Dragonwriter (16 page)

Anne never preached or even asked you to agree with her views, but she lived them. In her books she brought to life characters that shared her tolerance, optimism, and kindness. Because she was sincere about being inclusive, fans who did not feel welcome in other groups often found their way to hers.

ANNA LEE SMITH:

           
“And the books taught important values that I didn't see, or feel, being taught anymore: honor, integrity, morals, acceptance, openness, courage . . . Not just the Pern novels, but all of them. They were the common thread through all of her books. She imbued her characters with these characteristics and that's what drew me to them all.”

CHARLOTTE MOORE:

           
“Anne's stories are rife with the promise of redemption for outcasts and the misunderstood. They're about hope, perseverance, trust, and friendship . . . Anne McCaffrey fans want to believe the world is fundamentally a good place, that people can mean well and do the right thing.”

Like the characters they so admire, McCaffrey devotees tend to be willing to share and cooperate for a greater good. SF fans in general are intelligent and curious, but not as often are they as open to others as Anne fans. It's difficult to say whether the less well-socialized among them have not yet found Anne's books, or if they have but didn't like them because they did not find a voice that speaks to them. Yet, those readers who do find their way into the fan group find that sought-after inclusion they do not find in their other lives. Once included, it behooves them to learn to be inclusive as well. This last-named is sometimes a stretch; it requires trust, something that has been beaten or teased out of many SF fans in their more mundane existence. But to extend that trust among Anne fans is to be rewarded with the joy of having someone to share your passions.

Anne's fans are a diverse group. They come from every walk of life: children and adults, professors and shelf stockers. It's not uncommon to see college students having passionate discussions (and arguments) with doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, dog-walkers, stay-at-home parents, test pilots and astronauts, environmentalists and biologists, real estate agents, and copywriters. What they have in common is a love of a good story, well told, with compelling characters that behave under extraordinary pressure in a way that the readers admire and hope that, under similar circumstances, they too would respond.

A sense of humor is almost a necessity to appreciate Anne's literature. She had a marvelous understanding of the natural ups and downs of life and of those moments that bring a twinkle to the eye. She often used levity to balance against the utter seriousness of life on Pern. Her audience appreciates that. As many of her fans are serving or retired military, they understand the dragonriders' foxhole humor. A moment of lightness helps to relieve the pressure of a terrifying situation. Anne's fans love a funny story and share a capacity for finding humor even during difficult times.

GILLIAN HEWITSON:

           
“That was the thing about Anne Fans. They tended to be fans of everything else too, and the ones I've gathered up (who are among my best friends now) are all kind, generous, funny, geeky, and caring. Something about Anne's work seems to draw people like that in. Her books strike a chord with my sort of people.”

HISHAM EL-FAR:

           
“I often find myself comparing the behaviour and character [of] the interactions amongst Anne's fans, with that of the other major group of fans and enthusiasts I interact with. Compared to the (at best) rowdy, loud, and aggressive Xbox LIVE gaming community, Fans of Anne McCaffrey are paragons of virtue and honour (but few would dare cross us).”

We reached out for input to those who have been longtime fans and devoted members of the community. Those to whom we sent our questionnaire not only answered, but passed it along to others. Not only did they share the experience with one another (as good Pern people would), but their proactivity meant that we got to hear from people we might not have known about but whose input we also valued. It was the sort of win-win situation of which Anne would have approved.

Among the questions we asked were: Have you noticed traits in common among your fellow Anne fans? What are they? The answers were amazingly similar and also universally positive.

HANS VAN DEN BOOM:

           
“Love of fantasy/sf in particular and reading in general are almost a given, A willingness to get into the matter like you usually only see with fans of the great epic fantasy series, like Tolkien's and such, maybe, As for the rest, you got them all, lovable and stupidly irritating. Shy and outspoken. Come to think of it, the diversity of the fans (especially on the forum boards I was and am admin/moderator for) is what strikes me time and again. From all over the world, rich and poor, male and female, with low and high education, the diversity is enormous and despite that, online it seems one family, and on the occasions that I met them in a group in real life, that actually stayed through, which is amazing if you think on it.”

LESLIE TILLEY:

           
“We believe!!! find see Anne's creations in real life all the time.”

LINDA EICHER:

           
“We all (Anne's fans) tend to believe imagination is good for the soul, I think. That while no world is perfect, there is beauty and creative thinking, and that the majority of humankind isn't just in it for themselves.”

As early as 1978, fans in the United States began to hold unofficial Gathers, named after Anne's term for a fair or fete, modeled after the medieval festivals. In her books, her characters attend Gathers on special occasions. The real-world Gathers resembled medieval fairs, where they ate food mentioned in the books and sang the songs Anne had written. As Anne was a musician herself, her poems and songs were easy to set to music. In Europe, fifty or so fans met in Blackpool, England, for the first British Gathers. The fans who attended completely occupied two small bed-and-breakfast establishments and indulged in improvised song, discussion, and good humor over a weekend. They wrote lyrics devoted to “McCaffreydom” to popular tunes, such as
Jerusalem
and
Rule Britannia
; they had sing-alongs with microphones, solo performances, and plenty of dancing. The discussions were just as stimulating and intense and sometimes very funny.

