Free Dragonwriter by Todd McCaffrey Page B

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).

I t 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
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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