Irish-American author Anne McCaffrey was one of the patrons of the Irish Science Fiction Association when I joined in 1988, and it seemed to me that Anne was greatly loved by all who attended the ISFA’s meetings and events: she was never less than witty, generous, insightful, inspirational, hugely intelligent, and always very humble.
In March 1998 I was asked by the editor of a prominent science fiction magazine to interview Anne, and naturally I jumped at the chance: she was one of my favourite authors and I’d had the great honour of appearing alongside her on a number of convention panels, plus she was kind enough to give me a great cover-quote for my second novel, Moonlight.
So I promptly called Anne, arranged to visit her home in County Wicklow for the interview, and we spent a highly enjoyable hour or so chatting about her life, her works, and — very exciting — the then-in-development big-budget TV show based on her most successful series, Dragonriders of Pern.
I typed up the interview over the next few days, sent it off to the editor, and nothing happened. He never replied. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I never actually heard from him again. Annoying, that. Almost three decades later, it’s still annoying. But time moved on… Anne, naturally, continued to write new books and delve into new ventures, the TV show moved further into development (although the project never made it into production), and pretty soon the interview was out of date, so it’s never seen the light of day until now.
Anne McCaffrey died in November 2011 at the age of 85, but her legacy (besides her family) is not only a collection of wonderful stories, but legions of devoted fans, many of whom have been inspired by her writing to create worlds of their own.
I’ve unearthed the interview because yesterday on a Facebook group someone posted a picture of one of Anne’s Dragonrider books and asked whether most people would consider the books to be science fiction or fantasy. That was a question Anne faced throughout her entire career, and I even brought it up myself in the interview, although I already knew the answer from our previous encounters. Read on, and find out what she thought about that…
The Dragonwriter of Pern
An Interview with Anne McCaffrey
Michael Carroll, 23 March 1998
It’s been thirty years since Anne McCaffrey first put Pern to paper. The series, thus far, has spanned fifteen novels and several short stories (as well as three reference books), with many of the stories overlapping and interlinked. With such a complex world, keeping track of it must be quite a task…
“I can always figure a way out to get myself out of my difficulties,” Anne says. “I painted myself into a corner in The White Dragon: there was no way with the technology they had on hand that they could have done anything about the Red Star as F’lar promised, so I had to go back and do Dragonsdawn, and put in what I have.”
Her success at this is clear: the series holds together remarkably well. But again, it must be difficult to have to go back to something she wrote twenty or thirty years ago…
“Well, you can’t. Not in the same voice. Somebody asked me would I go back and rewrite Dragonflight, and I said no, because I could not recapture the mood that I was in when I wrote it, or the fact that I have since learned a great deal more about writing. I would only screw it up. So I’m quite happy to leave it as it is. My errors are there, but at least improvement is shown with every ascending novel.”
Anne McCaffrey lives in County Wicklow, often called The Garden of Ireland. Right next door to her home is Dragonhold, her stables. Ms McCaffrey’s love for horses is not surprising: In her Pern novels, the synergy between dragon and rider is like nothing so much as the relationship between a good show jumper and his or her horse…
But unlike most writers Anne doesn’t hide away. Her address is quite well-known, which surely must leave her open to globe-trekking fans and other strange visitors. “Yes, that’s why we have a big dog. I also have a six-foot-two son, a secretary, and a housekeeper who make sure that I’m okay. I generally suggest that visitors call me ahead of time to make sure that one, I’m here and two, I’m not busy. And we have a routine for those who seem to want to stay forever. The ones we would like to have stay and chat have the good manners to know that half an hour is enough, and go.”
Anne’s first novel was Restoree, deservedly famous for being one of the very first SF novels to feature a real female hero, rather than a token woman going around with a brass bikini, as was more common in the early sixties. “That’s why I wrote it! I was so fed up with the way male writers of science fiction were treating women — Heinlein included, and he was the worst offender — that I got up on my high horse and I wrote a story in which the heroine had all the information that the hero usually has, and comes up Jane-on-the-spot. So it was a send up, using all the science fiction clichés. And of course Dick Geiss in one of those fanzines just creamed it: ‘McCaffrey really ought to do something more original.’ And I didn’t bother answering him, because everybody then wanted to read the book and find out how bad it really was. And then somebody wrote, ‘Hey! She’s sending us up!’ But it did the trick. It also had the first actual honest-to-God love scene. You knew that Harlan — and it’s a name I got out of the New Jersey telephone book, at that time I hadn’t met Harlan [Ellison]: Andre Norton said that male names beginning with ‘H’ were more masculine, so I looked for one — Harlan actually goes to bed with my heroine Sarah, and you know it. Therefore they do not walk off hand-in-hand into the sunset, the way they usually do, to show that the hero isn’t really gay.
