Anne McCaffrey has a special place in my heart.
It's not because I'm an enormous fan of her work; I like some of it, dislike some, and haven't read much by her in several years. All the same, her work was tremendously important to me as a young fan and aspiring writer for one simple reason: she was one of the very few women who wrote speculative fiction when I was a girl.
It seems hard to believe today, when the SF and fantasy bestseller lists are dominated by the likes of JK Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, Lois McMaster Bujold, Tanya Huff, and Charlaine Harris, but it was tough to find any sort of science fiction, fantasy, or horror written by women in the early 1970s. Oh, there were exceptions - Zenna Henderson's jewel-like short stories about the People, Joanna Russ's stunning novels, and Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books spring immediately to mind - but for every Henderson or Russ or LeGuin there were five or six Asimovs or Silverbergs or Ellisons. Marion Zimmer Bradley was a woman, of course, but note that she spelled her name with an "o," not an "a," while Andre (Alice Mary) Norton adopted a male pseudonym to get published. Fandom itself was heavily dominated by men, to the point that women were known as "femme fans" and all too often treated with a mixture of awe, desire, and the unspoken belief that the girls were there solely because of their boyfriends/husbands rather than any real love of science fiction.
This changed in the early 1970s, thank goodness. Media SF like Star Trek brought a lot of women into fandom, many of whom wrote fanfiction and edited 'zines. Writers like Joan Vinge, Pamela Sargent, Carol Emshwiller, Kate Wilhelm, and Pamela Sargent began selling, and soon were winning major awards like the Hugo and the Nebula. One of the then-giants of the field, James Tiptree, Jr., was outed as a woman, much to the chagrin of Robert Silverberg, who'd loudly proclaimed that there was something "ineluctably masculine" about Tiptree's work, even short stories like "The Women Men Don't See" or "The Screwfly Solution."
Then there was Anne McCaffrey, the first woman to win a Hugo or a Nebula.
McCaffrey stood out in the field for more than her sex. A classically trained singer, she boasted a head of thick, prematurely white hair, a dominating physical presence, and a cheerful willingness to flirt, insult, crack jokes, and join in the madness that is fannish culture. Her novels, novellas, and short stories were popular and widely published, and she even managed to sneak an off-stage but unmistakable sex scene into a story she wrote for puritanical editor John W. Campbell, Jr.
Best of all, McCaffrey's works usually centered on women, real women and not the typical sweet girlfriend/plucky sidekick/feisty teenager that was the typical female SF character back in the old pulp days. Helva, the "shell person" in The Ship Who Sang, may have been physically crippled but loved and was loved in turn, while Lessa, the last Weyrwoman of Pern, was every bit as determined, and tough minded as Scarlett O'Hara. They weren't perfect - Lessa is a cynical, sour, grasping little creature, Helva is too tender hearted for her own good, Brekke has pitifully low self-esteem - but that was what made them so wonderful. They were people, not stereotypes, and if at least one (Menolly) set the pattern for a thousand girls who rebelled against a sexist society, someone had to be first.
Today there are plenty of books by and about women to delight the hearts of female geeks and fen. Former fanfiction author Lois McMaster Bujold is tied with Robert A. Heinlein for the number of Best Novel Hugos, while fantasy has come to be dominated by women thanks to the likes of Mercedes Lackey, Lynn Flewelling, Patricia Briggs, Diane Duane, Patricia McKillip. There's even female-oriented erotica courtesy of Cecilia Tan at Circlet Press. All of them owe a debt to McCaffrey, and if the modern heroes of SF, fantasy, and the media include the likes of Alanna the Lioness, Aeryn Sun, Mercy Thompson, Buffy Summers, Agatha Heterodyne and Natasha Romanoff, it's at least partially due to Lessa and Helva.
That's why I fell in love with McCaffrey and her books when I was a teenager and college student. Finally, finally there were books about dragons and spaceships starring women, not men. It was balm to a soul that cringed whenever Lt. Uhura said, "Captain, I'm frightened," and had been reduced to creating Mary Sues who fought alongside the Fellowship of the Ring at the Pelennor fields. Lessa may have been cynical, but she and her Weyr Leader F'lar were equal partners in the defense of Pern, and that meant a lot in 1974.
