What a treat! To write an introduction for a writer whom I hold in high esteem. All her books are on my "comfort shelves."
I think it was Bill Fawcett who first introduced me to Elizabeth Moon for her book, Sheepfarmer's Daughter, the first volume of The Deed of Paksenarrion. Then, when I was looking for another collaborator to finish the Planet Pirates trilogy, I took him up on his suggestion of using EMoon—as she is respectfully known as in Dragonhold. Having read the first novel, I was certainly more than interested and she proved interested in writing Sassinak. With her background of service in the Marines—not that anyone regarding this tall slender woman with long black hair coiled on her pate would ever think she'd been a captain in the Marines. But she was willing to write with me and I was delighted. We actually met about then, at an Atlanta Dragoncon. We both felt that we must have known each other in some distant incarnation, as we were comfortable with each other very quickly. I certainly admired her work. I gave her a basic summary of what I thought the novel should contain and where I wanted to go with it. WOW! She took it and ran.
So, she got the trilogy up to the final book and she did most of Generation Warriors. She phoned me one morning, from the depths of Texas, to ask if she could put in an opera about the tragedy of the heavyworlders. I told her to run with it and the sequence is enough to stop your heart and start your tears, tragic and beautifully handled. I could even like heavyworlders after that. What started out as a notion to mind to have a planet that stayed in the Mesozoic Age—and thus dinosaurs survived—was a fun sort of script and we did have fun with it. Jody Lynn Nye wrote the really hard one, The Death of Sleep, and then we all got in the act.
So now you have a collection of stories from this imaginative and highly inventive author and I get the chance to urge you to read it. Which I most certainly do . . .not that you'll need much nudging for you will recognize her name and probably have read her Heris Serrano series or the latest fun run of hers, Vatta's War. With great pride and pleasure, I add that her magnificent The Speed of Dark quite rightly won the Nebula Award with which science fiction writers compliment their colleagues. A powerful and gripping story of how one young man fights the handicaps of autism and makes his own way in a "normal" world. As the lad has told me, "normal" is a setting on your washing machine. Not only has that book been honored but she also wrote Remnant Population, which is very much a sneak-up-on-you, which I recall cackling about for the sheer mischief she created for her main characters and winds it all up with an ending every author would like to have achieved. I still find myself reading it, just for the fun of the ending. Wish I could write like that.
EMoon has been a not frequent enough guest at Dragonhold as much because we are both "into" horses as being science fiction writers. Her novel Hunting Party, set on a planet that is devoted entirely to the chases of the inedible by the unspeakable, earned her an invitation to join a proper English hunt for a day. She asked could she stay over with me on her way back. She had also been complaining about not finding a horse in Texas who jumped. (Well, ALL Irish horses jump!) So I suggested that she stop here first and I would see that she had a ride or two on a proper hunter horse. She did so, which was serendipitous because, as some of us here feared, the English hunt put her up on an old racehorse. She had neither steering nor brakes and how she stayed on at the speed she was going to keep up with the pack is another tribute to her expertise and determination. Fortunately before her arms and legs gave out, others were changing to second horses, and she was quite within hunt manners to end the session without disgracing herself, S-F, Texas or the Marines.
So, dive into this collection with the assurance that you will have your mind set at ease, your ears scratched and your eyes pleasured and maybe learn something new in the process. That's what good writing's all about . . . teaching the reader something new or an aspect to something familiar that they hadn't quite considered before.
Well done, EMoon!
Anne McCaffrey
Wicklow County, Ireland
June 2007