skygiants | (no subject)

In addition to all the Perns, I have also been reading some non-Pern McCaffreys! At this point this includes:

The Ship Who Sang, in which a young woman gains beyond-human powers through being indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, loses the thing she cares about most in the world, and desperately seeks a life partner, eventually finding one in her manipulative boss

Crystal Singer, in which a young woman loses everything she cares about in the world, gains beyond-human powers through being indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, and, despite not seeking a life partner, nonetheless enters into a romance with her manipulative boss

The Rowan, in which a young woman with beyond-human powers loses everything she cares about in the world, gets indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, and desperately seeks a life partner, eventually finding one in the guy who at the end of the book succeeds to the position held by her manipulative boss

Obviously all of these books have their own unique points of distinction:

The Ship Who Sang kicked off generations of what-if-a-girl-was-a-ship stories and also generations of disability-in-SF conversations; it is also IMO one of the most interesting of McCaffrey's structural experiments, being composed of short stories that do generally work well as short stories, while creating a coherent and connected character arc for Helva across the whole set. Also: women! Helva gets to partner with women! Does she want to partner with women? Absolutely not. She wants a hot guy, or, failing that, a weird little manipulative boss who's obsessed with her. But nonetheless while waiting for her inevitable manipulative bossmance she has some interesting women thrust upon her, which I appreciate even if she does not.

The Rowan is the latest, structurally the weakest, and I think perhaps generally the worst of these books ... Killashandra has a bad personality and it's charming, but the Rowan's bad personality mostly comes out in the context of being a bad boss within her devil's-bargain corporation, which is less charming. Also there's sort of a halfhearted attempt at an evil aliens are attacking plot but the evil aliens take up approximately ten (10) whole pages of the book because McCaffrey finds them much less interesting than the Rowan's boyfriend, who is of course destined for her because he's the only hot guy telepath who's more powerful than she is. Anyway, the funniest part about this book is the fact that the Rowan gets a telepathic cat in the first section, and because everyone loves a telepathic cat the telepathic cat is on the front cover of the book, but then Anne McCaffrey is like 'yeah but she left the telepathic cat on the spaceship the first time she left home, they weren't actually that tight' and the telepathic cat is never mentioned again.

Crystal Singer is notable for the fact that Killashandra -- in addition to being a failed opera singer who has to pivot to harvesting addictive crystal with the power of her voice -- is the meanest and most self-interested McCaffrey heroine and also the one who has the most casual sex. A real delight to go from Avril Bitra in Dragonsdawn to Killashandra, who has all of Avril Bitra's traits except she's protagonist-shaped so instead of performing sexy torturemurder and getting fired into the sun, she reluctantly saves the life of a guy who hates her, complaining about it all the way. God bless! Has the most opportunities not to enter into a devil's bargain with a corporation to become a protagonist, and also has arguably the worst devil's bargain of the lot (crystal singing rots your brain! creepy!) and so I think is in many ways central to the Corporate Devil's Bargain thesis of it all: the subtext of The Ship Who Sang and The Rowan is that yes, the devil's bargain Is worth it, but Crystal Singer holds it up defiantly and makes it text. Yes, you were probably manipulated into it, and yes, it's going to end in tragedy, but look how cool you are now!

This all also sort of makes me look a certain way at Lessa, the OG bad personality heroine herself, and her arc in Dragonflight. It's more obviously a devil's bargain when it's a Big Corporation and not a cool dragon that loves you unconditionally -- but what are all these sexy manipulative bosses, except proof that Big Corporation actually loves you unconditionally? And yes, you were manipulated into it. No, you can't leave now that you've done it. Yes, the institution takes away your agency, by design, but broadly speaking, it's a benevolent institution -- or at least, society can't do without it. Anyway, now that you're part of this institution, you are now the coolest person in the world; everyone needs you, admires you, loves you, and you're happier than you've ever been. Of course it was worth it!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sonia

... huh! Good points! I was going to argue with your characterization of Ship Who Sang until I saw where you were going with it. And yeah, Lessa.

Speaking of bonding with creatures and heroines with Issues, have you read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip? I loved this book uncritically as a kid, but later I was like... what she did at the end was Not Okay. Wait, maybe none of it was Okay.

From:

larryhammer

Crystal Singer is indeed the best of these three -- I even reread it at least once -- but be warned that its sequel throws away a large chunks of its premise along with large chunks of Killashandra's personality.

(I cannot recall whether I actually finished The Rowan. Probably? Maybe?)

From:

alias_sqbr

Ha, you have brought back memories of 14 year old me reading a bunch of these books and dividing them into "guy seems like a jerk but it's ultimately romantic" and "no really this guy is just a jerk wtf" without the self knowledge to recognise how subjective the distinction was. I also remember genuinely not being able to tell if The Crystal Singer was meant to feel like a uncharacteristically depressing story about someone with poor judgement ruining their life.

