ANNE MCCAFFREY TRIED to kill me once.
It was my first day of active duty as a volunteer for Weyrfest, the Anne McCaffrey programming track at Dragon*Con, and I was literally running late. Barreling through the bowels of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, I kept my head on a swivel as I threaded my way through a glut of scowling Klingons and beaming superheroes, past cardboard robots and buxom cat-girls, around wide-eyed convention virgins with their fanny packs and camera bags and sprawling paper programs. It’s important to keep one’s head at a science fiction convention—in trying to look at everything, one ultimately sees very little. You certainly can’t count on anyone else to see you (unless you’re a painted Amidala in her layer cake frills or a Robocop with real hydraulic armor or a lanky six-foot-two twenty-something with a rubber penis strapped to his forehead).
Weyrfest, as it was still officially known at the time, was the only Anne McCaffrey-themed event at any convention anywhere, and in 2003 the Dragonlady herself was Dragon*Con’s scheduled guest of honor. It wasn’t my first convention, but it was my first year as a volunteer, and as an eager disciple of Her Lady of Dragons, I was keenly aware of my tardiness. In sprinting, I was merely trying to exercise due diligence. That, and I was hella stoked to meet Anne freaking McCaffrey.
Little did I know that I was about to.
I don’t know who was more surprised when my shins crashed into the hard metal arm of a motorized scooter; I had only the impression of silver hair before my inertial dampeners smashed down.
Have you ever seen a dog lose traction on a hardwood floor? Canine physiognomy is capable of conveying a very specific, completely hilarious combination of surprise, dismay, and shame. I imagine my face looked much like that. I reflected briefly on the life I’d lived and regretted the way it would be changed by face-planting into Anne McCaffrey’s crotch. Oh well, I thought. I’ve had a good run.
Luckily for Anne McCaffrey’s crotch—less so for my tibias—I caught myself in the nick of time. She looked up at me with those green eyes of hers, and I said something apropos like, “Oh my god I am so sorry you’re Anne McCaffrey and I’m Charlotte I’m your junior staffer and it’s so nice to meet you and I’m a huge fan an I’m really really sorry.” Weyrfest’s director, Anna, with her brace of chaperones—we always had a few people on Anne Guard to keep exactly this kind of thing from happening—grinned at me, the picture of knowing parental bemusement. I had the vivid impression of becoming a floor.
I think Anne said, “It’s nice to meet you.”
I fled.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Charlotte,” you’re thinking, “I’m gonna be honest: it kind of actually sounds like it was you who tried to kill Anne.” False.
By now it is well documented that when put in control of a motorized vehicle, Anne Inez McCaffrey became crazed with power. Anne Guard wasn’t just meant for her safety. It was meant for everyone else’s. One second, that mezzanine was clear. The next, Anne, in open defiance of physics, had appeared directly in my way. I can only assume she’d worked out how to take that damn chair between.
The better part of my life, it often seems, has been characterized by intersections—or, if you like, near misses—with Anne McCaffrey.
Like many of Anne’s fans, I was a sensitive, precocious adolescent with a voracious appetite for books. I preferred fiction as a rule, but my mother had not had much luck plying me with the dramas, mysteries, and florid classics she so loved: I snubbed Rebecca, ignored Anne of Green Gables, and demanded answers for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: Was she trying to bore me to death?
Jurassic Park, however, went right down the hatch. I treasured my Edgar Allen Poe anthology and took great pleasure in carting it around to my sixth grade classes, where I knew my less subtle schoolmates would have little to no appreciation for the tome. (I couldn’t fathom why this endeared me to no one.) I must have read Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Witch Saga half a dozen times. I was ten years old when L’Engle whisked me away to Camazotz. I could recite Dahl’s Matilda in my sleep.
Yet I didn’t discover science fiction as a genre until the seventh grade, when my fingers first flattened the title page of Anne’s “The Smallest Dragonboy.” The textbook in which it was reprinted also contained Bradbury’s vitally poignant “All Summer in a Day.” Together, the two stories were tailor-written for a gangly, earnest tomboy with eyes for the stars. I had never considered that dragons might be loyal, benevolent partners, but in a strange way it made perfect sense. When my teacher put us into groups to stage excerpts for our classmates, I clamored for—and easily won—the role of the hatchling dragon, and the night before the play I slaved over my costume (the first of many in the years to follow). Unable even to visualize “bronze,” I settled for gold acrylic paint slathered over a paper snout, paper wings, and a paper tail. Inside it I felt positively alien, eager for my single joyous line: “My name is Heth!” (I think I pronounced it “Heath.” Like the candy bar. Twelve-year-old girls are big into candy bars.)
