readers. No one actually ventured to say as much, but the displeasure seemed unusually savage. In any case, “Beyond Between” did not garner much praise, to put it mildly.
Still, “Beyond Between” expresses something of Annie’s struggle to come to terms with significant losses in her own life. It was written as Anne approached the last years of her own life and the final days of many others important to her. Damon Knight died the following year, and Joan Harrison died later that year, too. Annie’s American agent and friend, Virginia Kidd, died a year after that, in 2003.
The following summer Annie’s mentally troubled niece, Karen, who had moved to Ireland some years earlier, died suddenly. I was in Ireland at the time and was able to preside at the funeral, held at Our Lady Queen of Peace Church in a Catholic parish in Bray where Karen had become a member and received sympathetic care and attention from the church’s outreach group. The parish priest graciously turned the church over to the family for the funeral mass. He and the parish staff couldn’t do enough for us and wouldn’t take a cent as a donation for their pains. As we left the church, Annie stuffed a fifty-euro note into the poor box.
Annie continued to write over the next several years, but declining health slowed the pace, which in her heyday had been prodigious. Collaborations with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (“the other Annie”) and especially with her son Todd, who was emerging as a fine writer in the Pern tradition, became more the norm, a development not viewed favorably by some readers, who had complained before at collaborations Anne had undertaken with promising writers such as Margaret Ball, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, Jody Lynn Nye, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and Steve Stirling.
Anne did not publish again under her own name only. In the summers to come, we met several times over tea and her favorite “biscuits” to blue-sky plot devices for After the Fall, the last of her Pern novels (although she finished a first draft several months before her death, it is unlikely to be published in the form in which she left it).
To Everything There Is a Season
Annie died of a stroke suddenly and, of course, prematurely, on November 21, 2011, just before Thanksgiving. I grabbed a quick flight to Ireland and arrived in time for the wake and funeral. The service was not held in a church. No surprise there, and there was standing room only at the funeral home in Bray. Annie looked great in her favorite purple chiffon dress. I’m sure she would have enjoyed herself. The service started with Bach (“Sheep May Safely Graze”) and ended with Brahms’ “Academic Festival Overture”—Annie’s favorites. Alec gave a short but eloquent eulogy, and later, after Celine Byrne (the rising young opera star) sang “It’s a Wonderful World,” Jim Carson gave a homily based on 1 John 4. If it seemed almost impromptu at points, he cleverly packed a lot of “religion” into it, and no one seemed to mind.
So yes, religion on and off Pern was a nuanced affair for Anne McCaffrey. Organized religion was kept at a distance—an interstellar distance on Pern, if less so at Dragonhold-Underhill. But the deeper and more mysterious dimensions of life, even on Pern, did not escape notice. Anne loved life, all of it, and lived it full stop. And she had a great ride. If it wasn’t on a real dragon, she at least got to swim with dolphins in Key West and rode her favorite horses till arthritis got the better of her.
A Psalm for Annie
Jim Carson had called shortly after I arrived in Ireland the day before Annie’s funeral and asked me to provide a short reflection on her favorite scriptural passage, Psalm 23, which she had selected for her funeral months before. I was grateful for the invitation, but with only a few hours to prepare, found myself perplexed. I bounded awake at 3 a.m. with most of it clearly in mind. This is how it went:
The Lord was her shepherd. No one else could have gotten away with it so long. If she did occasionally want—it was her own amazing generosity that led to it. A couple of times, she asked me for a short-term cash loan because she had literally given away every coin in her purse. An authentic Christian, she also preferred anonymity, and I know that in making some truly heroic donations, she insisted on not letting the left hand know what the right was doing.
Although they became home to a collection of remarkable horses, dogs, and cats, her pastures were always green. On the other hand, the waters around her were not always still, in fact rarely so, but with a guiding hand, she sometimes seemed to walk on them. Her faith was not little.
Annie had a way of choosing the road not taken, which today is too often the path of righteousness, but she would be the first to guffaw at the suggestion. She was the least hypocritical of women and hated even the semblance of evil. She didn’t fear it, but often railed against it. Nevertheless, she was not always a strict judge of human character because she preferred to believe that people were more righteous than, in fact, they were. When she was cheated, it hurt, but it failed to make her bitter or lessen her faith in human decency.
