Last night brought the sad news that Anne McCaffrey had passed away. There are plenty of obituaries online, so I don’t think I need to add to them, except to note that she and Michael Moorcock bear significant responsibility for my teenage interest in SF. I wanted my own gold dragon (and, of course, a group of bronze riders vying for my attention).
What I would like to note, however, is this post from Juliet Wade, from which I was reminded that “Weyr Search”, the story that won McCaffrey a Hugo in 1968 and was eventually expanded to form Dragonflight, was first published in Analog.
Yes, Analog, that bastion of hard SF. The Pern novels have, of course, long been cited as a classic example of genre mixing. While the books do famously feature dragons, it is made clear in later volumes that Pern has been settled by human space travelers, and the dragons were genetically engineered from the smaller indigenous fire lizards.
Fans can and will argue endlessly about how the books should be classified, but the point I want to make is that I think, had the books been published now, they would be sold as YA fantasy. Equally I think that had a book like Martha Wells’ The Cloud Roads been published in the 1960s, it would have been sold as science fiction. Publishers assign books to categories based on how they think they can best sell them at the time, and that decision changes over time as different genres become more or less popular.
And sometimes, if they can’t be slotted into a genre, they don’t publish them at all. I think the importance of genre is decreasing outside of the Big Six anachronisms.
I don’t know about the UK editions, but the US editions of Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums were clearly being aimed at younger readers, both by the publisher and the author.
Being a gold rider always seemed like too restrictive a life to me, I just wanted my own clan of fire lizards…
I think that the publishers switched into YA mode at White Dragon. As I recall, there was nothing teen-directed about Dragonflight and Dragonquest.
I’ll grant you the main sequence definitely did become more all-ages-friendly over time.
How come, with all the obituaries and tribute posts out there, nobody is talking about her bigoted opinions on homosexuality?
I guess because they are being polite, as people generally are when someone dies. They are not talking about Moreta either, despite the skewering it got from critics.
McCaffrey’s attitudes towards homosexuality were certainly very odd, but she did at least acknowledge a place for it, unlike one or two SF writers I could mention. I suspect the best antidote to her is to go and read A Companion To Wolves.
McCaffrey’s Pern novels got me through a couple of tedious stays in the hospital. I still reread them periodically.
As for genre, it’s always been a marketing label. It’s just that marketing currently rules editorial. (Though I suspect that may be changing. Just a bit.)
I wasn’t aware McCaffrey had Views on homosexuality. I thought the Pern books make it quietly but adequately clear that when a female Green dragon mates with any other colour then the (exclusively male) riders mate too, and no one is complaining.
I decided at an early age that being a Bronze rider had far too much responsibility attached. My dream job was top Brown rider during an Interval: you get a dragon, you get cudos minus responsibility, and no Thread!
It’s a lot more complicated than that. McCaffrey had some very odd views about the causes of homosexuality, though those may have changed with time. Wikipedia has a long section on fannish attitudes to sex on Pern.
Blimey, I had no idea. I’m glad I just took home the positive messages of the books.