Dragonsblood

INTRODUCTION

When Shelly Shapiro, our Del Rey editor, asked me to write this intro, I hemmed and hawed because, let’s face it, I’m compromised on several counts. One, it is my world Todd is writing in; and two, he is my son.

However, he comes from quite an authorial background. His great-grandfather was a printer-engraver. His grandfather, Colonel George Herbert McCaffrey, wrote many reports to the government dealing with the occupation of countries; his uncle, Hugh McCaffrey, wrote about his experiences as a military adviser to Thailand when they were training their border police corps in a book called Khmer Gold, published by Ballantine Books in 1988. His grandmother dabbled in writing murder mysteries, but with three kids to raise and my father to contend with, she never went as far as writing them down. And then there’s me, his mother, and him growing up while I was writing the Pern series, which I’ve been doing since 1967.

They do say that teenagers are very impressionable. And as he was born in 1956, he was certainly immersed in the Pern experience at exactly the most tender time. Grown up, he has helped me work my way through scenes. He has put his military experience (he was in the U.S. Army), his flying experience (he holds a private pilot’s license), and his knowledge of spaceships (he has a graduate credit in spaceship design) to good use in advising me and sometimes even contributing whole scenes to books like Pegasus in Space, Freedom’s Challenge, and Nimisha’s Ship.

Todd has published a number of short stories-some even without the editors realizing his maternal connection! And he collaborated with me to write the recent Pern novel Dragon’s Kin-an experience that proved both gratifying and fun for both of us!

So he is well qualified to write this book. He is also a damned good writer, as Dragonsblood will confirm. Perish forbid you should take my word for his abilities. But you should.

You see, I’ve always been paranoid about people writing in my world. If you’d seen some of the lovingly but inaccurately written stories I’ve seen, including a film script that had me cringing in fear that it would be produced, you’d understand how I feel about having my literary child misrepresented. But Todd was in at the beginning, and he knows Pern as well as he knows the innards of his computer (and as a computer person by nature and by education, he knows his computer!). And I knew he could write well. So I knew-well, to be honest, I hoped-that he was right for Pern.

Todd’s insight into the world and its culture is well-nigh perfectly Pernese. He also had some of my strongest and most reliable Pern fans, like Marilyn and Harry Alm, go over the manuscript, so it isn’t just Momma encouraging her child. They were harder on him than I ever could have been. Not that I didn’t watch him closely! I couldn’t let him make mistakes, and we did have a couple of arguments about scenes, but I am happy to admit that Dragonsblood is a good yarn, fitting perfectly into the Pern series, yet something I don’t think I would have thought up myself.

Enjoy, as I did, another point of view about Pern. And thanks, son, you done did good and me proud!