Crystal Line by Anne McCaffrey

I've noticed a pattern in the Crystal singer series. Killa manages to get herself overwrought about something, storms off planet, and has some wild series of adventures as a result. I much prefer a character who grows and changes over time, and Killashandra seems emotionally frozen as a shrill and emotional wreck, at times. The other thing that seems to happen regularly when she departs in a rage is that she finds a man to attach herself to, and to sleep with. In this third volume of McCaffrey's series, she turns into a total slut. How disappointing.

Crystal Line starts off benignly enough, with Lars Dahl (from Killashandra) and Killa having partnered as crystal singers on Ballybran for a long time, usually quite successfully cutting enough crystal to get off planet and enjoy long sailing adventures together on a seemingly endless list of water worlds. Guild Master Lanzecki sends them off on a mission to investigate a new, possibly sentient, type of mineral or crystal that's been discovered on a barren world, and the first part of the novel is intriguing. I actually thought McCaffrey was going somewhere important with it, at first. This new discovery is totally ignored until very near the end of the book, when it performs a deus ex machina routine and cures Killa of her memory loss, so she and Lars can live happily ever after.

When they return, Lanzecki begins to take Lars under his wing, so to speak, and includes him in some of the day to day business of the Guild. Killa seems oblivious to this, except as it affects her time spent with Lars, and how it inconveniences her schedule. When Lanzecki, who has grown old in the Guild Master job, goes out into the Ranges and essentially commits "suicide by crystal thrall", Lars Dahl is elected as the new GM, and Killa refuses to accept both Lanzecki's death, and Lars' new position.

Lars Dahl has made a habit of recording his experiences dutifully, so he won't forget who he is, what he's done, or who he loves, when singing crystal messes with his memory. But Killashandra has been lazy about doing so, and there are some things that she decided long ago she'd rather forget (any failure on her part, for one thing, which reveals something not so flattering about Killa's character). Her memory is not so good at this point, and she becomes unable to distinguish between Lars and Lanzecki's tenure as Guild Master. There is a new techique for helping Singers to recover their memories, but Killashandra refuses to be treated, and cuts crystal by herself for the first time in decades, then runs away from the situation, ending up on a water world by herself.

Killashandra overstays her slutty welcome, and ends up with severe crystal withdrawal symptoms. She returns to Ballybran considerably weakened, and Lars takes her back out into the Ranges to cut crystal again, letting her symbiont heal. The Guild is in the middle of a crisis, with a decimated force of singers, mainly through attrition and low recruitment, and unfilled orders from the FSP worlds, that competitors are hoping to fill with their crystal substitutes. Together, they must double-handedly save the Guild from extinction, or perhaps merely irrelevance.
This was a series that began well, but faded out with a whimper.

Killashandra by Anne McCaffrey

Killashandra is the sequel to crystal Singer, and I had eagerly awaited its appearance back in 1985, but it turned out to have a few flaws.

First, at the end of Crystal Singer, Killashandra has just returned to Ballybran from her assignment in the Trundimoux system, and we experience a huge time lag at the beginning of this book. Killa's claim has been destroyed by the Passover storms, and she's scrambling to replace it. Perhaps McCaffrey published a short story detailing this disaster in one of the pulp mags, but it's disturbing to take up a story when events have occurred "off camera". Also, Keborgen had the claim for years before his death, and Killa's re-discovery of the black crystal site. Why did these particular storms destroy the claim, all of a sudden, aside from being a good plot device to make sure that Killashandra was broke when she really needed to get off planet.

Second, Killa gets an assignment to install white crystal which she has just finished cutting, but it requires her to be off Ballybran for up to a year. Lanzecki's assistant, Trag, convinces her she must take the job, for a reason which was not readily apparent to her earlier. Some of this situation is set up well in Crystal Singer, where we learn that Singers lose their memories over time, as a result of singing crystal. Antona, the head of the medical department on Ballybran, is constantly nagging Killa to dictate any memories she wants to hang on to into her personal recording.

In the first book, Killa and Lanzecki become lovers. Trag lets Killashandra know that Lanzecki has to get out in the ranges and sing crystal soon, or suffer withdrawal, and he's been delaying because he has fallen for her, so if she gets off planet, he'll have no excuse not to go into the ranges. So Killa once again plays the tragic heroine and departs the planet in a hurry, without even saying goodbye to Lanzecki.

Why couldn't she have dictated all of her memories of her love affair into her personal file, and made sure that Lanzecki did the same thing, then leave the planet in an orderly fashion, secure in the knowledge that her lover would remember her. Almost as dumb a stunt as what Romeo and Juliet pulled, back in the literary day.