HARRY ALM:

           
“For several years after X-Con in 1978 [where the Alms first met Anne—ed.], Marilyn and I hosted a New Year's party, which we called the Turn's End Gather, with a theme of Pern, and Anne's writing, and science fiction, and anything else that caught the attention of the attendees at the time. One year, our friend Todd Voros, one of the original members from Milwaukee and Anne's X-Con, in his persona of F'lox, brown Quelith's rider, came up with an idea to raise marks for the weyr and allow the weyrlings to become entrepreneurs; unstated was his idea to make a profit for himself from their activities. Personally, I thought he was trying to institute Junior Achievement on Pern, but my character of L'renz, Ista's weyrleader, did not have the cultural referent for that idea. In any case, F'lox's idea was to produce fire lizard pooper scoopers to sell to all of the people who obtained fire lizards after F'nor and Menolly found them. When he presented the idea to the Gather, the unanimous and simultaneous reaction, literally, everyone saying the same thing at the same time, was, ‘No, no, F'lox, everyone knows that fire lizards go between.'”

As in other fandoms, readers who were part of the established fan groups became so deeply involved in Anne's characters and story lines that they wanted more stories, perhaps in the mainstream timeline, or perhaps along a side channel, where Anne's plots had not gone. After some thought, Anne gave permission. She didn't offer a blank check, however; she established ground rules for where the stories could and could not go.

Being able to write Pern fanfiction gave the readers a feeling of pride in ownership that they were not able to obtain in most other series; other authors discouraged it, sometimes out of caution over copyrights, and sometimes because they had been burned by disrespectful fans. Anne trusted her fans to respect her wishes and copyrights, and for the greatest part, they have honored that trust. Having a stake in their favorite world made them even more enthusiastic participants than ever. Individual fan groups arose all over the world. Most of them were named for weyrs, either canonical or original (Ista, Kadanzer, Theran, StarRise, etc.). A few were purely social groups, where fans could get together to talk about their favorite author and her books, but most were founded around writing their own Pern-based fan fiction. Marilyn Alm, who with her husband Harry Alm founded the Ista Weyr group, obtained permission to begin the Canth/Wirenth timeline in 1978, the first official fanfic offshoot from Anne's main timeline.

MARILYN ALM:

           
“. . . one of the questions I had for Anne was, ‘Oh, why, oh why did Wirenth have to die? Why couldn't Canth have flown her?' Anne's reply was, ‘Well, at the time I was writing
Dragonquest,
I couldn't figure out how to have Canth fly Wirenth and have Kylara get hers, and it was more important to have Kylara get hers.' We said, ‘Hmm,' and went back to our room and consulted all five of the Pern books then published. And came back to her with questions. Our questions involved several ‘What ifs?' and ‘Is this feasible on Pern as you see it?'and then we gave her our scenario. Anne looked very thoughtful, and then said, ‘D@mn. It would have worked.'”

Anne herself never read any of the fan-written stories for two reasons. She never wanted to find herself accidentally incorporating someone else's plot or alternate timeline into “canonical” Pern. Nor did she want the fan writers to feel pressured that the real Weyrwoman was looking over their shoulders. It was another extension of trust. As a result, the fan base policed itself. As new members joined in and penned their own stories, they were informed as to the rules. Instead of feeling as if they were under an onerous authority, the fans felt as though they were part of the universe.

Jody's book
The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern
came into being because it occurred to us that by that time (1988), Anne had created so much background material on Pern that a good gazetteer was possible. When Bill put out feelers among the fans for whether or not we should do it, the response was overwhelming: “Yes! Now!” We knew that it would be a grand tool for the fan writers, as well as a lovely, illustrated introduction for new readers to get to know Anne's brilliant and complex world. Doing ten days of interviews in Ireland with Anne for the
Dragonlover's Guide to Pern
, it soon became apparent to us that even parts of Anne's world that had not been thought out in detail when she wrote them to make the story work were often subconsciously consistent. Based upon their reading of Anne's internal timelines, Harry Alm and Eric Webb codified the Threadfall charts, doing mathematically what Anne had done more or less instinctively, and discovered that she was working from an accurate mental model. (When Mayfair did the
Dragonriders of Pern
role-play game, they used a University of Chicago math grad to analyze the Threadfall data, and it held up perfectly.) Marilyn Alm brought in mapmaker Niels Erickson to draw the charts that Anne later used in
Dragonsdawn.

Anne encouraged fan involvement in her research and always announced who had given her facts and figures. Her easy confidence in her work allowed her to consider other people's ideas as readily as her own. If someone proposed a notion that she liked as well or better than one of hers, she adopted it (with fair warning!) for the official canon. (Some of Jody's innovations in the two Crossroads books became part of Pernese history—and she couldn't be prouder.) That open spirit inspired her fans as much as her work did.

When websites and bulletin boards became easier to access and use around the turn of the millennium, Anne's son Alec created one of the internet's first online communities, the Kitchen Table website and Kitchen Table Live chat group, in 2000. Anne frequently invited fans to visit her at her home in Ireland; even drop-ins could count on a friendly greeting and a cup of tea at Anne's kitchen table. The Kitchen Table website was an online extension of that. Three fans, Hans van den Boom, Cheryl Miller, and Anneli Conroy, were invited to become site hosts, to welcome and mediate between participants. The boards covered conversations about each of Anne's books in turn. People talked about their favorite characters and scenes.

Anne herself participated in the chats. The fans appreciated the gift of her time and attention. She was playful with her fans, allowing herself to be a little silly, perhaps a bit ridiculous, and inviting others to be the same. Anneli Conroy mentioned an instance when Anne visited the Kitchen Table Live not as herself, but pretending to be a cat. (That's why the good humor in her literature finds such resonance among its readers. It's not pasted on—it's true.)

The hosts kept the discourse civil, so the KTL, as it came to be known, was a safe place to have those discussions (and arguments) in the round that were otherwise impossible except at conventions, Gathers, or meetings—especially impossible considering that the participants logged in from all around the world. Hans, Cheryl, and Anneli hailed from, respectively, the Netherlands, the United States, and Great Britain. Constant communication fostered further trust and friendship among the participants. Deep friendships formed among the fans.