I devoured McCaffrey's books and stories for several crucial years…and then the bloom came off the rose as I realized that for all her strong women, Anne McCaffrey was no feminist. Far from it. I began skipping her new books, and found flaws in old favorites that I'd never seen before. I still honored her as a pioneer, and still liked Dragonflight, but I could no longer read the sexual encounter between Brekke and F'nor in Dragonquest without cringing. Oh, I knew that she was still publishing, and had friends who adored her books about Killanshandra Ree and Acorna and the ever-continuing Pern series, but I had moved on.
And then one day I noticed a new McCaffrey book that looked very, very familiar, and not in a good way….
Back in the day, before the Pern books hit the bestseller lists, Anne McCaffrey was a typical hardworking science fiction writer. She produced short stories for the few remaining magazines, attended conventions, and used the success of the first Pern novel to have her collected short stories published.
One of these collections was called To Ride Pegasus. Written in the 1960s, the four stories in it describe the exotic world of 1997, when psychic gifts are becoming increasingly known and accepted. The Talented, as they are known, are primarily telekinetics and telepaths, and the stories' lead character, Daffyd op Owen, must overcome non-Talented prejudice as he leads the struggle for the Talented to take their rightful place in society. Like much 1960s science fiction, it's a thinly veiled allegory for the Civil Rights movement, and despite a ludicrous cover that made the collection look like Ye Olde Fantasie Trilogie LINK, what is now a laughably unimaginative version of 1997, gender norms that are consistent with 1957, and a total lack of evidence that Daffyd op Owen (or his creator) had been anywhere near Wales, mangled patronymic notwithstanding, the stories held my interest well enough.
They are not the problem.
Another collection, Get Off the Unicorn, was more problematic. One of the stories, "The Lady in the Tower," was a "love will make everything better" romance about an immensely powerful Talent, the Rowan (sic), who is lonely and unfilled despite her power and her status as one of a handful of Talents who can sling spaceships between star systems. This sad state of affairs continues until she meets another, unknown Talent who is even more powerful than she is, and despite knowing absolutely nothing about him except that he's really, really, really powerful, she falls instantly in love with him. Eventually they marry, she gets pregnant, and everything is just peachy-keen even though McCaffrey never quite gets around to explaining just how the Rowan manages to keep slinging spaceships while bitching out her assistants, having sex with the hunky and domineering Jeff Raven, and gestating a couple of kids.
The collection contained a sequel, too, about the Rowan's daughter Damia. This cringeworthy use of typeface, ink, and pulp portrays Damia, who is just as powerful as her parents, as a spoiled, selfish, not particularly intelligent brat who decides that if her parents fell in love via psychic content, why, she'll do the same thing! She gets her comeuppance, too, when the Unknown Psychic she believes will sweep her off her feet turns out to be an enemy, and it takes her family and her mum's platonic male BFF Afra to save her tuchis when her boyfriend turns out to be an evil alien who isn't even a mammal, let alone a hunky and domineering guy like Jeff Raven. The story ends with Damia admitting that she actually loves Afra, who admits that despite being involved in her life from infancy (he babysat while her parents were slinging spaceships) he's been in love with her all along (say what?) and has just been waiting for the little girl he diapered to grow up so he can marry her (EWW EWW EWW). It ends with Damia and Afra in a clinch, and one can all but see the sunset blazing behind them even though they're on another planet that may or may not have breathable air.
If this weren't bad enough, there are two more all but unreadable stories in this collection, "The Thorns of Barevi" (featuring an honest to God "I will reward you by raping you" soft core sex scene that includes the hunky alien telling the protagonist that his race "prides itself on being gentle" right after he's just torn off her clothes and had sex with her despite her pleas for him to stop) and "Changeling." The latter is the tale of a woman who falls in love with a gay man and decides that the best way to be part of his life is be the "Wendy" who looks after him and his boyfriend by keeping house and bearing their kids. It bears about as much resemblance to actual gay life either then or now as the average rant by Bryan Fischer or Maggie Gallagher, and even though my teenage self didn't know much about gay men, it still struck me as just terrible.
As bad as these stories were, they weren't the problem, either.