Since then, a lot of people—boyfriends, mostly, but also coworkers feigning interest and curious passersby as I doodled at a sunny café table—have asked me, “Why dragons?” It’s a question Anne herself was posed many times.
While they are the most enduring of the mythical creatures, with roots in every culture between here and Sumer, dragons don’t really appeal to me any more or less than do unicorns or gryphons or centaurs or Elves or dark old things that live in very still water. I respect their mystique and versatility—a dragon can look like damn near anything—but ultimately, a dragon is just another creature in humankind’s great mythological menagerie. It’s Anne’s dragons that are special.
Anne McCaffrey was an animal lover. So are most of her fans. So am I. And while most humans are driven by a basic biological imperative to communicate (barring Fox News pundits and people who don’t use their turn signals and anyone from South Carolina), animal lovers are that much more gratified by connecting to a member of another species. We see much of ourselves in these creatures so unlike us—and many of them seem intrigued by us in turn. But while their intentions are clear, animals remain largely mute. We know that they dream, but not of what. We wonder what they would say if they could speak.
Anne’s dragons exemplify the essential human longing for connection to the other. On Pern, dragons have wills, minds, and desires of their own. They fear and love and lust and hate. They are id and ego both; they are sweet children and impassioned soldiers by turns. And yet, one’s dragon is a reflection of the best in one’s self; they are an ever-present affirmation, a reminder to be just and to strive. Unconstrained by either space or time, a Pernese dragon is free to see the world as a place of boundless opportunity: all is achievable but that which, affronting the natural order, must not be achieved. I imagine they’d be fond of Yoda’s axiom “Try not. Do, or do not! There is no try.” Anne McCaffrey may have shunned organized religion, but her dragons were Buddhists, every last one.
Drawing them, reading about them, thinking about them, soothes and settles me like little else. It’s not simply the idea of enduring companionship that attracts me, though of course that’s a huge part of the appeal. It’s the idea of dragon as peacemaker: a serene, graceful mind whose single greatest instinct is to protect and sustain. In my dreams, they smell of warm earth, of sunshine. In flight together, my dragon and I travel beyond reach, beyond yesterday. We live for now, and we are now, and now is all.
I’m not the first girl-misfit to find solace in speculative fiction, but when I was growing up there weren’t a lot of other girls who shared my interest. Even now, the numbers favor readers with Y chromosomes (though, thank the maker of little green apples, this is changing). Apparently no one told Pern fandom, which is dominated by women—women of all makes and models, countless women on whose collective behalf I could never presume to speak. Maybe another of this book’s more illustrious, well-qualified contributors will speculate on why women are drawn to Pern. For my part, let it suffice to say simply that women relate to Anne’s work—and that this strikes me as I think about the helical shape of my connection to her and where our paths intersect at Stuart Hall School.
I can’t talk about Anne McCaffrey without talking about Stuart Hall.
I had known since I was six that I wanted to attend the all-girls boarding school in southwestern Virginia, my mother’s cherished alma mater. While my peers couldn’t comprehend boarding school as anything but a punishment, I saw it as a godsend, a refuge from the torments of those same indifferent peers, from whom I often hid in Benden Weyr’s secret passages, in Menolly’s precarious seaside caves. Imagine my elation when I found Anne McCaffrey’s name among the brochure’s list of notables. It wasn’t just a selling point. It was serendipity.
I loved Stuart Hall. It was there that I began to come out of my shell, built as a bulwark against the open scorn of my fellow adolescents. I had a role in every play. I took voice lessons and lent my ungainly mezzo-soprano to the school’s small but able choir. I was one of the first students to enroll in the intensive Visual and Performing Arts program.
But I’d never been much for academics. There was too much other interesting shit going on outside the classroom—and even more, exponentially more, going on inside my head. Charlotte Moore is never where she’s supposed to be, even when she is.
Pern was rocket fuel for daydreaming. I obsessively graffitied dragons on any piece of paper, any half-empty chalkboard, any virgin three-ring binder, that came within reach of my twitchy teenage fingers. Other girls were doodling horses or hearts in the margins of their carefully rendered English notes. My English notes were some halfhearted scrawls about how “The Awakening” made me want to walk into the ocean, followed by a dozen inept sketches of dragons dancing through the air, dragons belching fire, dragons peering into the sky. As much time as I spent practicing for my future as a liberal arts geek, I spent almost as much time doodling, procrastinating, oversleeping, neglecting homework, and feigning sickness to get out of class—which led to nearly as many hours sitting in detention (during which time I neglected still more homework in favor of reading and drawing more Pern).
