James Nicoll Reviews

Anne McCaffrey’s 1970 Alchemy and Academe is (to quote an inside page) ​“A Collection of Original Stories Concerning Themselves with Transmutations, Mental and Elemental, Alchemical and Academic.”

Or rather, it’s an anthology etc. Ah, well, still less misleading than the cover, which claims that Alchemy and Academe is ​“Enchanting tales of some sorcerers and their apprentices,” which it isn’t, not really. As far as I can tell, Alchemy and Academe is one of two anthologies edited by McCaffrey.

Of all the editors I would have expected to compare McCaffrey to, it would not have been…

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Anne McCaffrey’s 1969’s The Ship Who Sang is a fix-up of SF stories published 1961 – 1969.

Hideously disfigured Helva might have been humanely euthanized, as was routinely done to those outside the norm for her time and place. But she had a brain worth salvaging. Helva survived the conversion process and was reborn as … the brain of interstellar ship XH 834. 

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Anne McCaffrey’s standalone SF novel Restoree was her debut novel.

Snatched by monstrous aliens, embittered spinster Sara wakes from nightmares to find herself transformed from an all-too-Semitic-looking woman whom nobody could possibly love to a beauty. Her current captors are using her as grunt labor in a mental institution. They regard her as semi-intelligent and unthreatening.

Her masters’ underestimation of Sara’s cognitive abilities will prove their undoing.

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On the one hand, I am not a fan of Anne McCaffrey’s fiction. On the other, she was a significant figure in the field, one of just five women named Grand Master of Science Fiction; at some point I need to acknowledge her. I find that I do have some of her books¹. One of those books is the initially standalone² 1969 novel Decision at Doona.

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