At MediaWest, there was a large and hungry crowd of fen looking for more of what it loved. The authors of fanfic no longer had to pass out stories to one or two friends that they met by chance; they could now sell it in the dealer’s room. These were borderline to outright illegal magazines, infringing on copyrights willy-nilly, hand-typed, mimeographed, and badly stapled. These “zines” were tailored for the masses, featuring the main characters of television shows, and thus tailored toward stories that were collected to be sold. They started with Star Trek and expanded. They included Star Wars, Blake 7, Battlestar Galactica, and Man from Uncle, just to name a few.
People—well, actually, mostly women for some reason—who had been lost and alone in their hometown could find like-minded fans just by standing by the table selling “fanzines” of what they liked. To stay in contact, they created fan clubs.
A new form of fanfic developed out of these clubs. Instead of focusing on the main characters of the work, each member had a chance to live in the fictional world via a new and original character that was wholly their own creation. They could be an ensign on the Enterprise. They could be a viper pilot on the Galactica or its sister ship, the Pegasus. They could be a wolf rider elf in Wendy Pini’s Elfquest universe.
Or they could be a dragonrider on Pern.
Pre-internet, the Facebook of fen were APAs, or Amateur Press Associations. Each member of an APA would type up a page or two (or more if they had the time and money) and duplicate their pages as many times as there were members. Content ranged from book reviews to essays on current trends to personal journals. If an APA had thirty members, each member would make thirty copies of their section. Remember that while there were photocopiers available, they were expensive, often a quarter a page at a time when a can of soda was thirty cents. Since mimeographs had been around forever, people often used old machines they’d bought secondhand. The members would mail the copies of their section to a central mailer. She would collate everyone’s sections, create a cover and an index, bind all the pages together into a magazine, and mail it to the members.
The fanfic clubs created a hybrid of the APA. They started up newsletters where each member would write a section and mail it to the editor. Dues would not only cover the cost of mailing the newsletter but also the copying cost. The editor was often the person with access to some type of cheap duplicating machine.
Up to 1984, I was totally ignorant of most of fandom. That summer, though, my friend June Drexler Robertson turned to me and said, “Your family has a large farm, doesn’t it?”
My reaction was probably the same as yours is now. What? Huh?
June had joined a Pern fanfic club. She didn’t have to explain Pern to me; I had all of Anne’s books. It was “fanfic club” that I needed explained. It turned out that all around the world, fans of Anne’s were finding each other and creating clubs where they could live on Pern via shared fiction.
Sharing, however, meant that not everyone could be a queen rider that could hear all dragons. (Yes, almost every new member had to be told that they couldn’t hear all the dragons nor that they could automatically be a queen rider; otherwise, the weyr would have been fifty queen riders and two or three very happy but exhausted bronze riders.) Since fictional leadership somehow overruled common sense, it turned out that for a club to function, the people who ran the club had to take up the key positions. The Weyrleader, Senior Queen, and Weyrsinger went to the people that created the club, covered costs when dues fell short, scoured conventions for new members, collected material for the newsletters, copied them, and mailed them. That way a member wouldn’t be telling the “club officers” that they could buck the system because “the Weyrwoman said I could.”
Every new member was encouraged to think beyond Lessa to create a different kind of character, often to fill a gap in the weyr. Journeyman harper was the favorite second choice. Once a talented author took over a craft and their story appeared in the newsletter, other members would drift toward that choice. Woodcrafting became popular in our club after Melissa Crandall took over the weyr’s woodshop and wrote sections so vivid you could nearly smell the sawdust.
Another overlap of fiction and reality was the location of the club. The clubs were fiercely territorial despite the fact that technology made it difficult if not impossible to coordinate the fictional worlds. Once a club laid claim to a weyr or a hold, they would defend it from other clubs using it as their home. I think that it came from the fact that different clubs would come up with slight variations on the world, and they didn’t want to be confused with other clubs with a radically different spin on Pern.
Ista Weyr was the first fan club with its leadership based in New Orleans. Fort Weyr was a close second. When all the northern weyrs were taken, the Southern Continent was divvied up into wholly fan-created slices. After that, new clubs decided to move forward in time. Fort Weyr Tenth Pass was a totally different beast than Fort Weyr Ninth Pass.
While the initial meeting of members had been at conventions (because there was no internet to provide a way to find each other otherwise), the clubs began to hold Gathers. My friend June was looking for a campground for the third annual Gather of her club and remembered that my family had a farm with a large open field perfect for camping.
We had thirty-some people that summer of 1984. I was twenty-one, fresh out of college, still desperate to be a writer, but unsure how actually to go about it. I was skeptical of this whole “fan club” idea, but the members all shared my love of science fiction. They had Anne’s book memorized. They had made giant papier-mâché eggs with little statues of dragons inside for candidates to impress. (They crack like gunshots when you smash them open.) We ate roast wherry (turkey) and homemade bubbly pies and sang late into the night, led by the Weyrsinger who played the guitar. It was a lot of fun, but I wasn’t hooked yet.
