(no subject)

[skygiants]

I 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.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Interesting re: genre precedent! Genre seemed like members-only clubs, no mixing, even in the 1980s (I wasn't around for the 1960s). I guess McCaffrey would get an extra year (1967) if we counted from the novellas that precede and substantially comprise Dragonflight.

[genarti]

I admit I found it perfectly fine but less fun (it has SO little substance but mostly not in ways that felt popcorny for me, so I was just waiting for any of the inevitable resolutions and snorting semi-affectionately about how conveniently they kept finding stockpiles of food so that rationing didn't matter); definitely a lesser one of the McCaffrey contemporary romances in my book. But interesting! And fascinating how absolutely unArthurian it is given the title, lol.

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.

[sovay]

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.

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.)

[kore]

IIRC she was apparently the first woman to _ever_ win the Hugo Award (Best Novella, Weyr Search, 1968) and also the first to win a Nebula Award (Best Novella, Dragonrider, 1969), which is pretty amazing when you consider how low her reputation seemed to fall in comparison to Russ, Le Guin, Wilhelm, and other close contemporaries (I always thought Le Guin was first?).

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.)

[kore]

My impression is the sixties were a lot more fluid in terms of sff genre, and then the seventies had the New Wave and Srs Bsns Writing and boy I also remember all those 1980s doorstopper series of power fantasies by men (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, anyone?). Plus cyberpunk.

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.

[kore]

I find it so interesting because if you line them up it comes out like this:

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.

[starlady]

Reading her in conversation with Delany (they were very good friends! he thanks her constantly in the acknowledgments of his books through the mid-80s) is even weirder imo.

[sanguinity]

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

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!

[thistleingrey]

But McCaffrey's rep fell partly because she wrote romances, no? Wilhelm went sideways into mystery novels--different.

[thistleingrey]

My impression from looking back now at the 1980s, during which I bought books actively, is that it's pretty hard to reconstruct marketing trends only from what was published.

[chestnut_pod]

Did I know McCaffrey did Mary Stewart-style romantic suspense?? No! My mom loves the Stewarts; do I dare suggest she try McCaffrey? That way lies tropetastic dragon dub con…

[kore]

Duh, I think Vinge, b 1948, was also an early-awarded woman sff writer (Eyes of Amber, Snow Queen) who used a lot of romance tropes, especially in her short stories ("Tin Soldier," in Damon Knight's Orbit, 1974 -- that was interestingly genderswapped, with only women allowed to fly ships. But it's still really het and from a straight male pov).

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.

[snickfic]

I'm bad at podcasts, but that McCaffrey one sounds pretty great. I haven't actually read that many of her books, and the recent rereads haven't gone that well (oh boy the misogyny), but Pern was so formative to me.

[sovay]

But McCaffrey's rep fell partly because she wrote romances, no? Wilhelm went sideways into mystery novels--different.

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.

[sovay]

definitely a lesser one of the McCaffrey contemporary romances in my book.

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.

[osprey_archer]

Using Merlin in the title of this book when there is NO Arthurian connection at all (and Merlin the dog has no Mark) continues to boggle me. A weird marketing choice! Would NOT bring the right readers to the yard.

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?

[skygiants]

The podcast I mentioned quotes a (highly complimentary!) Harlan Ellison review of Dragonflight that describes it as "a historical love novel of manners," (?!?) but also seems to think it's very exciting to be revolutionizing sff with historical love novels of manners? Which is genuinely fascinating! But it does seem like the tropey romantic spec-fic path that she blazed ended up being both very well-trodden (see Lackey etc) but also kind of branching off in a different direction from the kind of thing that won Hugos and Nebulas.

[skygiants]

Yeah, it sort of turned my thinking upside down to consider that perhaps in 1967 no one had yet started gatekeeping bodice-ripper romance tropes out of sff because bodice-ripper romance tropes didn't exist yet! Everyone picking up Dragonrider with big wide eyes like "what is happening HERE?"

[skygiants]

Yes, I think you had a much clearer sense of her historical context than me! I was genuinely shocked to realize how early Dragonflight was. Dolphins of Pern (1994) is the one I actually remember finding in the New Books shelf and if I'd thought about it at the time (which I didn't; I was nine) I think I would've assumed that the whole series prior had been published over the course of the last decade and a half or so, not thirty years.

[skygiants]

Yeah, she was extremely formative for me as well -- but my editions were extremely 90s paperback editions and it never occurred to me to question the tropes therein and what era they belonged to.

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 ....)

