Until Anne McCaffrey. Through her original and compelling worlds, aliens, and plots, McCaffrey demonstrated that women writers could write powerful and popular science fiction.
As a young woman, I remember being frustrated by the limited roles available to women in science fiction. I enjoyed reading Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and other male writers, but I yearned for heroines with whom I could identify. Dragonflight and The Ship Who Sang opened my understanding of what women could do and be. (McCaffrey’s books inspired me to write one of the first nonfiction books on gender and science fiction and to teach science fiction in university courses.) I wasn’t alone. McCaffrey’s fiction received recognition not only from the mainstream reading public, but also from science fiction fans and her peers, other published science fiction writers. In 1978, her Pern novel The White Dragon appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List. McCaffrey also has the distinction of being the first woman to win science fiction’s two awards: the Hugo (awarded by readers) and the Nebula (awarded by published writers). McCaffrey authored 100 publications, sold millions of books, and her titles appear in more than a dozen languages. Many readers who thought they didn’t like science fiction changed their minds after reading one of McCaffrey’s novels, and dozens of the genre’s writers credit her with inspiring them to become writers.
These distinctions alone merit McCaffrey a place in literary history, but her impact on popular fiction did not lie only in showing she was as talented as any male writer, blazing a trail that other female writers could follow. McCaffrey’s legacy lies in the changes she brought about in science fiction literature itself.
Science fiction has been characterized as falling on a continuum, at one end “hard” science fiction, which focuses on the sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and, on the other, “soft” science fiction, which is characterized, in contrast, by its emphasis on the so-called “soft” human sciences of psychology and sociology. The term “hard science fiction” appeared in the 1950s, as editors, writers, and readers were promoting the genre for its realistic scientific premises. As more female and male writers began focusing on characterization and social sciences in the genre in the 1970s, the corollary “soft science fiction” proved a useful publishing and fan term. Soft science fiction focuses as much on characterization as on scientific issues, and is as concerned with human emotions as it is with scientific premises. Hard science fiction was associated more with male writers and characters, and soft science fiction with women.
In the Golden Age of science fiction, the genre largely focused on a scientific premise or problem, solved using technology or scientific knowledge, by a male hero in an adventure setting. The science was the center of the story. Less emphasis was placed on character development or a complicated narrative. Anne McCaffrey’s work was different. While her books were emphatically science fiction, not fantasy—set on other planets or in space, in the future, and interested in technology and science, not magic—she combined the traditional science focus of science fiction with previously derided female concerns like emotion, romance, and sexuality. In doing so, McCaffrey helped science fiction gain both larger audiences and widespread acceptability. Her complex, interesting female characters, who confronted emotional trauma and learned the value of tolerance, assertiveness, and leadership, brought in female readers, expanding science fiction’s readership.
The Dragonriders of Pern, as McCaffrey’s best-known and most successful series, provides a telling example of her literary innovations, which are evident from the very first story set on Pern. Dragonflight focuses as much on Lessa and F’lar’s relationship and Lessa’s blossoming as an individual as it does on the science fictional setting of a planet and the urgent puzzle of how Pern ancestors defended the planet from the invasive spore called Thread. Readers identify with Lessa’s outsider plight and follow with intensity her growing assimilation into the world of dragons and dragonriders. Lessa learning to love and be loved provides a compelling narrative. That emotional narrative is intertwined with a problem with a science-based solution: how to work with dragons to protect life on Pern. How the puzzle is solved, however, demonstrates an alternative to hard science fiction’s traditional engineering or laboratory solution. It is not a lab of scientists or an action hero wielding a new weapon that saves the day. Instead, the ability to interpret a tapestry and understand a song’s hidden meanings provides the critical clues. Female characters’ appreciation and knowledge of traditionally (in our world) feminine texts provides Pern’s redemption.
The importance of these feminine domestic arts is central to many plots in the Dragonriders of Pern series. It must have been especially surprising to readers, that first time, that songs, tapestries, and stories contained the knowledge needed to save the planet from Thread. Such a solution demonstrates, to the book’s characters and to its readers, that art can be as important as science, and that art and science are both essential to human existence. It suggests, less explicitly, that both men and women are essential to society and that we ignore “feminine concerns” at our own peril.
The Dragonriders of Pern also raises another “feminine concern,” relationships, to a place of world-saving importance—particularly the one between dragon and rider. Dragons and dragonriders share emotionally rich and rewarding collaborative relationships, ones that are essential to Pern’s survival. Rather than fantasy monsters to be feared and killed, Pern’s dragons are sentient beings created by science. In them, McCaffrey took the human-animal bonds we know from our own lives a step further, radically reimagining a fearsome creature into an intimate partner. What Isaac Asimov did for robots, transforming them from humanity’s enemies to our supporters and friends, McCaffrey did for dragons. On Pern, dragons are sentient, competent, and caring companions with a believable scientific explanation for their existence.