“So I was just fed up. I had one other novel almost completed when I had written that, and I showed it to Betty Ballantine. She asked me to redo the second half, which was quite right. This was Decision at Doona, and I rewrote that, and she published it. Then The Ship came along, and I’d finished the five stories that comprised The Ship Who Sang book, and by then I had “Weyr Search”, “Dragonflight”, and “Dragonriders”, which had all come out — thanks to John Campbell — in Analog, so I had four novels in the first four or five years.”
Anne has a great respect for the works of other female writers, particularly Andre Norton. “A lot of her books didn’t come through [to this side of the Atlantic] — and a lot of, for instance, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s didn’t make it.” On the subject of male (or androgynous) names taken by female authors, Anne says, “Leigh Brackett could have been anybody. C.L. Moore… They were asked in the fifties and early sixties to use male-type names. I argued with a sixteen-year-old boy that Andre Norton was a woman: he never did believe me. But having stayed in her house and played with her cats and eaten her dinner, I knew bloody well what sex she was.”
But was Anne herself ever expected to take a male pseudonym? “No! I never did. Anne McCaffrey was a good enough name, by God, and I was going to use it. No one ever asked me to change it. My first editor was Sam Moskowitz, and he was delighted to get a woman in, for “Freedom of the Race” in 1953. Then Algis Budrys was reading for Fred Pohl in Fantasy and Science Fiction and he picked up “The Lady in the Tower” (1959). They did ask to change the ending — and did so — I can’t remember what my ending was now, but nothing was said about changing my name. I had no trouble with the editors, ever. But the readership began, over the sixties, to want more than the usual ‘engineer in a laboratory with a bright idea’ story.
“A lot of other women were writing at that time, more than people realise, but they tended to go along with the format of the time, which was unemotional, very scientific, and aimed at the male-dominated readership. And I more or less said ‘the hell with this, emotion is as good a tool as any,’ as The Ship Who Sang, I think, still shows. The biggest thrill of my life was when I was reading that story with my son Todd, at one of the Brighton WorldCons, and I was being filmed for a TV show, and the camerman and the sound guy were right in front of us. And when I got to the end — and Todd took over the last four paragraphs, because I can’t read them without crying — and there they are with tears streaming down their faces! Hardened BBC cameramen, crying!”
As to the attitude that a lot of people have that female writers can only write fantasy: “That’s a lot of bullshit,” Anne says. “Look at what Pamela Sergeant’s been doing!”
Non-readers of the Pern books might dismiss them as works of fantasy, simply because they feature dragons, but their creator is quick to correct this misconception: “They are bio-genetically engineered from the genetic information of a indigenous life’s form. You couldn’t just make the fire lizards bigger — that wouldn’t work. They had to go and restructure the entire DNA or RNA or whatever you want to call that, because it wouldn’t be the same. The genetic information that they were able to extract from the fire lizards was what they used as a basis of the dragons.”
The origin of the dragons isn’t explained in the first book (which presents Pern as a medieval world with almost no concept of technology) but some people still assume that because they’re dragons, it must be fantasy, and because Anne is a female writer, it must be fantasy. “Heinlein used dragons,” Anne points out. “His spouted methane gas. Chickens do to,” she adds.