Toward the end of the weekend, someone handed me the club’s little ten-page newsletter called the Harper Beat. It was created by pasting text onto eleven-by-seventeen-inch paper, photocopying it, and folding it in half, so it created a booklet. One page was a report from the Weyrwoman, who was the club’s founder and president. The vice president was the Weyrleader, and his report was called Kreelings. They talked about club memberships and activities and their daily lives. I ignored those two columns. What hooked me was that the rest of the newsletter was a story. Eight pages of fluff from the Weyrsinger filled with everything I loved about Pern. The dragons. The fire-lizards. The weyr.
“June says you write. Why don’t you write something for the newsletter?”
I had never considered writing fanfic before. I had no desire to create stories set in someone else’s world. The fan club, though, offered two things I couldn’t resist: an editor and an audience.
They explained Anne’s rules to me. At the time you couldn’t use any of Anne’s characters nor could you set any story in Benden Weyr. A club whose members were air force pilots with “silver dragons” triggered a rule that only Anne’s standard five colors could be used. Men couldn’t ride gold dragons and women weren’t allowed to ride bronzes. And of course, we weren’t allowed to sell our fiction.
I sat down and tried to write the persona I had used all weekend. He was a brown rider from another weyr. His weyr-mate had recently died, and his grief had caused him to come in conflict with his wingleader. The trouble had escalated to a knife fight. He’d won the fight only to be transferred out before more trouble could follow. He was an angst-ridden, battered man. I wrote him coming to the new weyr and handed the “story” to the editor, Julia Ecklar. (Yes, the club fostered two John Campbell award winners. Julia won the award in 1991, and I won in 2003.)
“It’s nice,” she said in a tone that clearly meant that it was barely acceptable. “It’s just not a real story. It’s a vignette.”
“A what?”
“Vignette. Slice of life. A story is when a hero has a problem. See, in my story, the Weyrsinger discovers the problem in the first sce
ne. In the second scene, he attempts to fix the problem and only makes it worse. Third scene, he attempts again and fails. Fourth scene, he resolves the problem. That’s a story. I’m practicing telling a story with only four scenes, but you can take more.”
This triggered a great deal of rereading famous SF short stories to verify that she was completely correct. (Her method of limiting the number of scenes turns out to be a great way to focus on what a scene is about and why you’re writing it.)
Well, I couldn’t wrap my brain around what kind of difficulties would face a middle-age widower bonded to an animal the size of a small jet. I was twenty-one and still working on the whole first serious boyfriend thing. I scrapped the brown rider and came up with a new character, one whose problems would be easier to grasp. His name was Zachafiddel, but he was nicknamed Zac. He was a twelve-year-old apprentice beast herder who took care of the flocks of wherries that the dragons fed on. He was new to the weyr, ignorant of how things worked, and had an abusive journeyman.
I wrote up a short story and sat nervously as Julia read it. After a few minutes, she sighed and handed it back. “It’s still a vignette.”
It took two more attempts before I grasped “story.” The newsletter was published every other month, so I managed to write six stories before the next annual Gather. I basked in the glow of people telling me that they liked my writing and loved my character. Zac grew up as time passed, becoming a journeyman beast herder, and then searched as a candidate. Eventually he impressed a bronze and changed his name to Z’del.
The club grew, and what the members read in the newsletter encouraged them to also write stories about their characters. Like me, several were learning the craft before breaking out into their own fiction. We had solid writing skills. What we lacked was the ability to take it to novel length in a world of our own creation.
Anne had created a rich and detailed world. The wonderful thing about fanfic writing is that you’re free to ignore world-building at first; your audience knows all the cool details that the creator laid into place. I could write about my character stripping off his wherhides as he walked into his weyr, uncovering the glows to light his way, and then using soapsand to bathe without having to invent and explain anything. I could focus on getting my character through four scenes to set up and solve a problem.
Once I got short story structure nailed down, I discovered that I could create two levels of conflict. The surface level would be a simple world problem that gave my character something to do while he struggled with inner emotional conflict. The two could be thematically connected but otherwise unrelated. The mental lightbulb went on while I was writing a story about Zac attending a Gather immediately after walking the tables and becoming a journeyman. He’s been charged with keeping all the boys he’d been an apprentice with under control. He’s distracted, though, by his girlfriend asking him to move in together.
The outer conflict is trying to have fun with his girlfriend while keeping track of the younger boys in thick crowds, breaking up fist fights, and chasing accidently freed herd animals. These are all things out of his control; he can only react to them.
The internal conflict is trying to cope with being “adult.” What decision does he make in regard to things he can control? How grown up does he want to be? Does he try to be responsible or does he focus on having fun? Does he really want to be in a relationship as serious as living together?
For the first time, I realized that there could be a disjuncture between what a character was doing and what he was thinking. Zac could be trying to dance with one eye out for his apprentices, but what was going on his mind wasn’t step one, two, three, spin, clap . . . was that a wherry? No, no, he was thinking Move in together? Oh shards, what do I say? What do I say?