From:

thistleingrey

Killashandra has a bad personality and it's charming, but the Rowan's bad personality mostly comes out in the context of being a bad boss

Yes! Ugh. Even as a teen, I couldn't figure out why anyone would ever work with or for the Rowan--but it made sense that Killashandra was mostly a loner (with occasional moments for hot sex).

This all also sort of makes me look a certain way at Lessa

*nods* Part of "But of course you can have it all, honey--for a cost," except that I don't think people usually put McCaffrey's work into first- and second-wave feminism contexts? It does go there, though.

From:

jothra

All of my manipulative bosses over the span of my career have been incredibly unsexy. I need to find better evil corporations to be indentured to.

From:

mme_n_b

Pretty please try the City Who Fought - it has more evil aliens and two sexy manipulative bosses! (OK, kinda - one is only pretending to be her boss).

From:

salinea

I've read all those books but i don't remember them very well. Still your description made me laugh and is interesting.

From:

sovay

This all also sort of makes me look a certain way at Lessa

The symbiosis aspect of three out of four of these stories interests me also—I don't remember enough of The Rowan to tell whether there's an equivalent in it to becoming a ship/adapting to a spore/impressing a dragon—and the way it's always intertwined with but not identical to the romance, although The Ship Who Sang shears closest to crossing all the tropes with the way that Helva and Niall do canonically, eventually have alien, telepathic sex and end up soulbonded into the bargain.

From:

kiezh

Anne McCaffrey really did have an intense, career-spanning hangup in the form of "what a super-special, incredibly talented woman REALLY NEEDS is a romance with an even more special, even more talented, older dude who is her mentor or boss."

(I think the most repellant instance of this pattern is Damia/Afra in the Rowan series. He was basically her parent! When a little kid decides they want to marry their favorite adult, it may be a cute category error on their part, but it does not make a good romance plotline for them to form a lifelong fixation. And it's creepy as hell for anyone to reciprocate. Ugh.)

What struck me a while ago on a reread of the Harper books is that Menolly/Robinton is the one time McCaffrey breaks the pattern. She sets it up - Menolly is special and talented, she gets an older male mentor who is maybe even MORE special and definitely more experienced, she has a crush on him... and then Robinton does the decent thing and does NOT take advantage of his young adoring student. I don't know WHY McCaffrey broke the pattern this time, but I'm glad she did.

You could argue that Menolly/Sebell fits the pattern, but I don't really think it does; by the time they actually get together, they're equal in rank, and he's not particularly better at anything than Menolly is. They're even equals in crushing on Master Robinton and being gently redirected toward each other. Sebell getting the Masterharper position didn't feel to me like he was now in charge of Menolly, but like he was the one stuck with the generalist manager job while she got to specialize in the work she wanted to do: composition. He never supplants her as the Most Special the way Jeff does Rowan, or whatsisname does Killashandra, or any of McCaffrey's other "annoying dudes who are better than the protagonist at her own defining Thing."

I got sidetracked by the romance pattern, but your insights about the devil's bargain are really interesting! What does it cost to be a Special Protagonist, especially for a woman? Is it worth it? (It certainly does seem to require abandoning solidarity with other women... do any McCaffrey heroines have female friends? I think Menolly and Mirrim might be closest, and they don't really seem that close.)

Now you've got me thinking back over many years of reading McCaffrey's works and I... can't really think of any where main characters push back against oppressive structures. Sometimes a bad leader gets replaced with a "good" one, but McCaffrey protagonists don't seem to go in for structural change. Lessa wants to be at the top of the hierarchy, which she sees as her birthright, not to change the hierarchy that allows abuse of servants like she was. Menolly and Piemur can individually get help dealing with bullies, but the structures that foster bullying in the Harper Hall are left unchanged. I don't remember any of the Prime telepaths in the Rowan series challenging the idea that their power means they MUST serve FT&T, and must also breed more Prime telepaths for the sake of interstellar shipping.

Tia from The Ship Who Searched... oh wait, idk if you've read that, and what I was about to say would be spoilers. rot13: Gvn orpbzrf n pbecbengr bireybeq urefrys naq fubjf ab vagrerfg va serrvat ure vaqragherq sryybj fuvc-crbcyr; fur'f vagrerfgrq va fryyvat gurz naqebvqf gb vzcebir gurve dhnyvgl bs yvsr, ohg fur'f svar jvgu gur vqrn bs qevivat gurz qrrcre vagb qrog naq pbecbengr pbageby.

I liked it best of the Ship series, a long time ago, but I have no idea if it would hold up now. Come to think of it, Tia breaks the McCaffrey romance pattern; it was co-written with Mercedes Lackey, I think, so maybe that's why? It got a Lackey romance instead of a McCaffrey romance.

Both authors kind of share that tendency to be all "the heroine got out of her bad situation and became powerful and important! forget about all the people like her that didn't; the heroine doesn't think about them and neither should you."

