(no subject)
Feb. 15th, 2026 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI never got around to writing up Anne McCaffrey's The Mark of Merlin when I read it last year, but I've been thinking about McCaffrey a lot recently due to blitzing through the Dragons Made Me Did It Pern podcast (highly recommended btw) and osprey_archer asked for a post on my last-year-end round-up so now seems as good a time as any.
The important thing to know about The Mark of Merlin is that -- unlike many of the things I've read recently! -- it is not, in any way, the least little bit, Arthuriana. They are not in Great Britain. There are no thematic Arthurian connections. There is absolutely zero hint of anything magical. So why Merlin? Well, Merlin is the name of the heroine's dog, and he's a very good boy, so that's all that really needs to be said about that.
Anyway, this is McCaffrey writing in classic romantic suspense mode a la Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels, and honestly it's a pretty fun time! Our Heroine Carla's father Tragically Died in the War, so he asked his second-in-command to be her guardian and now she's en route to stay with Major Laird in his isolated house in Cape Cod. Tragically scarred and war-traumatized Major Laird has no Gothic-trope concerns about this because Carla's full name is Carlysle and her dad accidentally forgot to tell him that the child in question was a daughter and not a son; Carla is fully aware of the mixup and but has not chosen to enlighten him because she thinks it's extremely funny to pop out at Major Laird like "ha ha! You THOUGHT I was a hapless youth and wrote me a patronizing letter about it, but INSTEAD I am a beautiful and plucky young co-ed so joke's on you!"
There is an actual suspense plot; the suspense plot is that Someone is hunting Carla for reasons of secret information her dad passed on in his luggage before he died, and also his death was under Mysterious Circumstances, and so we have to figure out what's going on with all of that and eventually have a big confrontation in the remote Cape Cod house. But mostly the book is just Carla and the Major being snowed in, romantically bickering, huddling for warmth, cooking delicious meals over the old Cape Cod stove, etc. etc. Cozy in the classic sense, very little substance but excellent for reading in a vacation cottage while drinking tea and eating a cheese toastie.
As a sidenote, I did not know until I started listening to Dragons Made Me Do It that McCaffrey's Dragonflight preceded The Flame and the Flower, the book that's credited as being the first bodice-ripper romance novel and launching the genre of historical romance as we know it today, by a good four years. It's interesting to place this very classic romantic suspense novel -- which was published almost a decade after Dragonflight, but, at least according to this Harvard student newspaper article I turned up, at least partially written in 1950 -- against the full tropetastic dubcon-at-best dragonsex Pern situations, which clearly belong to a later moment. And speaking of later moments, it's also a bit of a mindfuck for me to think very hard about McCaffrey's place in genre history and realize how very early she is. I was reading McCaffrey in the nineties, against Lackey and Bujold. Reading her in conversation with Russ and LeGuin is a whole different experience.
But this is all a tangent and not very much to do with The Mark of Merlin, a perfectly fun perfectly fine book, very short on the wtf moments that have characterized most of my experiences with McCaffrey, and if anything comes late to its moment rather than early.
osprey_archer asked for a post on my last-year-end round-up so now seems as good a time as any.The important thing to know about The Mark of Merlin is that -- unlike many of the things I've read recently! -- it is not, in any way, the least little bit, Arthuriana. They are not in Great Britain. There are no thematic Arthurian connections. There is absolutely zero hint of anything magical. So why Merlin? Well, Merlin is the name of the heroine's dog, and he's a very good boy, so that's all that really needs to be said about that.
Anyway, this is McCaffrey writing in classic romantic suspense mode a la Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels, and honestly it's a pretty fun time! Our Heroine Carla's father Tragically Died in the War, so he asked his second-in-command to be her guardian and now she's en route to stay with Major Laird in his isolated house in Cape Cod. Tragically scarred and war-traumatized Major Laird has no Gothic-trope concerns about this because Carla's full name is Carlysle and her dad accidentally forgot to tell him that the child in question was a daughter and not a son; Carla is fully aware of the mixup and but has not chosen to enlighten him because she thinks it's extremely funny to pop out at Major Laird like "ha ha! You THOUGHT I was a hapless youth and wrote me a patronizing letter about it, but INSTEAD I am a beautiful and plucky young co-ed so joke's on you!"
There is an actual suspense plot; the suspense plot is that Someone is hunting Carla for reasons of secret information her dad passed on in his luggage before he died, and also his death was under Mysterious Circumstances, and so we have to figure out what's going on with all of that and eventually have a big confrontation in the remote Cape Cod house. But mostly the book is just Carla and the Major being snowed in, romantically bickering, huddling for warmth, cooking delicious meals over the old Cape Cod stove, etc. etc. Cozy in the classic sense, very little substance but excellent for reading in a vacation cottage while drinking tea and eating a cheese toastie.