None of my college courses or writing books ever explained conflict in this manner. I don’t think I would have easily made the realization writing short stories set in worlds of my own creation. I would have been too caught up fighting with world-building to pay attention to that fine point.
With this freedom, there was also this wonderful feedback from Julia explaining where I’d gone wrong with a story (often demanding rewrites until I got it right) and the general membership telling me that I was great. (I wasn’t actually “great,” but I was writing exactly what they loved: Pern.) Even in the age where we were photocopying all the stories and mailing them to the membership with regular postage, the feedback was rich and heady.
Anne was six books into Pern when I started to write fanfic. Once I got a handle on the basics of storytelling, I wanted to expand my story arc, to reach more toward novel length via a series of related short stories. But to grow, I first had to understand Pern. How the weyr and holds worked together. How they came into conflict. How the crafts fit in.
Pern at the basic level is man versus nature. Thread would destroy all life on the planet if given a free rein. The dragons, while full of wonderful beneficial abilities, came with negative side effects, from the dangerous awkwardness of hatching, to the uncontrollable mating flight, to the perils of going between. I quickly learned that primal forces result in simple conflicts with fairly straightforward plots. The character has only one choice: do or die. It made for exciting action scenes. A longer story arc, however, required complex conflict to support it.
What Anne did so ingeniously was set up a three-branch society structure of dragonriders, holders, and craftsmen. They desperately needed each other to survive, but were in constant conflict on multiple levels. In addition, each branch was hierarchical in nature, so each group also contained conflicts within itself.
While many of the dragonriders might have started as hold-bred, the very nature of being searched and then impressing conveyed a sense that they had been elevated above the normal man. If they didn’t feel that way, their dragon telling them that they’re the greatest thing on the planet would soon convince them. They then risked life and limb to protect the planet. It is natural that they would assume that they were owed a comfortable life, if not the best of everything. And they brought their living “jet fighter” to any meeting to back up their demands of being supported by the holders and crafters. Given their dragon and an open field, they could win any one-on-one fight. It led to a certain “oh yeah, me and my fire-breathing dragon will take on you and your flashy runner” arrogance to their interactions with the holders and crafters. Their sense of entitlement, however, did not sit well with the other two.
The fact that there are five different dragons—gold, bronze, brown, green, and blue—creates division within the weyr. Anne set up that there was only a handful of gold dragons per weyr during the earlier passes and a score or so of bronze. The riders of these colors could and often would suddenly find themselves in leadership positions. A senior queen dies, a bronze unexpectedly wins a mating flight, and the weyr’s highest positions would suddenly change hands. It meant that candidates for these dragons had to be vetted carefully. There would be fierce and often bitter competition for the gold and bronze dragons, and people would be disappointed to be rated “just a blue.”
Because the dragons control who sleeps with whom, the weyr’s society had to be free of moral judgment on sexuality. For the weyr to function, a person couldn’t be shamed for acts that the dragons forced them to commit. This included women having children with multiple partners and same-sex pairings. Nothing put this into perspective more clearly than a dice game we came up with to play at the club’s Gathers. People would often announce that their dragon/fire-lizard was rising for a mating flight to create a random element to their story fodder. For pure bragging rights (the clubs were mostly women after all), people would attempt to “catch” the rising female. Bronzes were given the best odds, but browns and blues would occasionally win due to a combination of who was competing, when the flight was announced, and pure luck. Add in the fact that Anne wrote of males on female green dragons that rose in mating flights every few months, and homosexuality had to be considered as
a natural consequence.
The title “Lord Holder” goes far to understand the moral mentality of the larger holds. The lord holders supplied the world with food and shelter. They were kings, complete with armies, and expected to be in charge. They tended to see craftsmen within their territories as talented servants, to be fed and housed only as long as they produced. As with kings of old, they are concerned with passing on their wealth to their heirs. Since a man can only be sure that he’s providing for his children if a woman only has sex with him, the holders value female monogamy and morally view sex as “for procreation only.” All sexual freedom is considered perversion. They viewed the dragonriders as morally corrupt mercenaries.
Within the holds were dozens of levels of society, from the lord holder’s family, to “cot holders” who headed up satellite households, to drudges. In Anne’s books, each lord holder dealt with those under him differently. In the Harper books, the Half-Circle Sea Hold is staffed mostly by extended family. (Yes, I know that it’s not a major hold, but it serves as a point of reference.) Under Fax, Ruatha’s drudges were slaves living on the edge of starvation, constantly beaten. Under Jaxom, the same drudges lived more like maids and butlers of an English manor.
The crafters had the short end of the stick on Pern. Intelligent and guarding over the ancient knowledge of their past, they nonetheless needed the food and shelter that the lord holders controlled. Steeped in lore (especially the harpers), they respect the dragonriders but rarely can openly act against the will of the lord holders. In order to protect their craft, they need gifted children, which means the child’s parentage doesn’t matter. There are indications that the crafters have a less rigid sexual moral code than the holders.
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