From:

nineveh_uk

So interesting to think of Lessa in this light. Now you mention her, she fits right into the pattern.

Teen me adored The Crystal Singer, and I found it surprisingly relatable later, Killashandra was a bit of a bitch in a way that felt convincing, and I liked the worldbuilding. Whereas The Rowan aas just dull.

From:

mrissa

It's interesting that the Masterharper plot is where the pattern breaks, because another thing about the Masterharper plot is that while Menolly is very clearly stated to be The Best Singer-Songwriter On The Planet (which even at 12 made me feel very sorry for poor Pern), I think on some level McCaffrey knows from personal experience that music is not something that comes with a total ordering, where you can just know your rank and that the Hot Guy is Better Than You At Your Thing. Whereas when she's making up telepathic powers or whatever, she can and does conveniently give them objective rankings. I remember just going absolutely nuts about this at 12, about how people's actual brains varied so much that just giving them a single number was completely wrong and all the different ways you could write a telepath story that didn't involve rank numbers because people could do different things well and and and...

...what a great preparation for the way people use IQ in this world. Except I don't think McCaffrey meant it to be AT ALL. Sigh.

From:

kore

What struck me a while ago on a reread of the Harper books is that Menolly/Robinton is the one time McCaffrey breaks the pattern.

I was surprised by that when I read it too!

From:

cahn

Ohhhh Damia/Afra. As a teenager I had what seems to me now a very high tolerance for creepy relationships in my fiction, but even I drew the line at Damia/Afra. Like you say, he was basically her parent! (Because I was a teenager, I was still weirdly fascinated by it, but I also understood it was creepy.)

From:

cahn

Huh! This... makes so much sense, especially the connection to Lessa.

and gosh, I vaguely remembered finding the "I am a better telepath than you and also hot, therefore we must be mates" thing in The Rowan offputting, but all together like this is... something.

From:

marginaliana

I periodically forget how infuriating The Rowan is and get a craving to reread it, and then when I do I get infuriated all over again about the weird psychosomatic agorophobia thing. That's Not How It Works!

From:

chestnut_pod

Is the last one anything at all to do with the town in Ireland, Killeshandra? Fascinated by this particular seam of plot for McCaffrey, also now I have "Come Out Ye Black and Tans" stuck in my head.

From:

kate_nepveu

for some reason, I do not know why, I reread the Crystal Singer trilogy relatively recently. I don't recommend continuing especially, but now I'm interested to look back at the third which does some stuff with the Guild and see how it fits into this.

From:

sovay

I remember just going absolutely nuts about this at 12, about how people's actual brains varied so much that just giving them a single number was completely wrong and all the different ways you could write a telepath story that didn't involve rank numbers because people could do different things well and and and...

I always associated the division of 1st/2nd/3rd Class Espers in Bester's The Demolished Man (1953) with military ranks, Technician Third Grade etc.

From:

pedanther

As far as I recall, there's no direct mention of Ireland in the Crystal Singer series, which is set in space, far enough in the future that most people don't think about Earth much. That may well have been where she got Killashandra's name from, though; she'd been living in Ireland for a while by the time the first one was published.

From:

mrissa

I think they always felt more final and existential to me. My grandpa was enlisted, and I knew that he had gone from being a Private to a PFC all the way up to being Base Sergeant Major, and the Anne McCaffrey characters did not seem to have that potential for progress but were rather being graded permanently. I don't remember which reaction I had to The Demolished Man, though.

From:

starlady

Yeah, I definitely reread The Rowan at least once as a teenager due to that same weird fascination. I don't think I read any of the other ones mentioned in this entry, though, so I had no comparison to realize it was the weakest.

From:

sovay

My grandpa was enlisted, and I knew that he had gone from being a Private to a PFC all the way up to being Base Sergeant Major, and the Anne McCaffrey characters did not seem to have that potential for progress but were rather being graded permanently.

I don't disagree with you about the ceilinged-out quality of most fictional systems of telepathy (and it's consistent for McCaffrey to have one which is one-and-done: it's not like people switch dragons throughout their lives). Bester's is the earliest I can call to mind and I was thinking about its potential influences beyond the ever-popular eugenics factor. Phyllis Gotlieb in her GalFed novels has a flexible one in which practice and training realistically make a considerable difference, e.g. one of her series protagonists goes from pro-tem second-class to first-class ESP over the course of A Judgment of Dragons (1980): "'It is good to be class-one,' Prandra said quietly. 'It remains to be seen whether I become first class.'" I would have encountered it before Bester, McCaffrey, or Babylon 5, but I'm not sure it was typical of its subgenre.

From:

rymenhild

I think the protagonist of Forgotten Beasts of Eld is supposed to be terrible. We follow her and we see the decisions she makes and why she makes them, but with the single exception of the very last choice at the end, every choice is self-centered. To be fair, she deserves her revenge, but the way she goes about it is incredibly destructive to parties who are not the victims of the revenge plot.