Upon graduating cum laude from Radcliffe, Anne I. McCaffrey '47 never would have guessed that she would become one of the most prominent and prolific science-fiction writers of her time.

As Slavic languages and literatures concentrator, the closest McCaffrey came to science fiction was using a Slavic science-fiction book in her honors thesis. Now she is the author of the wildly popular Dragonriders of Pern series, and has written a total of 55 books and more than 60 short stories.

While a writing career never entered her consideration, an affection for opera singing, nine years of voice training and participation in the theater at Harvard and Radcliffe did lead to some amateur acting as well as an appearance in the first successful summer musical circus in New Jersey in 1949.

It was a short stint, however, as McCaffrey realized she wanted more out of her work. "I didn't have that great a voice," she says. "i wanted a regular paycheck."

McCaffrey began to write short stories, and entered the realm of science fiction and fantasy because, she says, that is the where she found a market for her work.

Cambridge and Sci Fi

While at Radcliffe, McCaffrey took only one composition course, which she feels allowed her to become the writer she is.

"Studying great writers all the time is counterproductive to those who want to writers all the time is counterproductive to those who want to write themselves, because you constantly compare yourself to them and get intimidated," she says.

However, she says her work in college was not completely irrelevant to her current occupation. In the one composition course she took, McCaffrey wrote a Gothic tale for an assignment based on a visit to the Cape Cod summer home of one of her girlfriends who, in 1950, was also a bridesmaid at McCaffrey's wedding. Snowed in with no central heating, McCaffrey says, "I used quite a few elements of that Easter weekend in Mark of Merlin."

This small link between McCaffrey's undergraduate years and her later life is rare. Her degree did not have a profound influence, she says, except initially when "a Radcliffe honors degree meant the difference between the [employer's] picking me over someone else."

Radcliffe was not a choice for McCaffrey as it is for some people.

"My father, B.A. '12, M.A. '13 and Ph.D '38, expected my brothers [and me] to go to Harvard. We couldn't go anywhere, else," she says. "He was disappointed that my degree was only cum, rather than magna. He never thought I would make any thing of myself."

Just as in Mark of Merlin, McCaffrey often finds inspiration for her stories in real life. Although she did not realize it at the time, The Ship Who Sang, McCaffrey's acknowledged favorite of all her books, was written as therapy for her father's death.

"Ray Bradbury's hero had been Ernest Hemingway, and Bradbury could not understand or cope with Hemingway's suicide," McCaffrey says. "Bradbury wrote a marvelous story, "The Kilimanjaro Effect,' in which Hemingway is killed by a tiger as a way to deal with his death in real life. I realized that in writing that story, I had done much the same for my father."

The Ship Who Sang is her favorite because it is a very emotional story that impacts people dramatically when they read it for the first time, McCaffrey says. "It's not the best-written story, but it was certainly effective."