But how does Anne feel when people categorise her work as fantasy? Does she correct them? “I always correct them, particularly when I’m doing an on-line or a live session. I wait until they come out with ‘So, you write fantasy,’ and I say, ‘No, I write science fiction,’ which throws them for a loop, exactly what I want, and then we can go on from there. The difference is I still use Newtonian physics. I don’t set the parameters. I don’t use magic — except in those three or four fairy tales that I’ve been writing lately, and having a lot of fun with, they’re definitely fantasy — but most of the time I do use the logic and the science that we know today. As far as I go with the science it is accurate. I’ve just finished a book called Nimisha’s Ship, and I asked my son, who’s not only a science fiction writer himself he’s also a computer person, ‘Have they gotten faster than nanoseconds yet?’ and he said, ‘Yes, femtoseconds.’ So I used that in this book, particularly where you have to have exceedingly fast reflexes and deal with a lot more CPU space and Josephson junctions and all this sort of stuff to get it done. I can throw these buzzwords — the technobabble that they use in Star Trek — I can throw it in and at least for what I’m saying it’s creditable, and people don’t have to know what the hell it is. Most readers won’t have that level of knowledge, but they don’t need it. So it’s soft-core science fiction, rather than hard-core.
“Fantasy always uses magic and generally sets different parameters. I don’t. I use the parameters we’re all familiar with, which I think is one reason people do enjoy my books: they don’t have to stretch quite that much in other directions.”
The hot news for all Pern fans is that there is currently a TV series based on the books in production…
“It’s an Irish-based film. Zyntopo Teoranta had started a digital company here doing CGI. I actually met Eric and Joanna Weymuller, the owners, when they came to look at one of my cats — they got one for their daughter — I found out later that he’d worked for Warner Brothers, and he knew one of the other people who were trying to do Pern, and he didn’t think the guy had a handle on it at all, and he didn’t so I dropped that contract. At the time I met them I was contracted with someone else and I was not very happy; although I had script control, the people who were writing the script were putting derivative things in that you didn’t need. Lessa’s dying mother did not need to throw her the ‘Ruby Ring of Time.’ Fax did not need to throw the star-shaped — what do they call them? Those knives?” Shuriken? “Yeah, from Krull, to try and cut F’lar’s throat and then have Ramith intervene and then have all the dragons required to suicide immediately. They didn’t need to move the Star Stones on Benden’s Rim, because of course they weigh several thousand tons, and Lessa did not return from gathering the five missing weyrs through a worm-hole, thank you very much! And then they had the gall to tell me, ‘Oh, but you don’t understand. The book is a toolbox for the movie.’ And I said, ‘If you had used the book as a toolbox for the movie, you’d still have the option.’
“So, Joanna and Eric and I were talking and they had a very definite idea, they’d always liked the Pern series. They couldn’t understand why the series had never been made into a show, and I said it was possibly because I always insisted on script control, knowing what Holly-weird would do. Well, I got to know them quite well, and we had talked sufficiently about how they would treat Pern, so that I signed an option with Eric to do a CGI / live action movie, originally. But then they got talking with some of the possible production companies, and it was decided we could do more with the properties — since there are fifteen books — if we do it as a TV series. So it is now to be produced by Zyntopo Teoranta and Atlantis Films in Toronto, with Eric as the producer — I’m co-producer with my son Alec — and Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens will be doing a script, which I am very happy about, and I’m going over to Toronto shortly to help write the bible. That way I’m sure that what should be in the Pern ecology and environment is there.
“There will be changes. It won’t be the books people know, but it will have everything that the books have in the series. We’re aiming for Friday prime-time in the fall of 1999. Atlantis also bought a small digital company recently to help with some of the films it’s been doing, and when they were told that they would have a part in the Pern project, suddenly their desks sprouted with Pern novels! I have friends where I least expect them! And if I have that kind of support from people who know and love Pern it’s less likely to get messed up with ‘Ruby Rings of Time’ or wormholes near a planet. This is now absolutely definite. We signed with Atlantis, I signed with Eric over a year and a half ago.”