Even so, I’m sure she’s had a
few words with God about his staff, who did not always comfort her as much as they should have, but it’s sometimes hard even for God to get good staff these days. I was chuffed when back in 1981, she did not find me totally wanting but invited me back to Dragonhold as a kind of an occasional weyr chaplain. We sometimes even talked about religion, the Church, and, yes, God . . .
Annie didn’t always wait for God to prepare a table in the presence of anyone, much less enemies—if she had any. She got there first. And if her cup occasionally overflowed a little with good Chardonnay, it was more often the cup of kindness and mercy that made her blessed with family, friends, colleagues, and that strange cloud of witnesses called “fans,” over three million of whom quickly tapped into Google about the death of the Dragonlady of Pern, who has found a lasting dwelling place not only in the Lord’s house but in those millions and millions of hearts.
Born and reared in New Mexico, RICHARD J. WOODS did undergraduate studies in Washington, DC, New Mexico, and lowa before joining the Order of Preachers (Dominicans), a Roman Catholic community of priests, brothers, and sisters. He earned a PhD in the philosophy of religion (Loyola Chicago, 1978), MAs in systematic theology and scholastic philosophy, and an STM (master of sacred theology) from the Dominican Order. For twenty-seven years, he taught on the graduate faculty at Loyola University Chicago and also taught undergraduate theology and philosophy, and since 1981, has been adjunct associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Loyola University Medical School. From 1991 to 1999, he was lecturer and tutor at Oxford University, and he held the Dominican lectureship at Emory University in 1999. He has written thirteen nonfiction books, coauthored a novel with Anne McCaffrey, and published three novelettes. He has edited four anthologies in religious studies and has authored articles in spirituality, theology, health care, sexuality, and Celtic studies. His last book, Meister Eckhart: Master of Mystics, was published by Continuum/Bloomsbury in 2011. Currently, he is professor of theology at Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois.
1 http://karimblogl23.blogspot.ie/2012/08/anne-mccaffrey-example-of-stupid-being.html
2 http://annemccaffreyfans.org/forum/showpost.php?p=1024665&postcount=126
3 http://pernhome.com/aim/anne-mccaffrey/frequently-asked-questions/
4 http//www.writing-world.com/sf/mccaffrey.shtml
5 Lynne Jamneck, “An Interview with Anne McCaffrey,” http://www.writing-world.com/sf/mccaffrey.shtml
6 See http://www.amazon.com/Legends-II-Dragon-Sword-King/product-reviews/034547578X/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt_sr_4?ie=UTF8&filterBy=add FourStar&showViewpoints=0, and http://www.amazon.com/Legends-II-Dragon-Sword-King/dp/product-description/034547578X/ref=dp_proddesc _0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
In many respects, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is to horror what Anne McCaffrey was to science fiction. She holds numerous awards, many of them lifetime awards, including the rather charming “literary knighthood” from the Transylvanian Society of Dracula. I knew her first, respectfully, as Ms. Yarbro.
Whenever she and Anne got together, they would make it a point to disappear and compare whatever occult notes they’d made since their last rendezvous. They always had a marvelous time together.
Annie and Horses
CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO
ASIDE FROM WRITING, Anne McCaffrey and I shared a love of opera and horses, and were as likely to talk about “horses we have known/know” as we were to discuss the state of the publishing industry. We met infrequently over the years, but when we did, eventually we’d end up at horses, and we’d exchange stories, suggestions, anecdotes, tips, and other horsey things.
After she had moved to Ireland, her stable became a major focus of her non-writing life, and the horses she owned or boarded were increasingly part of the framework of her life.
Annie got horses as well as loved them. She could read their personalities and characters from their demeanor and behavior, and dealt with them accordingly. Most of the time, she wanted cooperation rather than dominance with horses; when this wasn’t possible, she tried for minimal conflict with them, but maintained the position that the human was in charge.
About twenty-five years ago Annie and I attended the same book fair in Las Vegas, and one night over dinner, after debating the proper time to use draw-reins, we got into a lively discussion on bits, from snaffles to trammels. We ended up with her thoughts on the Kimberwick and mine on the short-shank elevator (high port with copper roller). The rest of the group had got that dazed look, so we changed the subject, to everyone’s relief. At that same book fair, at another break in the evens, we ended up discussing saddle-pads.
