Dragonwriter (18 page)

That slope is particularly slippery in Anne's case because she tended to lay a veneer of her own cheerful personality over the top of even the most depressive situations when she wrote, making it easy for the superficial reader to think that she was depicting something that she was not. Take, for example, the aforementioned Crystal Singer series. Lovely premise, how Crystal Hunters seek the rarest and most precious of their quarry by singing for it and listening for the echoes, then use voice-controlled machinery to cut it. It sounds very beautiful, and what a potentially idyllic life for a musician who has failed to make his or her mark
as
a musician. But then there is the dark side . . . a symbiotic spore may make you a master singer, give you a hugely extended lifespan, make you virtually immune to disease, and heal almost any injury—or it may deafen, mutate, or kill you. And eventually, it will render you sterile, destroy your memory, and drive you insane. There is a dark heart to this paradise.

This is true as well in the Brainship books and stories, one of which I had the honor and pleasure to cowrite with Anne. The emails and notes we exchanged gave me a unique look at the background of these books, a background that might not be apparent to a casual reader.

Anne was never one to dwell on negatives. Her emphasis was always on how her protagonist overcame her barriers, not on waxing emotional about her troubles. But let there be no mistake about this: although the doctors in the books present the disabled-child-to-shell-person-slavery as a highly positive thing, and even though the shelled themselves are presented as being cheerful, generally contented people, the universe of the Brainships is, at least for the shell people, an often-hellish dystopia. How could it not be? It is a universe where, if your infant is deemed sufficiently handicapped and is not smart enough for the shell program, he or she is summarily snuffed out. A universe where even if the handicapped infant is deemed “worthy,” he or she is promptly enrolled in a program of indentured slavery under the guise of “saving” his or her life. Annie was well aware it was a hellish dystopia, and did not in the least approve of it. She could have made everything about this situation positive—except the part about being indentured, since that was integral to the plot. This was her world and her choice to make it a kindly or unkindly one, and she paints the brutishness of the “euthanasia” of “unacceptable” infants in obviously harsh strokes; those strokes just happen to be brief. Unlike some who style themselves primarily as dystopian writers, who would proceed to wallow in just how hellish it was, depicting page after page of weeping parents being informed that their child was not fit to live, Annie did what she always did—she cut straight to the story. She wasn't a dystopian writer; she was a storyteller. She wasn't interested in setting the stage beyond what she needed to get the story started, and for her, the important part was not the setting, but the characters and what they did within that setting. I'm pretty sure (although I never had a chance to ask) that she was at one with Heinlein's amused scorn for those writers who “sell their birthright for a pot of message.” She never saw her job as that of a preacher. Her job was to tell stories.

In the case of “The Ship Who Sang,” the story that introduced the Brainship universe, her job was to tell Helva's story.

Bear in mind, I am not entirely sure just which part is chicken and which part is egg here. Knowing Annie, and having watched her work when she was briefly considering taking part in C. J. Cherryh's Merovingen Nights shared world series along with me and several other writers, I think Helva herself might have been (no pun intended) the “egg.” At least in the instance of Merovingen Nights, Annie came up with the character first and designed the setting to match what she wanted out of the character. I think Helva probably came first, and in order to justify Helva's physical state—a woman with the body of a spaceship—Annie invented a world in which such a state was possible.

Annie was not one to allow her characters to wallow in angst for chapters at a time. Her characters faced rotten situations head-on and took steps to get themselves out—as Lessa does in the Pern series, going from kitchen drudge to Weyrwoman, mostly propelled by her own determination. Helva was no exception. After the usual treatment—medication to stunt her growth, several surgeries, education, and special training—she emerges fairly early in the book ready to take on her first assignment as a Brainship and with a steel-hard determination to pay off her debt.

This is a theme that runs through the entire book: the heavy, crippling debt that the shell people are saddled with. Annie never ignored that, nor the implied slavery. She made sure that theme continued to be present in the background of every story—when Helva speaks with other ships who are saddled with unappealing “brawns” because they cannot afford to reject one, or in Helva's conversations with planet- or station-bound shell persons—underscoring the simple fact that, no matter how pleasant some parts of the society Annie created are, this
is
a dystopia. A very pretty dystopia, and a dystopia where most people have good, or even exceptional, lives—but one that functions at the expense of others who have had no choice and no say in being made slaves.

Annie was far more interested in how Helva dealt with and circumvented that dystopian culture than she was in railing against it. That is both in keeping with Annie's character and Helva's. Handed lemons by life, both of them would opt to make a lemon soufflé rather than rail against life or the authority that determined all they were to get was lemons. Neither were revolutionaries—and why should they need to be? They also serve who scout the way out.

The Brainship universe also looks more dystopian now than it would have when
The Ship Who Sang
was first published as a novel. The technology available to us today—and the world that disabled children are born into—is very different and much more advanced than any writer at the time could have dreamed. When Annie was writing the books, for instance, there was no such technology as ultrasound, no fetal testing, no way of knowing if a child was even going to be born alive. That context matters in how we understand the universe.

Annie, unlike Isaac Asimov or even Poul Anderson, her contemporaries, was
not
particularly interested in the bleeding edge of technology; when she needed something for a book, she would talk to an expert in that field, but otherwise, she pretty much ignored the techie stuff with a bit of writerly hand waving. Technology was a tool for her, not a be-all and end-all in itself. She put in what she needed for her
story,
and that was that. Properly so: remember that for her story and character came first, setting after, and technical details, so long as she didn't contradict herself or make some logic blunder or plot hole, were somewhere out in the distance. Annie was anything but a technophobe, but as someone who made a living as a computer programmer, I can tell you that she wasn't really interested in the details of technology unless those details would enhance or propel her story.