The summer following a rocky freshman year, I sent an email to Anne via the fan page hosted through Del Rey’s old website. You may remember it—it featured the winners of an art contest, news about upcoming publications, and even a fun feature where you could “go between” from one page to the next. It also included a contact form that, unbeknownst to me, was more or less a direct line to Anne herself.
I couldn’t tell you now why or what I wrote to her. It was likely the kind of inane, nervous question you’d expect a fifteen-year-old fangirl to write; and while I don’t remember the contents of the message, I remember writing it with heat in my hands and face, with a frenzied tremor in my fingers. I don’t know what I feared more: that she wouldn’t answer me, or that she might.
Some time went by, and as I plunged into summer, I more or less forgot the matter. Then one afternoon I opened my inbox and there, perfectly nondescript, was a reply from Anne McCaffrey. Upon seeing it, I did what any intelligent, educated young woman would do and promptly shit myself.
That email should have been printed and framed, but instead is lost to time. Here’s what I remember:
Anne glossed over whatever question I asked her. Instead, she began by (politely, always politely) informing me that she had been in touch with Stuart Hall’s alumnae director, a benevolent, broadly smiling woman named Margaret, who had taken a liking to the scatterbrained waif tearing ass down the halls. Margaret, Anne told me, had let her know that I was not giving due attention to my studies.
Fuck, my brain suggested helpfully. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Anne went on to patiently explain that her son Todd, who was very clever and a rocket engineer, had wanted to be a pilot when he was young, so he worked very hard. I think she shared a relevant anecdote, but I confess to losing it because my brain was stuck in a positive feedback loop of fuck, fuck, fucking, fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck.
She ended with the maxim that no one gets anywhere without working hard, and then leveled the most direct admonishment I had received or would ever receive again: “So STUDY, twithead!”
I began screaming. From her bedroom, I’m sure my mother thought I was being expertly murdered.
I’d experience that feeling again eight years later, when Anne would appear where I had not expected her to be, leaving me to limp off with bruised shins and pride while she, the picture of poise, continued on her way with nary a hair out of place. She had a knack for that. Formidable people usually do.
If I had gone to public school—if I’d been shooting up behind a mall, if I’d been touring with the Spice Girls, if I’d taken up underwater basket prostitution, if I had been literally anywhere else—I probably wouldn’t have discovered online gaming on December 13, 1997. And I probably wouldn’t have been expelled from Stuart Hall School on February 15, 2000.
I couldn’t tell you now what got me wondering about whether Pern had one of those text-based “role-playing games” I’d heard so much about. But it was a Saturday, and I was bored, and I thought a Pern game might be fun. I suspect most meth heads follow a very similar line of logic. Saturday is probably tremendous for meth heads.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for or if I would like what I found, but even in those days, I was adept at bending search engines to my will (AltaVista, probably, or Magellan or Dogpile—Dogpile was my favorite). A few tentative clicks later, Pern was real. Really, really real. As real as anyone could make it. It was a living place populated by actual people whose stories played out in real time—and I could be part of it, with a character who looked like me (but prettier) and talked like me (but cleverer) and did all that I would do if only, only I had a fire-lizard to perch on my shoulder, twin moons to light my way, and a warm and gentle beast who knew my mind and would adore me to our last inextricable breath.
That first character’s name was Catalina. I named her for Jewel Stake’s rainbow-haired Saturnian girl on the tween sci-fi adventure Space Cases (I doubt anyone remembers it). To this day, my friends in Anne fandom insist on calling me Cat.
What began as an innocent foray into a world I loved quickly ballooned into a full-blown gaming addiction. My already pitiful work ethic took a backseat to late nights lit by the wan electric glow of my hulking CRT, and then—when my in-room computer privileges were revoked—to increasingly furtive trips to the library computer lab. I learned how to circumvent what passed for a firewall in those days, how to confound the school’s monitoring software, how to keep playing even when the local host shut down for the night. The school’s sole IT guy was a well-meaning middle-aged man whose ineffectual tactics my defiant teenage know-how rendered wholly impotent. And once I got my friends to play with me, entire social schedules were coordinated around Gathers, Search cycles, and fire-lizard hatchings. Except mine were the only grades in free fall.