The problem was that by the early 1990s Anne McCaffrey decided that these stories weren't nearly long enough and expanded what was essentially her juvenilia into nearly a dozen big, fat, melodramatic, overblown, and largely unjustifiable novels. Even worse, like Isaac Asimov attempting to reconcile The Caves of Steel and Foundation, McCaffrey decided that the Daffyd op Owen stories were actually prequels to the Rowan stories, thus melding a slight but enjoyable series onto a far futureverse where all a powerful woman needs is a firm, older, and oh-so-masculine hand to keep her in line.
The so-called Talents series (To Ride Pegasus, three sequels, and five books based on "The Lady in the Tower" and "Damia") is every bit as good as one might expect given its history; McCaffrey may have expanded the plots, thrown in an overall story arc about evil insectoid aliens (why is it always insects? can anyone tell me why the menace from beyond the stars isn't, say, intelligent coatamundis or peafowl or caribou?), and created a whole bunch of new characters, but the technology and society were still firmly rooted in the 1960s.
So were the gender norms. Despite the presence of allegedly powerful women like Daffyd op Owen's relative Rhyssa (who, thank the tiny baby Jesus, doesn't use a bastardized version of Welsh naming conventions), not to mention the Rowan and her female offspring, relations between the sexes are pretty much what they were when McCaffrey first wrote these stories in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Rowan is still an ice queen until the superior male shows up, Damia is still an idiot, Afra is still the latter-day equivalent of Jacob from Twilight as he powders Damia's little baby bottom (and later is forced to admire her nude fourteen year old self as she flaunts her budding sexuality and breasts right in front of him, and why such a powerful Talent has no idea that he's in lurve with her is beyond me), and both the Rowan and her daughter pretty much get pregnant on their honeymoons and push out lots and lots of incredibly powerful babies. One of these books actually ends with the husband realizing that his wife is pregnant before she does because she doesn't like the smell of coffee anymore, meaning that the females of this far-future society have forgotten to chart their menstrual cycles despite being able to chuck multi-ton objects several light years at a time. It's as if McCaffrey had completely forgotten how to write a believably human, let alone complex, female character.
If this weren't enough, "The Thorns of Barevi" also got expanded into its own series. This time McCaffrey was smart enough to rewrite the rape scene so that the sex is consensual, but that doesn't help all very much. The female lead, Kristin, despite falling in love with a hunky but curiously human alien, cheats on him twice, becoming pregnant each time. Despite this he still lurves her enough to accept her and her woods colts, and together they overcome all obstacles while defeating his race and founding a colony, or something.
Now, these were not the only early works that McCaffrey expanded past the point of reason; some of the later Pern books, especially those co-written with her much less talented son Todd, are pretty mediocre in their own right. Compared to the Talents series and the Freedom series, though, even the likes of Dolphins of Pern and Cockroaches of Pern look like Pulitzer Prize winners.
This begs the question of why Anne McCaffrey thought this would be a good idea. She was living in Ireland by then and enjoying the tax breaks the Emerald Isle extends to working writers, so money likely wasn't a critical factor. And it wasn't as if the fannish community was beating down her doors demanding MOAR ROWAN/RAVEN STORIES PLEEZ PLEEZ PLEEZ. It may have been as simple as she had these ideas all along and finally was in a position to get the books into print, though one would think that she'd at least bother to update the technology to what the 1990s thought was futuristic.
Regardless, the Talents series sold well enough to keep it in print even to this, as a casual perusal of the listings on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble will show. Ditto the Freedom series. Neither series is anywhere near as popular as the Pern books, but there's no sign that readers have stopped buying them, which means that the publisher will keep printing them despite their less than stellar quality.
What future critics will think of this is a good question; McCaffrey's posthumous reputation will almost certainly rest on the Pern books, not these, but just as Conan Doyle scholars still have to deal with Professor Challenger going full-blown Spiritualist, McCaffrey scholars will need to discuss the Rowan, Damia, and "The Thorns of Barevi."
Then again, it could be worse. At least the world was spared a full length novel based on .“Changeling.”
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So, my faithful friends - have you read any of these expanded short stories? Is there something I've missed or misinterpreted? Remember, this is just my opinion - yours may well vary, and that's just fine. Feel free to share on this steamy Saturday night….
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