Actually, given the stories that Todd tells about her, I suspect that, even outside of her writing, she wasn't remotely interested in how technology worked so much as what it could do for her. Not that odd, even for a science fiction writer. I've lost count of the number of SF writers I know who are perfectly comfortable rattling off tidbits about nanotech or the complexities of bubble computers, but who are utterly baffled by the innards of their own cars.

It's also always wise to consider the real world that a writer is working in when you consider the work that they are writing. Even if technology had been Annie's primary interest, the technology of 1969—the year
The Ship Who Sang
was published as a novel and the last time she made changes to Helva's story—in no way hinted at the advances (especially in electronics, miniaturization, and medicine) that we take for granted now; very few would have dared to predict technology in the far future as advanced as the things we handle every day.

Let me take you back to 1969 for a moment.

Man had just set foot on the moon. The computing power that was necessary to send man there required entire buildings to house. Hard to imagine, then, that a computer capable of running a spaceship would someday fit inside the CPU of a moderately complicated digital watch, with room to spare. Even
2001: A Space Odyssey,
released in 1968, showed us a HAL 9000 that was several stories tall. Intel had only just invented the first microprocessor. When asked if there would be computers in the home (something Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury had both already envisioned), Intel engineers suggested that there might one day be “a dozen or so” people who were interested. The idea of a PC was considered ultrafuturistic, and even Asimov envisioned most of its working parts being hidden away in a separate room or embedded in the walls. While science fiction writers of the time had no problem imagining interstellar travel, a solid portion of them balked at the idea of a ship being able to carry enough computing power to run itself. It made more sense to imagine that a ship's “computer” was the brain of a living human instead. A human, even with extensive life support, would “always” take up far, far less space than a multistoried computer—and be less likely to fail.

As for communication of large amounts of data over vast distances, that didn't seem even remotely possible. By 1969, the first computer-to-computer message had been sent over ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), but it was a classified military project that very few people knew about. There was no internet. Plenty of science fiction writers still bought into the idea that any data you would need on a spaceship, you had better bring with you.

The first artificial heart transplant took place in 1969, but the machine that powered it was outside the body and was about the size of a large desk, and it worked for only three days until a donor heart was found. The procedure was insanely expensive. In fact, a lot of medical procedures that we take for granted as affordable these days were insanely expensive—more than expensive enough to make a future where one might need to indenture oneself to pay for them plausible. In 1969, people died all the time of things we now consider treatable. Heart attacks, stroke, cancer . . . they were pretty much death sentences. Very few people were put on life support: coma patients, usually. Most children born with severe birth defects died. Compassionate, excellent doctors were known to take steps to make sure they did.

Though it had been several years, the specter of the thalidomide babies still haunted the collective psyche of the world. Thalidomide, an antinausea and sedative drug that was introduced in the late 1950s to be used as a sleeping pill, was quickly discovered to help pregnant women with the effects of morning sickness. It was sold from 1957 until 1962, when it was withdrawn after being found to cause many different forms of birth defects—everything from missing limbs or shortened limbs to congenital defects of the heart, lungs, and internal organs. In Germany alone, 10,000 babies were born affected by thalidomide. Many were too damaged to survive for long. Those that did required constant care. Although there were no thalidomide babies in the United States,
Life
magazine and other publications there covered the story extensively and graphically. I strongly suspect the images of those children, widely disseminated in the media through the '50s and late '60s, influenced Annie considerably—as did the stories of how desperate parents were trying to cope. Annie says in
The Ship Who Sang
that shell persons would never have traded places with those who were born “normal,” and when she does, I suspect she had those images in the back of her mind—because certainly, as Annie describes them, the shelled are, in many ways, far freer than their “brawns.”

This was a difficult time for anyone with a disability, whatever its origins. In the early 1970s, people with disabilities lobbied Congress to put civil rights language for people with disabilities into the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. The act was actually vetoed by President Nixon because of the cost. “Supporters would have the American public believe that each of these bills would further an important social cause,” he said, “but they neglect to warn the public that the cumulative effect of a Congressional spending spree would be a massive assault upon the pocketbooks of millions of men and women in this country.” And though the 1973 Act included language prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability in federal programs, people with disabilities did not achieve broad civil rights until the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. It is not difficult to see where Annie got her dystopian vision from. Not only were there no disability rights advocates of consequence between 1965 and 1969, when Annie was first writing the Brainship books, but one could scarcely imagine that anyone would
allow
such a thing. In 1965, disability
was
depersonalizing; the severely disabled were warehoused away from the eyes of the public, institutionalized for the duration of their lives, while parents were encouraged to forget that they existed and “go on with their lives.” It's an attitude that invokes horror nowadays, but was perfectly commonplace back then. In even imagining that some severely handicapped infants would be given a chance to live outside the walls of an institution, Annie was far more enlightened than most people, and her imagination extended far beyond that of the vast majority of her peers.

I have to wonder whether, if they had been given the choice offered Helva's parents, the parents of those thalidomide babies of the late '50s and early '60s wouldn't have seized on such a fate as a blessing. There were no cleverly engineered harnesses to help lift an adult-sized handicapped person in and out of bed. There were no cordless phones or television remotes. There were no ramps, no lifts, and virtually no one had any notion of installing them. And of course, it is not
just
the gadgets that make life easier for the disabled in the modern world; it is the
attitude.