As a sidenote, I did not know until I started listening to Dragons Made Me Do It that McCaffrey's Dragonflight preceded The Flame and the Flower, the book that's credited as being the first bodice-ripper romance novel and launching the genre of historical romance as we know it today, by a good four years. It's interesting to place this very classic romantic suspense novel -- which was published almost a decade after Dragonflight, but, at least according to this Harvard student newspaper article I turned up, at least partially written in 1950 -- against the full tropetastic dubcon-at-best dragonsex Pern situations, which clearly belong to a later moment. And speaking of later moments, it's also a bit of a mindfuck for me to think very hard about McCaffrey's place in genre history and realize how very early she is. I was reading McCaffrey in the nineties, against Lackey and Bujold. Reading her in conversation with Russ and LeGuin is a whole different experience.
But this is all a tangent and not very much to do with The Mark of Merlin, a perfectly fun perfectly fine book, very short on the wtf moments that have characterized most of my experiences with McCaffrey, and if anything comes late to its moment rather than early.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 04:02 am (UTC)It seemed like the genre definitions got a lot more stratified, and writers a lot more pigeonholed, as the field got a lot more attention and respect.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 04:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 02:31 am (UTC)We have discussed this, but I was also reading her in the nineties, but I think I read more of her non-Pern stuff than you, and more of her earlier stuff; at any rate, I have always thought of her as significantly earlier than Lackey even though their output did overlap. So reading her in conversation with Russ and LeGuin has always felt right, whereas reading her in conversation with Lackey feels like "well, I mean, I was reading them at the same time, but..." even when the books were actually coming out at the same time and probably should indeed be considered together.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 04:14 am (UTC)Tiptree, 1915
McCaffrey, 1926
Wilhelm, 1928
Le Guin, 1929
Russ, 1937
Willis, 1945
McIntyre, 1948
Of course there's also publication history that changes the timeline -- Tiptree started late and Russ early, I think; I always forget she was younger. And McIntyre and Le Guin became very close iirc.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 09:08 am (UTC)Which would you rate more highly? During the period of my life when I was putting more of her into my brain than was medically recommended, I bounced hard off almost anything that wasn't full-bore sff with some carve-outs for historical fiction.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 03:39 am (UTC)I don't think I knew that, either! I did know she was publishing in the '60's. My parents' copies of Dragonflight etc. were all first editions. The casual prevalence of telepathy in all of her futures feels specifically very '60's–'70s to me, too.
this very classic romantic suspense novel -- which was published almost a decade after Dragonflight, but, at least according to this Harvard student newspaper article I turned up, at least partially written in 1950
"and they also have sex" feels like one of the most relevant things McCaffrey ever said about her own work.
It is occasionally weird for me to think about her as one of my formative childhood authors, but she was: mixed right in there with Alexander and Beagle and Yolen and DWJ and the D'Aulaires. I had elementary school headcanons that were not borne out by adult revisiting and still stand by my instantaneous objection to the gendered aspect of Impression. (I wanted a bronze.)
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 02:04 pm (UTC)And you are right!! (There's some very funny math in the podcast where they start comparing what McCaffrey says about dragon color distribution -- 50% greens! 30% blues! 5% bronzes! -- against the actual dragons who appear in the series. Unfortunately, if you start out with "protagonists get bronzes because bronzes are rare and special," and then you write umpteen books with a lot of protagonists in them ....)
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 03:53 am (UTC)I remember being really surprised she was that forerunner, when I started reading sff about twenty years after the New Wave (mostly heralded in the US by Dangerous Visions, lol), and she seemed much closer to romance, a la the whole F'lar and Lessa dynamic, complete with dubcon). I read Get Off the Unicorn in 1987 when it came out and that kind of confirmed it for me. Not that I thought she was _bad_ at all -- I practically memorized the Harper books when younger -- it's just a kind of really interesting career path blending genres that also got respect from the male-dominated sf critical scene at the time. I don't think that happens now -- in the eighties the critical focus shifted more to Erect, er, Hard SF cyberpunk (lol never was a genre built more on male geek vibes) and the last female sff-sorta-romancey writer I remember who won a lot of prizes was Connie Willis on the 1990s. But she used screwball comedy romance tropes. (And then I didn't follow SFF at all for a long while after the early 90s because grad school, so this is really partial.)
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 04:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 09:03 am (UTC)Thank you for blowing my mind because Wilhelm's science fiction was also in the house when I was growing up, but I do not think I had any idea about the mysteries until tonight.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 05:09 am (UTC)And also maybe Zenna Henderson (b 1917) with her telepathic People stories in the fifties, altho her work was out of print for decades and only fully collected in the late nineties.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 04:21 am (UTC)I cut my teeth on those old bodice-rippers when I was a teen, and for decades now I figured that they were gone forever, the romance market has shifted so much since then. I am very</> pleased to know the title and author of a seminal (heh) work, AND that the pendulum has swung back to the point that they're now being re-issued as epubs. Hurrah, and thank you!
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 04:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 02:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 05:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 01:10 pm (UTC)I do think it's very funny to see McCaffrey doing her itty bitty bratty girl/big strong studly man pairing in a non-Pern setting. She had a type and by God she went for it.
And Turtle and Carla's dad were totally married, y/y?
no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-16 02:40 pm (UTC)