[skygiants]

YES I sort of want to do this project now even though I think it will, again, blow my mind. And again almost impossible for me to imagine Samuel Delaney throwing a party for his buddies and both McCaffrey and Russ showing up because those are two people I CANNOT imagine in the same room without a fight breaking out even though given the givens they must indeed have frequently been in the same room!

[skygiants]

You're so welcome! I have not myself read Flame and the Flower, but I'd definitely heard the name. SEMINAL INDEED.

[skygiants]

Perhaps your mother could live peacefully in the world where McCaffrey only wrote romantic suspense and historical fiction, as the rest of us have lived so long in the world where McCaffrey wrote only dragon dubcon, and never the twain shall meet???

[skygiants]

I've been having a really good time! They cover the books with a good balance of nostalgic affection and well-deserved criticism.

[skygiants]

I remember that this was true but I could not talk about it in the post because it's been so long that I can't remember the reveal about what Turtle actually did ajsd;lkfjdlk killed .... a guy? for her dad? accidentally killed her dad because he was trying instead to kill another guy for her dad???

[osprey_archer]

I believe Turtle accidentally killed her dad because he was trying to kill another guy who was trying to frame her dad for looting expensive art and stamps and things. Then Turtle tried to frame the actual looter for the murder, because the murder was basically his fault because Turtle never would have shot Carla's dad if he hadn't been trying to frame the looter??

[osprey_archer]

I wouldn't recommend The Mark of Merlin to a Stewart fan, because I don't think it's as good as a Stewart, but I haven't read McCaffrey's other romantic suspense novels so possibly some of the others are?

[selki]

Oh yes, some of her mysteries are pretty good. Many with legal angles.

[selki]

I mean by legal, judge/lawyer/courts stuff, not just that murder is illegal. :-)

[chestnut_pod]

This is informative. On the balance, I think the answer to my question is probably no :D

[sovay]

Oh yes, some of her mysteries are pretty good. Many with legal angles.

Neat! Thank you for the additional information: since I like Cyril Hare, legally-angled mysteries are a draw.

[ceitfianna]

For my book club, we read Cotillion by Georgette Heyer, who I think with doing a lot to create the historical romance as well especially the Regency. I wonder how she fits into this conversation as her books are very much not bodice rippers.

[sovay]

a (highly complimentary!) Harlan Ellison review of Dragonflight that describes it as "a historical love novel of manners," (?!?) but also seems to think it's very exciting to be revolutionizing sff with historical love novels of manners?

Oh, my God, I've read that review. I would say it oscillates between compliment and misogyny and often delivers the former by way of the latter. I have a lot of opinions about his opinions. The one thing he was absolutely right about was that Dragonflight was generically unusual and there was little precedent for the kind of mixed protocols she was running the narrative on, which evidently socked a whole lot of readers who were not Harlan Ellison right in the combined id.

[sovay]

Using Merlin in the title of this book when there is NO Arthurian connection at all (and Merlin the dog has no Mark) continues to boggle me. A weird marketing choice! Would NOT bring the right readers to the yard.

I don't know if I would consider it an antidote because it may or may not be any good, but Andre Norton's Merlin's Mirror (1975) is hard sf Arthuriana because that's just how she rolled.

[starlady]

Just thinking about how they both went from being pretty blandly conventional to becoming more and more porny (complimentary) is kind of doing my head in.

[sovay]

Yeah, she was extremely formative for me as well -- but my editions were extremely 90s paperback editions and it never occurred to me to question the tropes therein and what era they belonged to.

Understood! I have books all over my childhood whose eras even if I knew them meant nothing to me for years. The most recent one I was surprised by was Garner's The Owl Service (1967), which re-reads like textbook folk horror and predates the officially recognized crystallization of the form by about five years.

I have contradictory evidence placing the start of my McCaffrey-reading in either third or fifth grade, but I was very definitely given several of her late-1980's/early-1990's titles as they were published and then The Dolphins of Pern (1994) happened and I tapped out.

(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 ....)

Justice for green riders! And blue, since right now I can't remember a plot-relevant one!

(Lytol is identified as a former green rider in his initial appearance in Dragonflight and I have never accepted the retcon to brown, thank you.)

[nineveh_uk]

M'barak in Moreta! Which I just reread and didn't include the blue rider scene I vaguely remembered from reading years ago, but did contain a surprisingly prominent character.

[nineveh_uk]

I had no idea McCaffrey had wirtten books that weren't SFF, probably a matter of what the local libraries happened to have. And I am going to have to listen to that podcast!