Dragonwriter (11 page)

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!

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 paperbacks and magazines left lying around the house by my engineering-professor father, who used to buy them for airplane reading when he went on consulting trips. My school libraries, and the three public libraries that I was eventually able to sporadically access (we lived out in the country at the edge of the suburbs, and reaching any library required co-opting a parent with a car), supplied the rest. Library SF/Fantasy collections were much smaller in those days; one could read them all up. I first discovered Tolkien when I was fifteen;
Star Trek
came out when I was sixteen. Both fell on fertile soil already plowed by Campbell's
Analog.
Poul Anderson, Randall Garrett, and Frank Herbert (through the
Analog
serialization of the first
Dune
novel, also with magnificent Schoenherr illustrations) all came to me by that route.

It never crossed my mind that my gender was any barrier to the SF writing task. I had already encountered Andre Norton in my YA (then called “Juvenile”—what's with all the renaming, anyway?) early reading days and was entranced by the “People” stories of Zenna Henderson. Female scientists and female heroes? The James H. Schmitz stories, also found in
Analog,
modeled them for me handily. (Nile Etland!) Anne's work slotted right in.

Whatever fight was then going on in the genre trenches by women writers for recognition passed far over my head as a young reader. While I have had plenty of problems in my life as a woman, which I share with other women, and the usual allotment of struggles in my life as a writer, which I share with other writers, I can't say that I've ever felt particularly impeded, professionally, by being a woman writer. The SF genre, at least in the United States, seemed a pretty level playing field by the time I strolled in.

There were causes for this, and one of the most important was Anne McCaffrey. One of the most important
reasons
was her hard-earned popularity. Other women writers may get more academic attention, but Anne hit the
New York Times
list with a hardcover SF novel (
The White Dragon,
1978), one of the first SF writers to ever do so. I can (nowadays) just picture the response in the SF editorial community—“Hey! Rival publisher has a best-selling woman writer! Why don't
we
have a best-selling woman writer?” followed by a sudden reevaluation of their slush piles. Anne's pioneering on the awards front was vital, but it is
sales that
allow publishers to stay in business—and to take chances on new writers.

As a very young reader, to me writers were represented at most by a few not-very-illuminating biographical lines in the backs of the books. Books themselves seemed to come out of the walls; there was no authorial or critical barrier between me and what I had not yet learned to call “the text.” It was all the
story,
then, seeming to bloom spontaneously in my mind's eye as I read. Writers were distant figures, not connected in any way to my everyday world. This started to change for me when I discovered SF fandom and the convention scene soon after high school. My first SF convention was Marcon, in Columbus, Ohio, in 1968. Even then, writer guests of honor were still rather distant, up on podiums or panels that I seldom made it to. (Although I came within inches of first meeting the young Robert Silverberg in a somewhat crowded convention motel swimming pool in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, circa 1970, by not
quite
accidentally kicking him in the head. I'm sure our later first meeting, whenever it was, was much better.) My fling with SF fandom in this period was brief, running perhaps four years all told, but it gave me knowledge of a major go-to resource a decade and a half later when I came back as a wannabe pro.

I'm afraid I missed most of the '70s and the early '80s in SF, just the period when Anne's career was building up. I was put off SF by the dreary dystopian turn it took into the New Wave and abandoned the genre in favor of mysteries, romance, general fiction, and boatloads of nonfiction. A somewhat too-early marriage (didn't seem like it at the time—twenty-one was as old as I'd
ever been
) diverted me out of college and into the workforce, and I lost track of wanting to be a writer. But a job in patient care at Ohio State University Hospitals and a staff card that admitted me to the university library's main stacks gave me both original life experiences and a new breadth of reading that were to pay off later.

From the mid-'80s, I was back in the SF scene, this time as an aspiring, and soon actual, pro, thanks to Baen Books picking
The Warrior's Apprentice
out of their slush pile. My next brush with Anne came through Baen, who evidently brought my books to her attention; they, and I, received a most valuable promotional blurb from her. (Although I do have a memory, totally disassociated from its context, of having a writer-guests-get-together sort of lunch with Anne at some convention or another in the late '80s or early '90s. Her beautiful silver hair made me think she was older than she perhaps actually was.)

I was, at the time, watching older writers like a hawk in an effort to pick up tips not so much for writing, but for how to live a writer's life—everything from dealing with contracts and tax records and royalty reports to public speaking to managing one's time and space as a self-employed person. My particular quirk in the late '80s was office-envy. I didn't have room for a home office in my house back then; my tasks were carted variously around from the back of my dining room to my kitchen table to my living room or bedroom to the couch in front of the big window at the Marion Public Library, as chance permitted. So in greenroom conversations and the like when I met colleagues, I often ended up asking them to tell me all about their home offices, rather like a person on a diet asking someone to describe their dessert. Roger Zelazny and Anne both stick in my mind as mentioning that their home offices looked out upon mountains, a tidbit which, in Anne's case, must have come from that convention lunch. (I never imagined that I might someday see her work space.)

The marketing idea of “sharecropping” popular SF universes was just getting rolling in those days. New and hungry young writers were frequently targeted as junior partners for these arranged marriages. Sometimes, as in publisher Jim Baen's case, it was also a ploy to bring new writers to the attention of a wider audience and turboboost their careers, a hat trick he subsequently pulled off several times. Sometimes, I'm afraid, it was just because new writers were cheap. My first such invitation was to write for a YA line in an Asimov robots-universe series, an offer I found very flattering then, but, by luck or some dim sense of self-preservation, turned down. The next such invite was a
lot
harder to say no to.

I was, as I recall, on a family vacation to my brother's place at Lake George, NY, (therefore midsummer, though I don't now remember the year) when someone at Baen caught up with me with a proposal to be the junior writer on an expansion of Anne McCaffrey's Planet Pirates series. This was not one of her books I'd previously read; I think there may have been a quick dash to the closest B&N, an hour's drive away, for a cram course. I looked very seriously at the proposal for a week or so, trying to think my way into it, but it was in competition for my very single-track brain space with my own work in progress, so I at length took a deep breath and turned it down. (If it had been in the Ship Who Sang universe, a series expansion Baen took on later, they might well have had me.) In any event, the project went to Elizabeth Moon, which she later mentioned was a well-timed break for her as her own original creativity had hit a downturn at about that time due to difficult family obligations. And the book that I would have set aside was one that went on to win a Hugo Award for best novel. So that was better for both of us. (Elizabeth's collaborative work gained her some striking covers, though.)