We would from time to time exchange tales of our horses—she had more stories because she had more horses—and she was always an excellent source of information on problems. When my Norwegian Fjord mare Pikku became stall-sour during one wet winter, Annie recommended going on a short trail-ride in the rain with friends. It seemed to ease her irritation, and it’s not the thing that a Californian like me would tend to think about, but Annie in Ireland was in a much better position to deal with that kind of situation.
What was most clear about these conversations she and I had was that Annie respected her horses and held them in great affection, even the annoying and headstrong ones. There was none of the kind of boasting that sounded as if she took credit for the abilities of the horses; instead she spoke as if she had been able to bring out some ability of her horses, which was as much to their credit as hers.
Once I asked her if I was right in detecting an equine undercurrent in the nature of her dragons, and she said that horses were easier to study than dragons—a clever answer that was neither confirmation nor denial; sometimes I wonder if she ever drew a line between them. Not that such a view of an imaginary creature does not have roots in known creatures—coming up with something that is truly devoid of any influence from actual human experience may be possible, but communicating it to others would take heroic amounts of work. Many have tried it, but most have not actually succeeded to pull off such a feat of the imagination.
Occasionally Annie and I would discuss our views of Pern: as the creator of the world, she always had the final word, as it should be, but I had some reservations about Pern as science fiction, although none at all as high fantasy. I know Annie saw Pern through a science fiction lens, and in narrative technique she was absolutely right. The turning from conventional magic for biology for the basis of that world is refreshing. And I had no trouble with equine dragons qua dragons, but I had reservations on equine dragons in terms of the economics of the society where they existed, and which was set up to tend to the dragons as a crucial defense system for the preservation of crops and forests. Knowing how much it costs to keep one horse, extrapolating what a number of her dragons would cost in coin or goods-and-services to maintain goes well beyond the kind of agrarian society that apparently prevails on Pern; the kind of social structure she offers in those books is far more like early fifteenth century Europe than a more urban society that rose, along with a middle class, some two centuries later. Pern, being more Plantagenet than Tudor, is therefore highly dependent on farmers and other agricultural workers, who would either be bound to the land or to the landholder in order to provide feed for and upkeep on dragons, which is only sketchily present in the series.
When we talked about this, she often said she wasn’t interested in economics, or in what kind of labor might be involved, but in the need for dragons as participants in such circumstances as she used in her stories. And I admire the complexity of the stories, particularly the great use she made of the interaction of dragon and rider, which sustains the tone of the stories from book to book—no mean accomplishment for any writer. I may have had quibbles about her vision of Pern, but none at all at how well she held all the disparate elements together book after book. They are her stories and she is the one who calls the shots.
At one of the Brighton Worldcons (I think it was ’87), Annie gave a Devon Cream Tea in her suite, and over crum
pets and scones and jams and jellies and Devonshire cream, we, her guests, heard about her horses and her stable; it was apparent that Annie was deeply happy with her life, with her work, and with her horses. She enjoyed all three components of her life, and she wore her fame with aplomb—or if she didn’t, it certainly looked like it. It is always reassuring to see writers gain recognition and gratification at the same time, and to be aware of it without lording it over their colleagues. I was glad for the example of professionalism she set for newer writers; I was delighted for her achievements, even those that had to do with horses rather than Hugos. I was sad when we lost her, her stories, and her great collection of characters—the ones in print and the ones on four hooves.
A professional writer for forty-five years, CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO has published over ninety books in a variety of genres as well as nonfiction. She has received the Grand Master award from the World Horror Convention, the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend award, the Horror Writers Association’s Life Achievement award, and has twice been nominated for an Edgar Award. She lives in Richmond, California, with two sublime cats.
Anne McCaffrey loved Michael Whelan’s covers—and so did the fans. One of the things that sets Michael Whelan above some other cover artists is that he reads the books before he illustrates them, and that brings a level of detail to his covers that really makes them shine.
When Isaac Asimov, one of Anne’s favorite people of all time (they were utterly hilarious together), passed away, Michael Whelan was commissioned to do a memorial cover for Asimov’s magazine. Not long after, some of the comps were on sale at a Worldcon. I saw one in particular, and I phoned Mum right away. She said, “Get it.”
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