Anne McCaffrey
The Girl Who Heard Dragons
Introduction: So, You're Anne McCaffrey
I'm never sure what image readers construct of me from reading my books. But, generally, when I get a response of "You're Anne McCaffrey?" I haven't had the nerve to ask what they were expecting. Tones range from skepticism to deep disappointment and incredulity. Yet I do describe myself.. "My hair is silver, my eyes are green, and I freckle. The rest is subject to change without notice" - the "rest" being the unrepentant bulk of me.
Fortunately, the faces of authors are not as widely displayed as those of more public celebrities. Often the jacket flap or the back copy includes a photo, formal or informal, of the author, which very few people ever connect to the person sitting next to them on an airplane or walking in a mall.
Once, on the shuttle from New York to Boston, I was recognized: I'd been on a Boston TV talk show that noon. I remember the show vividly, because during a commercial break I was sitting in the audience, waiting my turn, when Ethel Merman suddenly swept in. She was there to promote her autobiography. She did, then swept out again. To my horror, I was beckoned to come on the set then.
I was still sort of in a trance (as I used to sing many of the songs that Ethel Merman had made popular) when the presenter asked me how I get such fantastic ideas.
"That's nowhere near as fantastic as following Ethel Merman's act on this show," I replied, and got a laugh and applause.
About two hours later, as I was filing down the aisle of the shuttle, a girl tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was Anne McCaffrey.
"Oh, are you a fan?" I asked, pleased.
"No, I just thought I recognized you from the show with Ethel Merman."
Very early on in my career, I learned never to admit to seatmates on airplanes (particularly long-distance flights) that I write for a living.
That was a surefire way to be told in exhaustive detail their idea for a best-selling novel, invariably based on an autobiographical event. When asked directly what I do, I tend to vary between saying I'm 1) a potato farmer, 2) a horse breeder, and 3) going to visit my grandchildren. The latter generally silences all but the most garrulous. Who wants to be shown pictures or bored with tales of precocious off-spring?
Twice, though, seatmates provided considerable gratification for me. In I980, I was suffering from a heavy cold on a short hop from Melbourne to Sydney, Australia, and I had buried my head in the mammoth crossword puzzle I was doing. Having the window seat, I didn't pay much attention as the other passengers filed into our row.
When I did come up for a look, I was amazed to see the man next to me - mid-thirties, attractive, very elegantly dressed in fine gray flannel with a silk shirt and Countess Mara tie - engrossed in a book with an extremely familiar cover: To Ride Pegasus. I waited until he was turning a page and then asked him in a sort of skeptical tone if the book was any good.
He looked up and replied that yes, it was good but then he enjoyed all this author's books.
"That's good;' said I, "because you're sitting next to her!"
He introduced himself as David Ogilvy, the director of the Sydney Opera Company, on his way to direct Joan Sutherland in a concert version of Lucia di Lammermoor. We chatted quite amiably until the plane landed, but I count him as one of my more prestigious readers.
Every time I'm at Andromeda Book Shop in Birmingham, I'm asked to sign a book for Bob Monkhouse. "We must stop meeting like this!"
In April I984, on one of those remarkable zigzag air routes from New York to Alaska, I acquired two new seat-mates in Dallas: a very pretty girl in the middle seat, and on the aisle a gangly guy, who immediately chatted her up. She was a beauty counselor on her way to Seattle, and he announced that he had just finished a first-aid course for helicopter pilots and was on his way back to Fairbanks, Alaska - my ultimate destination. I listened to their banter but didn't add anything.
When she left the plane at Seattle, I asked him about the weather in Fairbanks. He was quite civil, but he obviously wanted to get back to the book he was reading - which was an SF title. I asked him if he liked reading the genre, and he replied that he liked the hard science but fantasy bored him. Out of courtesy, he asked why I was on my way to Alaska, so I told him I was a potato farmer.
I spent a marvelous time as author in residence in Fairbanks, going dogsledding, eating moose-meat spaghetti, watching the aurora borealis, corrupting junior and senior high-school students and undergraduates at the University of Alaska - anyone I could get my hands on. I was there on my birthday, and the local bakery students whornped up an irnmense White Dragon cake -- enough for everyone in the Fairbanks Arts buffet. On the final Saturday, I was doing an autograph session in one of the malls, when in comes my airplane friend, arms loaded down with books, wife and daughters trailing after him. He stopped in front of my table and plopped down every book I had written, including the three Dell romances.
"You didn't tell me you were famous," he accused me.
"You didn't ask!"
Then there are those times at conventions when people don't yet realize that you're the Guest of Honor. I enjoy sitting at the registration table when my con schedule permits - and getting a charge out of reactions.
In Baltimore in I977 (the year I discovered I had become a cult figure), I was sitting in the registration area when a woman, neatly dressed in a Villager shirtwaist dress, carrying two heavy Lord amp; Taylor shopping bags, advanced on the desk. She was not at all the type that you would expect would read SF I thought she might have got into the wrong hotel. She wanted to know if Anne McCaffrey was really speaking that day. I replied that she was. The woman asked at what time, so I told her (all this with two of the registration staff trying to keep their faces straight).
"Are you sure she's going to speak?"
"Oh, yes, I can vouch for it. She's here and she'll be speaking at two o'clock."
Only then would she pay for her day badge. After my speech, the lady approached me again, still lugging her shopping bags.
She gave me a sideways glance and then smiled. "You fooled me." She upended the shopping bags to display all my novels, including the romances, and the magazines that had published my short stories.
"And you fooled me" I replied, pointing at the bags. We both had a chuckle.
I remember being asked if I knew Doris Pitkin Buck, who was in her seventies when I first met her at Milford, Pennsylvania, but who could write tales with intense and horrific insights into human nature or gentle and restorative tales. When I admitted to knowing her, the boy asked me how old she was.
"How old do you think she is?" I asked.
"Oh, early twenties." Obviously that was a considerable age to him. "How ever did you guess?" Well, why not? Doris wrote with a very young, romantic voice at times, and for the duration of those stories she was in her early twenties. The identity dichotomy (the real versus the imaginary) started for me in the late I960s, by the time of the Kent student massacre. My son Alec, who started his career as a protestor at this point, asked permission to use the SFWA mimeograph machine to run off some flyers for a march to be held in Sea Cliff, Long Island, where we were living. Alec was bustling about my office, introducing his mother to the Columbia students who were joining in the march. One of them noticed the titles on the bookshelves.
"Hey, who reads science fiction?" one young man asked.
"My mother," Alec replied, because he was not totally convinced that he wanted a science-fiction author as his mother.
"Hey, why does your mother have four and five copies of Anne McCaffrey's books?" the boy wanted to know. "Because she is Anne McCaffrey," Alee replied, exasperated.