I had no reason to think about this until today; no reason to remember it until i heard the news that legendary fantasist Anne McCaffrey had died Monday at the age of 85. What i’ve remembered is that the Dragonriders of Pern was the first real fantasy and speculative fiction i ever read.
I’d read SF before then, including Theodore Sturgeon and Robert
A. Heinlein, but the worlds of those books were simply our world with a twist.
I’d read fantasy before, starting with The Hobbit and C.S. Lewis in third grade, but those were
nominally kids’ books. Tales. Fables. Amazing fables, to be sure, but the
worlds that Lewis and Tolkien had crafted were worlds i likewise recognized,
because they were familiar from the same archetypes that had long ago splintered
off to create Snow White and The
Black Cauldron. But it was only a year
after Sturgeon and Lewis and Tolkien that at the age of 10, i saw a copy of Dragonflight at my local drugstore and felt myself sucked into
the cover of that circa-1974 paperback edition.
Reading McCaffrey at age ten is not a thing i would necessarily
recommend. I remember struggling at the outset to read Dragonflight. I remember feeling like i was missing about half of
what was going on, particularly the politics, the sense of history, and oh,
yeah, the hot dragon/human group-sex-at-a-distance motif. But even as i worked
my through Dragonflight, a thing
happened at the tender age of ten that set the bar for my love of fantasy for
the rest of my life. The more things that i didn’t understand, the more
determined i became to dig deep enough into Pern that i could make them real.
And so i did. And over the space of three-hundred-odd pages, i
felt Pern come alive in my mind. I learned the ways of the Weyrs and their
people. I felt the history of McCaffrey’s world slowly set its ageless
impressions into me. I felt the trepidation of a people who craved peace so
much that they forgot their deadliest enemies. I let the thread scare the
ever-loving crap out me in the best mindless-fantasy-creature tradition. (I had
seen the Steve McQueen version of The Blob
shortly beforehand, which probably helped.) For the space of the summer it took
me to read Dragonflight, I walked
in Pern in a way that i had never walked in Narnia. I felt Pern like i wouldn’t
feel Middle Earth until Lord of the Rings a half-dozen years later. I knew Pern like i’ve since come to know a
hundred different F&SF realms, from Ringworld to the Sprawl, from Greyhawk
to Westeros, in all the years since.
I haven’t read an Anne McCaffrey book in a long while now. As
with the works of Frank Herbert and his overly loquacious offspring, the Pern
books eventually ran on just a little too long for my taste, though i have no
quibble with their quality or the love that McCaffrey clearly brought to bear
on her continued exploration of her world. But even so, more than thirty years
after Dragonflight called to me one
afternoon from a drugstore bookshelf, this is the legacy that Anne McCaffrey
has left me with — the idea that the best fantasy and speculative fiction is
that which allows a reader to step into a real, living world, no matter how far
that world’s most basic dramatic foundations are pushed by the imagination.
Anne McCaffrey taught me some of my first lessons of character story, of the
value of real dilemma and human emotion in fantasy, of the rules of
storytelling that let us use our fantasy worlds to hold a mirror up to the fear
and the pain and the pathos of the real world.
I replaced that longlost copy of Dragonflight today, and i’m sorry that didn’t happen sooner. I’m sorry it takes so
long to remember these things.