Fans will also be pleased to note that Pern is expanding in other directions: “Grolier Interactive Games have bought the gaming rights. Up until that point, up until 1996, I had allowed people to play on-line if they followed the basic directions, and put up my copyright notice, because Dragonriders of Pern is a registered trade-mark to me. I used to look in, but — my God! — it proliferated! There were MUs and MUSHes and MUDs… I hate to tell you, but if you look [on the internet] for ‘Anne McCaffrey’ and ‘Dragons’ you run into well over a million hits. I had so many people quite upset about the fact that they couldn’t play on-line on Pern that I just turned the whole thing over to Grolier. They are going to do not only an on-line game, but a game that people can play stand-alone. I don’t play games, but my son does and he’s working very closely with Grolier.” Anne’s son will have final say over what happens in the games, “because he knows what I would and would not permit. Actually, I’m not at all upset about it, in fact Kevin Oxland, who is the main director of the project, called and said, ‘you have a marvellous character in The Masterharper of Pern, can I put him in?’ and I said, ‘Which one?’ He said ‘Tuck’ I said, ‘Fine!’
“RedStorm, which is Tom Clancy’s entertainment group, have taken the rights to the Crystal Singer series, and they’re making a game of that. Again, it will be both an on-line and board game.”
Maybe she doesn’t play games, but Anne McCaffrey is definitely very much in touch with the latest computer technology. Her office is dominated by a state-of-the-art PC, accompanied by a laser printer and a photocopier, all of which she handles with confident expertise. Computers, of course, will play a large part in the creation of the Pern TV series… “I’ve had six contracts on the movie rights. The first ones were animation and they weren’t bad, but I always wanted live-action, and CGI so that you would believe the dragons were real, since Jurassic Park, obviously, and Zyntopo’s systems are two generations ahead of what they used in Jurassic Park. We’ve been working on the dragons… I’ve seen them in low-resolution, and we have the model that’s going to be — or has been — fed into the computer to give the sizes and the flapping of the wings and all that sort of stuff, the next step is to make the faces of the main dragons different. They’re more equine than reptilian, because my dragons were always more equine. It’s not quite like Michael Whelan’s — whose White Dragon sold the book — which are too reptilian for what I had in mind, but he’s done such a marvellous job with all the covers that I’m not going to complain. For the movie I want closer to what I had in mind for the dragons.”
The movie Dragonheart showed that dragons could be done convincingly with CGI, but despite the clever use of technology, Anne wasn’t too impressed with the movie’s dragons. “They had too many teeth in their heads. I haven’t seen the movie, but I saw some trailers for it, and one of the things that annoys the hell out of me is the language that’s being used, just like in Xena and Hercules and the others. They’re all using modern language, which for me just ruins the ambiance that they are trying to create. And I mean, Maid Marian in a busty dress doing karate kicks? Come on!” But they say that makes it more accessible for younger generations… “It probably is, but this [the Pern series] is not for the younger generations, it’s for an adult audience.”
For the sequels to The Ship Who Sang, Anne collaborated with Margaret Ball (Partnership, 1992), Mercedes Lackey (The Ship Who Searched, 1992), S. M. Stirling (The City Who Fought, 1993), and Jody Lynn Nye (The Ship Who Won, 1994), and on the sequels to Decision at Doona she collaborated with Jody Lynn Nye (Crisis at Doona, 1992, and Treaty at Doona, 1994), but she has always said that she absolutely will not allow anyone else to work on the Pern books. But how does this hold with the TV series? Would it bother her to have other people writing stories using her characters and situations? “That, I think, will be handled by Judith and Garfield. I might even have a chance to write a script myself. But there will be a story editor, or consultant, or whatever you want, managing the whole thing. I don’t know if anybody’s been appointed or not yet. Actually, the writer has very little to do once the studio takes over, so if I can get the one or two things that I’m particularly keen to have in, I’ll be gracious about the others… I won’t have any choice!”
Anne’s very confident that, despite other people now becoming involved in her creation, the Pern TV series will remain essentially faithful to her books: “The main thing is the partnership — the equal partnership — between dragon and rider, and the love they bear for each other, that is the most important thing in the entire film. And that is going to come across.”
Twenty-eight years on…
Sadly the Dragonriders TV show in development at the time of the interview never made it into production, a fate it shares with several other attempts by different production companies. The possibility still exists that one day an adaptation of the books will materialise, and certainly the technology is now more than up to the task… But the quality of a book should never be judged by its adaptations: new readers will find that the Pern books are still as strong, captivating and impactful now as they ever were, as are all of Anne’s other books.
I hope that the interview (out-of-date as it is) has managed to capture at least a taste of Anne’s vibrant, resonant personality. She was one in a million.