As useful partners to humans, dragons play crucial social and emotional roles on Pern beyond their contributions to fighting Thread. Emotionally, a dragon’s relationship with his or her rider is so important that, in most cases, should a dragon die, the human also will die from the shock of losing his or her dragon companion. Should the dragonrider die first, the dragon will fly between and die also. Because of their telepathic bond, dragons and their human riders can share complete openness and intimacy and provide a model for the kind of ideal, mutually supportive relationship that humans have difficulty achieving. Certainly the emotional relationship of Lessa and F’lar in Dragonflight is much more complicated and fraught with difficulty than the one between Lessa and her dragon, Ramoth. Literary critic Jane Donawerth suggests that McCaffrey’s dragons and dragonriders offer an alternative to traditional heterosexual relationships based on male dominance. Perhaps fittingly, then, dragons also provide a source of social power. Through their relationships with dragons, female characters on Pern have a path to leadership, something as hard won at that time in literature as in real life.
In addition to making relationships the center of her narratives, McCaffrey dealt explicitly with sex and sexuality, and did so in a way that contrasted dramatically with that of most of her male contemporaries. Sex frequently wasn’t mentioned at all: for example, the justly celebrated Isaac Asimov almost completely ignores sex, and his brilliant female scientist, Dr. Susan Calvin, eschews sex and femininity. If present, sexuality in texts by men tended to be oppressive, presented in a way that made clear the female character’s complete subordination to men. In 1953, Philip Jose Farmer received a Hugo Award for the novella The Lovers, in which a female alien morphs into a male fantasy of a sexually attractive partner. This female alien only exists to sexually satisfy a human male even though the resulting pregnancy kills her. Her offspring look like just like her, suggesting that the next generation of females will fulfill the same subordinate role.
In contrast to such portrayals, McCaffrey depicted sex as a key part of a full and satisfying relationship of equals. In Dragonflight, Lessa first experiences sex when her queen dragon
mates because when dragons mate, their riders feel compelled to have sex also. Since the experience is not initiated by Lessa, she faces the possibility of losing control of her body. Over time, however, she asserts her dragon’s ability to out-fly undesirable suitors, and with her dragon’s support, is able to assert herself as an independent female, including choosing to embrace her sexual desires. By the end of the novel, her involuntary association with F’lar has become a true partnership.
McCaffrey’s willingness to assert the importance of a romance of equals in her dragonriders’ relationships remains an important legacy for science fiction, but the sexual complexity of the dragonrider community may have been even more groundbreaking. Dragonriders have a noticeably different attitude toward sex than other groups on Pern due to the effect of dragon sexuality on the dragonriders’ emotions and actions. Sex outside of traditional relationships is common. Also, if a rider of a female dragon is male, then he may very well end up mating with the male rider of a male dragon. McCaffrey depicted these relationships positively and even includes a romantic and sexual relationship between a male rider and a non-dragonrider male, a healer. While the Dragonriders of Pern does not present a polemic view of homosexuality, on Pern, homosexuality is normal and accepted.
Through both dragon-human relationships and Lessa and F’lar’s partnership, McCaffrey valorized collaboration and relationship as an alternative model of leadership. However, this emphasis on collaboration, a traditionally feminine model of cooperation, extends beyond the content of her work to the development of it. As a writer, McCaffrey chose to open her worlds to other writers in what is sometimes called a “shared universe.” McCaffrey has cooperated in more shared universes than any other science fiction writer, sharing not only Pern but also many other planets and concepts with several other writers. She cow-rote numerous books in the Brainship universe, the Powers series, the Doona series, and the Planet Pirates series, among others. These books, authored with mid-list and early-career writers like Elizabeth Moon and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, to name just two award-winning authors who cowrote with McCaffrey, provided invaluable financial and emotional support. Evidence of McCaffrey’s generosity, these shared universe series show her influence as a writer who could create not just one very popular world, but several.
It is always a tribute to an author’s genius if her works survive her own death and seem to have a life of their own (for example, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein). To create creatures, settings, and plots that can successfully continue in others’ hands is a great tribute to a writer’s creativity. Anne McCaffrey’s Pern seems to be one of these.
McCaffrey carefully planned for this legacy, first cowriting books with her son Todd before turning the series over to him before she passed. As I write, the twenty-sixth Pern novel is being published. Todd McCaffrey wrote four Dragonriders of Pern novels before his mother died and has continued the series with four others—all have made the New York Times Bestseller List. Just as Anne mentored and encouraged other writers, she also developed a writer in her own family.
