Dragons, 'Weyrwomen' Haunt a Sci-Fi Writer's Domain

Upon graduating cum laude from Radcliffe, Anne I. McCaffrey '47 never would have guessed that she would become one of the most prominent and prolific science-fiction writers of her time.

As Slavic languages and literatures concentrator, the closest McCaffrey came to science fiction was using a Slavic science-fiction book in her honors thesis. Now she is the author of the wildly popular Dragonriders of Pern series, and has written a total of 55 books and more than 60 short stories.

While a writing career never entered her consideration, an affection for opera singing, nine years of voice training and participation in the theater at Harvard and Radcliffe did lead to some amateur acting as well as an appearance in the first successful summer musical circus in New Jersey in 1949.

It was a short stint, however, as McCaffrey realized she wanted more out of her work. "I didn't have that great a voice," she says. "i wanted a regular paycheck."

McCaffrey began to write short stories, and entered the realm of science fiction and fantasy because, she says, that is the where she found a market for her work.

Cambridge and Sci Fi

While at Radcliffe, McCaffrey took only one composition course, which she feels allowed her to become the writer she is.

"Studying great writers all the time is counterproductive to those who want to writers all the time is counterproductive to those who want to write themselves, because you constantly compare yourself to them and get intimidated," she says.

However, she says her work in college was not completely irrelevant to her current occupation. In the one composition course she took, McCaffrey wrote a Gothic tale for an assignment based on a visit to the Cape Cod summer home of one of her girlfriends who, in 1950, was also a bridesmaid at McCaffrey's wedding. Snowed in with no central heating, McCaffrey says, "I used quite a few elements of that Easter weekend in Mark of Merlin."

This small link between McCaffrey's undergraduate years and her later life is rare. Her degree did not have a profound influence, she says, except initially when "a Radcliffe honors degree meant the difference between the [employer's] picking me over someone else."

Radcliffe was not a choice for McCaffrey as it is for some people.

"My father, B.A. '12, M.A. '13 and Ph.D '38, expected my brothers [and me] to go to Harvard. We couldn't go anywhere, else," she says. "He was disappointed that my degree was only cum, rather than magna. He never thought I would make any thing of myself."

Just as in Mark of Merlin, McCaffrey often finds inspiration for her stories in real life. Although she did not realize it at the time, The Ship Who Sang, McCaffrey's acknowledged favorite of all her books, was written as therapy for her father's death.

"Ray Bradbury's hero had been Ernest Hemingway, and Bradbury could not understand or cope with Hemingway's suicide," McCaffrey says. "Bradbury wrote a marvelous story, "The Kilimanjaro Effect,' in which Hemingway is killed by a tiger as a way to deal with his death in real life. I realized that in writing that story, I had done much the same for my father."

The Ship Who Sang is her favorite because it is a very emotional story that impacts people dramatically when they read it for the first time, McCaffrey says. "It's not the best-written story, but it was certainly effective."

McCaffrey's book Restoree, published in 1968, was a send-up of other science-fiction novels of the 1950s and '60s that portrayed women as weak, damsel-in-distress types. "I got so goddamn tired of the heroines' sitting in the corner of the spaceship wringing their hands and crying," McCaffrey says. "I would have been in there kicking and screaming, doing anything to help the hero.

"So I wrote my book where the heroine has all the information needed to save the hero, and they also have sex," she adds. "I did it very discreetly, of course, but it was still clear. Previously, it was never known if the heros snuck under the covers or not."

A feminist theme continues throughout McCaffrey's work, even in her tales of dragons and the fantastical planet Pern.

Pern, an acronym for Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible, is a planet whose residents arrived from Earth many generations before and have reverted to a medieval lifestyle, losing their knowledge and understanding of advances such as computers. Fire-breathing dragons flourish on the planet, genetically engineered by the first settlers of Pern to combat the dreaded Thread--a corrosive substance that threatens Pernese existence every 200 years or so.

The female dragons control the planet, and are ridden by intimidating "Weyrwomen."

Dragons dominate McCaffrey's novels, but she presents them in a positive light. In writing her books, she decided to try to change the negative image surrounding dragons. "Dragons had bad press in the West, whereas in the eastern cultures they are considered good fortune."

I do critters well, so I just had to decide what kind of a dragon I wanted and what it was for," she says. "You can't just plant a new creature down on a new planet without establishing a niche for it." Fighting the Thread with fire become her dragons' niche on Pern.

Writing has become a gratifying experience for McCaffrey, and many honors have been bestowed on her in the world of science fiction. In 1968, she was given the Hugo Award, one of the top prizes in science fiction, for Weyr Search. "No one was more surprised when they announced my name than I," says McCaffrey. "I didn't need an airplane to fly home. It was sort of a stamp of approval because I was the first woman writer to win."

The next year, McCaffrey won the Nebula Award, the other top honor for science fiction writers, for her book Dragonrider. She also has been the recipient of many Science Fiction Book Club awards, and has been the guest speaker numerous times at the World Science Fiction Convention.

Current plans for her work include making a live television series out of her Dragonriders of Pern books, including the Walt Disney Co. in 1969. However, McCaffrey wanted live action rather than animation, which most companies believed would be too expensive.

Since the release of Jurassic Park, it has been made clear that people who were riding dragons could be made to look very realistic by combining live action with computer enhancements. The television production is being done in Ireland, where McCaffrey resides, but is scheduled to be released worldwide next year.

McCaffrey moved to Ireland with her three children in 1970 after her marriage ended in divorce, and she has lived there ever since.

She makes her home on an estate in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, that she named Dragonhold-Underhill, because she has her dragons to thank for financing it and because she ha to dig under a hill to build the house. Now an Irish Citizen, McCaffrey says she has no intention of leaving.

She lives with her sister-in-law, and her eldest son lives down the road. Her second son is also planning to move to Ireland. "There are a lot of advantages here [that] the States don't have," she says.

At 71, McCaffrey's trips to the States have been dramatically reduced. However, when she was asked to be the Class Day speaker at her 50th reunion, McCaffrey decided she couldn't pass up that invitation.

As for her speech, McCaffrey joked that she is thinking of combining her father's favorite saying, "The mark of a Harvard graduate is effortless superiority," with her amazement that she has survived this long.

McCaffrey says she has enjoyed her life's work, and she continues to write stories every day.

"Suddenly you will realize what you're doing is what you really like," she says. "Not many people are so lucky, but I have been one of them."