Playing Pern certainly improved my typing skills considerably, and encouraged me to abuse synonyms like a dominatrix abuses vinyl (and bankers). There was always a friend to be made; indeed, many of the friendships I found in Pern gaming have endured to this very day. My imagination stretched to its utmost. I wrote, drew, and read constantly. But always about dragons. Never about algebra. Never about ancient world history. Even my boyfriend, already separated from me by a span of hours, had less of my attention than my computer did. The only people less thrilled than my teachers were my parents.
Though I tried hard—I did try, Anne, wherever you are, I did—my studies fell by the wayside; my second and third years at Stuart Hall were not much of an improvement over the first. But by early 2000, halfway through my junior year, I felt that perhaps I was turning a corner. I was, after all, a fundamentally good kid who desperately wanted the approval of the authorities in her life. I tried to wake up on time. I tried to focus on my studies. I tried to be good.
All that’s important for you to know here is that there was a crush (shared more or less equally throughout the student body) on a teacher; that this teacher had once been engaged to another faculty member, and that their wedding was canceled months before I was due to sing in it; that this teacher was now dating another, new teacher; and that the student body, being teenage girls, were all very interested in the nature of their relationship.
I won’t tell you how I guessed my teacher’s email password, nor how many love letters my friend and I, conspiring over a library keyboard, read before guilt compelled us to withdraw. (Not many, and they were disappointing.) And I will leave you to infer the ripping sound my soul made when my friend, having left in some haste not long after our invasion, returned to the library to inform me, “I went to the front desk and told him what you did.”
I will spare you those details. I will share only these three: that my will, hardened by the expectation of a brawl, shattered when my teacher asked me, simply, “Why?”; that my possessions were packed the next day, and I left without fanfare once night had fallen; and that my father interrupted the silence of the car ride home with some advice: “Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”
I didn’t hear from my friends for months or years. Some of them never spoke to me again.
After that I went (willingly) to military school—where I repeated my junior year—and did very well. I completed ground school and got about forty hours of flight training under my belt, but graduated before I could solo. I received a bevy of awards and honors, including Outstanding Cadet of the Year, the United States Marine Corps Scholastic Excellence Award, and the Order of the Daedalians Award. I made National Honor Society. I became very, very good at self-discipline, though I still had a tendency to forgo homework in favor of a little harmless role-playing. A not inconsiderable swath of dorm room wall was occupied by a poster of Michael Whelan’s unearthly “Weyr-world.” My McCaffrey books—perfectly arranged by height, series, and chronology—still retained their place of honor on my bookshelf. But my addiction was restored to the status of an esoteric yet largely harmless hobby.
In the fall of 2000, the first year I was at military school, I convinced my dad (who did not need much convincing) to take me to the sci-fi convention my Pern pals had been gushing about for months. Though I’d never had any interest in conventions before—like most people, I assumed they were designed largely for the benefit of overzealous Trekkies and crater-pocked, grabby man-children—this one, Dragon*Con, had a whole track dedicated just to Anne McCaffrey. That was four days of nonstop McCaffrey programming. The mind boggled.
We arrived without incident and found our way down to the Weyrfest room, where Dad planned to leave me while he went off photographing anything that would let him. There must have been a moment when I stood alone, nervous and feeling perhaps a bit foolish in the garb my mother had so obligingly sewn me, a sleeveless red dress and gold pants like the ones Catalina wore to Gathers. But that moment would have passed when my friends—strangers only because I had never seen their faces before—snapped me up in a torrent of warmth and welcome. And I knew I was where I should be.
I’ve been directing Weyrfest for five years now. In the era of smartphone apps, highly graphical MMORPGs, and open-world console games, text-based online gaming—never mind reading—has more or less fallen by the wayside. Pern itself has not been treated well by video game studios; the TV series imploded when creator Ron Moore felt that it too was in danger of abuse. With the rights to Pern having again changed hands, there continues to be noise about a movie script—but the depths of pre-production limbo are vast and uncertain. There are many reasons why Anne McCaffrey’s fans could have let their interest wane. In truth, many have.
But many, many more have not. While 2012 was its last year before merging into the Fantasy Literature track, Weyrfest was as well attended as I’ve seen it in years—even without an Anne McCaffrey in the world, a world made chaotic by the dual evils of distraction and cynicism. Our attendees travel to Georgia from Texas, from California, from Canada, England, and Australia year after year after year, not because Dragon*Con is the only place they can talk about Anne’s books—the internet has long since negated trivial barriers like time zones—but because that’s where their friends are. Because it’s like coming home.