Pern’s continued popularity in Todd’s hands is, however, only one measure of Anne McCaffrey’s literary legacy. Her influence has been attested to by many other writers of subsequent generations and can be seen in the work of numerous writers who later continued and further developed the motifs she pioneered. After McCaffrey died in November 2011, there were dozens of moving tributes to her importance and influence. In an interview, Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire series, described herself as a big fan of McCaffrey’s and explained how her dragons were influenced by those of Pern. Similarly, Robin Hobb, author of the Rain Wild series, recently discussed the unique features of McCaffrey’s dragons and acknowledged she followed McCaffrey’s lead in creating scientifically plausible and intelligent dragons. Sharon Shinn’s beautiful genetically altered humans with wings and their powerful and compelling use of music in her Samaria series owe a great deal to McCaffrey’s ballads and harpers on Pern, as well as the dragons. Other works that bear the impress of McCaffrey’s vision range from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld to Christopher Paolini’s Eragon books, and include writers such as Mercedes Lackey (another McCaffrey cowriter), Catherine Asaro, and many others.
If the genre of science fiction can be compared to a hold on Pern, Anne McCaffrey surely is its masterharper, singing songs of great beauty and power. She valorized the importance and power of the arts, especially singing, through the influence those arts had on her created worlds, and she herself lived up to this vision of art, by creating characters, worlds, and stories that have had a tremendous impact on our own world.
ROBIN ROBERTS is the dean of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, professor of English at the University of Arkansas, and author of five books on gender and popular culture, including the biography of Anne McCaffrey, Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons (University Press of Mississippi) and Anne McCaffrey: A Critical Companion (Greenwood Press).
It was the late jan howard finder who first introduced me to Lois McMaster Bujold’s work He grabbed me at a convention in the dealer’s room, dragged me along after him with his never-ending monologue, picked up a copy of The Warrior’s Apprentice, paged it to a certain spot, and said, “Read this.”
I did pretty much the same thing with Mum when I next saw her. Mum always eagerly poured through Lois’ latest works and was thrilled to be asked to write any quotable words of praise for her books, saying most notably, “Boy, can she write!”
In her essay, Lois explains that some of the inspiration she received and built on came from none other than Anne McCaffrey—greater praise can no writer ask for!
Modeling the Writer’s Life
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
THE FIRST ANNE McCaffrey tale I ever read was also one of the most memorable works of its era. Sometime in the mid to late ’60s, which was my mid to late teens, I encountered the short story “The Ship Who Sang” quite by chance in my random SF reading, in a battered paperback Judith Merril anthology that Wikipedia (but not my fuzzy memory) tells me must have been the Dell 7th Annual Edition The Year’s Best S-F (1963). I remember absolutely nothing else from that anthology.
To become a starship! To live for centuries! What a geek dream that was. (The tragic romance, not to mention the galaxy-famous singing career, was icing on the cake.) To be an SF girl geek in the 1960s, before the term had been repurposed or the concept even invented, was every bit as uncomfortable as one might imagine. But that story spoke to me.
My next encounter with this writer—I did not think of her as “a woman writer” at the time—was via my subscription to Analog magazine, which my dad had bought for me starting in 1964 and kept up for some years thereafter. This fell in the heart of editor John W. Campbell Jr.’s classic era. The story, of course, was “Weyr Search,” which (thank you again, Wikipedia) was published there in the year I graduated from high school, 1967. I still remember the wonderful, sinister, moody black-and-white illustrations by John Schoenherr. Not yet being plugged into SF fandom, I was unaware that the story went on to win a Hugo (deservedly). The story stuck in my brain without that aid. I see in retrospect that Anne found the novella length to be very friendly for her ideas, as I was much later to discover in my own work.
My own youthful first stabs—“stabs,” I think, is probably the most appropriate term—at writing began in eighth grade and continued on into high school and early college. I was heavily influenced, as young writers tend to be, by the fiction I then loved. I had actually started reading adult science fiction by age nine, as I picked up paperbacks and magazines left lying around the house by my engineering-professor father, who used to buy them for airplane reading when he went on consulting trips. My school libraries, and the three public libraries that I was eventually able to sporadically access (we lived out in the country at the edge of the suburbs, and reaching any library required co-opting a parent with a car), supplied the rest. Library SF/Fantasy collections were much smaller
in those days; one could read them all up. I first discovered Tolkien when I was fifteen; Star Trek came out when I was sixteen. Both fell on fertile soil already plowed by Campbell’s Analog. Poul Anderson, Randall Garrett, and Frank Herbert (through the Analog serialization of the first Dune novel, also with magnificent Schoenherr illustrations) all came to me by that route.
It never crossed my mind that my gender was any barrier to the SF writing task. I had already encountered Andre Norton in my YA (then called “Juvenile”—what’s with all the renaming, anyway?) early reading days and was entranced by the “People” stories of Zenna Henderson. Female scientists and female heroes? The James H. Schmitz stories, also found in Analog, modeled them for me handily. (Nile Etland!) Anne’s work slotted right in.
Whatever fight was then going on in the genre trenches by women writers for recognition passed far over my head as a young reader. While I have had plenty of problems in my life as a woman, which I share with other women, and the usual allotment of struggles in my life as a writer, which I share with other writers, I can’t say that I’ve ever felt particularly impeded, professionally, by being a woman writer. The SF genre, at least in the United States, seemed a pretty level playing field by the time I strolled in.
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