Third, I'm not sure I understand why and how she decides she should travel to Optheria incognito. She decides to pretend to be merely a student on her way to study there, rather than the Heptite Guild representative, with all its attendant privileges and comforts. The only thing that makes sense here is that it sets up a plot device where a secret agent of the FSP on board doesn't know who she really is at first. It seems improbable to me that when her tickets were booked by the Heptite Guild in the first place, they would fail to mention she's a Guild member, and the passenger manifests for the various ships would certainly mention that little detail. At least the steward and captain would know who she was, even if she requested a low profile. Niggling little bits.

Once on Optheria, she encounters a very parochial culture, which doesn't allow its citizens to leave the planet, and which uses a form of subliminal conditioning so that most of them never even think about doing so. The Optherian organ which she has come to repair is used at an annual concert, which all citizens attend, to influence their emotions, in violation of Federated Sentient Planets regulations. Unfortunately, FSP agents who have been sent here are also not allowed to leave with any evidence of the manipulation.

I sense a bit of a theme here with McCaffrey in these first two novels - Killa seems to encounter very insular and nationalist cultures in her two excursions away from Ballybran. I wonder if McCaffrey, who lived in Ireland, encountered a lot of this narrow thinking in various villages around her homeland, and was making some subtle political comments about them in her writing.

In this adventure, Killa is assaulted, kidnapped and left on a desert island, makes her escape and joins up with her kidnapper - whom she is once more able to deceive concerning her identity (due to her hair bleaching out and complexion tanning on her little island) - seems unlikely, but... and ends up falling in love with him. At least, as much as Killashandra is ever in love with anyone except herself.

These novels are billed on wikipedia as Young Adult, but it seems that for the 80s, there's certainly far more casual sex included than would have been approved for publishing for the YA market. Nothing graphic, just footloose and fancy free. I found it entertaining, though the plot has a lot of holes.

Crystal Singer by Anne McCaffrey

In honor of Anne McCaffrey's passing this month, and because "coincidentally" my daughter just returned my copy of Crystal Singer, I'll be doing a review of classic McCaffrey weekly for a while. She was a grand old dame of science fiction, and her presence will be sorely missed.

Published in 1982, this novel was a breakaway from her Pern series and early "Ship Who..." novels, and it definitely ranks highly in my favorites list.

Killashandra Ree has been studying vocal performance at Fuerte's Academy for ten years, expecting to launch a career as one of the premier Singers on her planet, when at the final examination, she is informed that she has an unpleasant "burr" in the upper registers, and her voice will never be suitable for such a career. Simultaneously crushed and enraged, she storms out of the audition, grabs her belongings from her student quarters, and impulsively descends on the spaceport, in a bit of misplaced wanderjahr, searching for a new career and life.

At the spaceport, she hears a shuttle craft which has its crystals (part of the propulsion unit) badly out of tune. Another bystander who hears the crystals' dissonance, however, is Carrick, a member of the Heptite Guild, a Crystal Singer. He holds the authority to tell the local authorities about the problem and demand that they have the crystals tuned before a disaster occurs. In gratitude, the spaceport authorities "comp" his expenses, and he invites Killashandra to join him in his recreations.

The Crystal Singers are a very exclusive group, responsible for the discovery and mining of various crystals on the planet Ballybran, and they command exorbitant salaries, which they spend in hedonistic abandon whenever they're able to get off planet. Killashandra is charmed and taken in by his easy manner, and enjoys herself for some time in his company at various resorts around Fuerte. When another spaceport mishap incapacitates Carrick, Killa accompanies him back to Ballybran, home of the Heptite Guild, where he will receive medical treatment.

Killa is intrigued by the possibility of becoming a Crystal Singer, which requires perfect pitch (which she has), but doesn't seem to stop someone with a burr in her voice from pursuing (never really mentioned in the story), and she insists on being allowed to apply for the job, despite repeated warnings from her old Maestro on Fuerte, various members of the Federated Planets bureaucracy, and even representatives of the Heptite Guild itself.

The kicker is that there's a symbiont on Ballybran which binds a person permanently to the planet - they can leave for short periods - but which gives long life and special abilities to those people who successfully adapt to the symbiont - sometimes the adjustment is fatal. But Killa goes ahead with her plans, and the rest of the book describes her recruitment, training and early career as a Crystal Singer.

McCaffrey creates an interesting bit of future technology here. The crystals are essential to nearly every bit of tech in the Federated Planets empire, governing communications, propulsion, information storage and retrieval, entertainment - she almost anticipates the important integrated circuit technology we have today. Each color of crystal has a different application, with the most important and expensive crystal being the "black" crystal (of course Killa is able to sing and cut black crystal, or the story wouldn't be as wonderful), which is used in interplanetary and interstellar communication, providing FTL messaging when properly linked. Seems to be a bit of the old magical "law of contagion" involved, as the pieces of black crystal must have been mined from the same vein, then when properly activated (by magical mystical ritual known only to the Heptite Guild), they act as if "once together, always together" to send instantaneous comminications.

All in all, a fun and interesting novel, which begins an unfortunately short series.