Every once in a while I’ll ask my director’s second, Angelina Adams—a sweet-voiced buxom beauty with hugs that go on for miles, for eons, who I’ve described as “Weyrfest’s mom” and whose own essay you can read in this very book—what the response to our little track has been. While I do my best to be approachable, it’s a rare and bold person who would criticize an event organizer directly to her face. Yet I can’t be a good director if I don’t know what people are thinking.
Seeing my concern, Angel will smile, and squeeze my hands, and say, sotto voce, “Every year, people tell me that they come here because this is where they feel at home. They’ve heard that we’re a safe place. Even if they’ve never read the books.” Then she’ll kiss me on the cheek and call me “gorgeous,” and I’ll beam and feel like we are the defenders of justice.
For all of her imagination, her prolificacy, her tenacity, Anne McCaffrey’s fans are her greatest legacy. They are reflections of her fundamental goodness, her stalwartness, her belief in the power of mind over matter. So if her fans are motley and troubled and often a bit strange, they are kind. They are loyal. They strive.
On the evening of November 23, 2011, newly dragonless, I crawled into bed and wept myself hollow.
Then, when I had wrung myself out, I gathered my computer and a copy of Get Off the Unicorn. I set myself up in the trough of my boyfriend’s substantial eighty-pound beanbag, and I opened to the book’s only dog-eared page. I hit record, and I began to read: “Although Keevan lengthened his walking stride as far as his legs would stretch, he couldn’t quite keep up with the other candidates. He knew he would be teased again.” It seemed significant—sacred, even, in a vital, urgent way, to give voice to the first story Anne McCaffrey ever told me.
I don’t know how I ended up contributing to this book. I make my living as a writer, but I write flyer headlines, product demonstrations, and company websites. As simple as those tasks should be, I’ve been fired from nearly every job I’ve ever held—“You’re very talented,” they always tell me, “but it feels like you’re somewhere else.” How could I deny it?
Yet nearly every creative effort in my adult life, every piece of work I actually have cared about, has been, either directly or indirectly, tied to that very first story. Anne McCaffrey didn’t teach me to love writing; my mother and father did that. Anne McCaffrey didn’t give me a gift for writing; my heritage, my voracity, my teachers did that. And hers are not, perhaps, my favorite books in adulthood—for there are many, many talented authors in the world, and some have resonated with me in radiant, powerful ways.
But Anne McCaffrey built refuges for dreamers. Her worlds are comfort food to aching, empty stomachs. They have been my solace and my friend. When I first applied for Clarion West, I named my story’s protagonist for her; when I try again (and I will try again), I hope to find a more suitable embodiment of her spirit. And this feeble little essay, every word of which has been a struggle and an agony, is also owed to her: it is my first as a published writer.
One of the nights I was relegated to a hard wooden desk in the Stuart Hall auditorium, doing time for tardiness or mouthiness or academic delinquency, I opened the hardback edition of The Girl Who Heard Dragons. A compendium of short stories, its cover featured a lush scene rendered by the incomparable Michael Whelan, whose work graces the front of this book. It also contained a dozen or so black-and-white illustrations, each of which held my attention as long as or longer than the stories themselves.
Of these, the one that struck me most was that of a dragon perched on a thrust of rock, her young rider’s hand outstretched in a wave—of beckoning or farewell, I have never been able to discern. Early last October, I walked into a tattoo shop to keep an appointment made at the height of summer. When I walked out again, a full-color version of that drawing was forever scarred into my flesh. That tattoo is my first, the culmination of years of earnest reverie. It is a reminder to me to take chances, to aim high, to see clearly.
I hope, someday, it will follow me to wherever Anne has gone—and that I will find her there, that glint in her eye, as she shakes her silvered head and chides, “It took you long enough, twithead.”
A northern Virginia native, CHARLOTTE MOORE is a copywriter and fangirl in Raleigh, North Carolina, a marvelous little city you should probably visit. By the time you read this, she will have turned thirty but still won’t own a house. She directs the Fantasy Literature track at Dragon*Con, where she collects autographs for her So Say We Wall of nerdy celebrity photos. Her blog, The Irritable Vowel, incorporates elements of copywriting and scatological humor, which aren’t as dissimilar as you’d think. She may or may not be an actual redhead.