Crystal Singer

Origins

While a schoolgirl, Anne McCaffrey enjoyed one year of piano lessons purchased by her Aunt. Later she studied voice for nine years, performed in the first music circus in 1949, once directed a play, and worked for a record label, Liberty Music Shop. DuPont transferred her husband temporarily to Düsseldorf, Germany in 1962/63, where Anne resumed vocal training but suffered a crisis when she was informed that a flaw in her voice would limit her in that avocation. Regarding that experience, including some emotional trauma, her fictional character Killashandra Ree is partly autobiographical.

McCaffrey divorced her husband in August 1970 and emigrated to the vicinity of Dublin, Ireland in September with her second Dragonriders of Pern book nearly finished and a contract for the third. The White Dragon would complete her "original trilogy" with Ballantine Books in 1978 but for several years that work stalled. The markets for children and young adults provided crucial opportunities, as when editor Roger Elwood solicited contributions of short genre fiction to anthologies. She was able to deliver "The Smallest Dragonboy" and the four-part story of Killashandra:

McCaffrey called the 1982 novel a "considerably expanded" version of the four-part work and acknowledged "the technical assistance of Ron Massey, Langshot Stables, Surrey" for its transformation.

In fact the first three sections of the novel—through Killashandra's return from her first experience cutting crystal in the field—are moderately revised and heavily revised versions of the first and third 1974 stories, "Prelude to a Crystal Song" and "Milekey Mountain". In the second and fourth original stories she is a veteran of more than 100 years in the field. Whether and how she may be able to go on as a woman on vacation (#2) and as the miner of her claim (#4) are primary themes.

Killashandra is a small town in north central Ireland, about 120 km northwest of Dublin.

Plot summary (1982 novel)

Killashandra Ree has spent ten years studying music and training to be a vocal soloist, anticipating interstellar celebrity. After a final exam she learns that a flaw in her voice will prevent her from singing lead. She dreads a life limited to choral work and supporting operatic roles so she plans to exit both school and home planet discreetly.

At the spaceport she meets a vital older man who uses perfect pitch, and his occupational experience as a "crystal singer" on Ballybran, to identify an incoming space shuttle on the verge of explosion. He treats her to a whirlwind romance and the experience of her home planet in ways entirely unknown to her, but sincerely warns her against the high-status, high-income occupation that makes such a vacation possible for him. Further, one of its occupational hazards leaves him in a coma, but Killashandra determines to accompany his return home under life support, and to investigate membership in the Heptite Guild of crystal singers for herself.

The crystalline rock of Ballybran, when skilfully cut, is essential to advanced power and communications systems at the heart of interstellar civilization. Only the Guild "singers" can mine crystal: locate it, and cut it with voice-controlled machinery. Killashandra's ability to sing perfect pitch meets one qualification, she knows, and she passes other qualifying exams in the staging area on Ballybran's moon.

Travel to Ballybran itself, however, is forbidden to all but its resident singers and supporting population, about 30,000 people. The moon-side orientation program secretly explains why: a native spore soon invades the human body and causes genetic mutations. Some newcomers will die of the initial infection and many will adapt only partly, with a mix of permanent symptoms such as vastly increased visual acuity along with complete deafness. Those who adapt fully to symbiotic life may become singers; other survivors must join the staff. The symbiont maintains its host, perhaps for hundreds of years, but only on Ballybran; only the fully adapted singers can safely depart, and only briefly.

Full adaptation brings remarkable benefits, including increased sensory perception, rapid tissue regeneration and a vastly prolonged life expectancy, but it renders all hosts sterile, and eventually causes severe memory loss, paranoia and dementia. Even after full adaptation with the symbiont, mining Ballybran crystal is a dangerous occupation. Beside the risks associated with other mining operations, there are frequent storms with high winds that may cause crystal deposits to resonate: "sonic storms" that may impair the symbiont and drive the singer mad.

The Guild provides life support for physically disabled or insane members, many aspects of the industry are highly centralized, and everyone begins with big debts. Yet singers in the field are solo adventurers who establish private claims, work them in secret, and sometimes amass great fortunes.

Killashandra and thirty others accept the personal risks and make the commitment. The story follows her and her classmates in a general education program, awaiting infection. When her own adaptation is unusually rapid and easy, she advances alone to rapid acquaintance with the rules and customs, transport and cutting equipment, emergency procedures, commercial values, and some of the planet-bound specialists. She is especially sensitive to "black crystal", the rarest and most valuable variety. Partly for that talent, the Guild Master Lanzecki becomes her mentor (but soon her lover as well). Before any of her classmates learns to fly or to cut, she is in the field. She is first to find the unknown claim of a black crystal miner recently destroyed in a crash, and she cuts some of it adequately.

Killashandra's rapid adaptation and training have isolated her from the other newcomers and her continued success has fostered jealousy, she sees even in her closest friends among the former classmates. So she accepts an assignment offered by Lanzecki, to install "her" set of crystals in a recently settled planetary system. The cost of a black crystal set is high, even on the planetary scale, which has made its acquisition politically controversial and its installation a celebrity event. Killashandra must not only complete the technical installation but also represent the Guild in a public performance not unlike her one-time aspiration. She succeeds on both counts.

Trilogy

McCaffrey continued the biography of Killashandra Ree in two sequels, Killashandra (1986) and Crystal Line (1992). The original Continuum stories ended with the death of Killashandra, but the trilogy follows a different path.

Killashandra

In the second book, Killashandra is once again sent off-world, this time to the planet of Optheria. Her task is ostensibly to install new White Crystals into the manual of the planet's largest Optherian Organ, which was shattered under mysterious circumstances. ...

Crystal Line

In the third book, Killashandra Ree and Lars Dahl are sent to investigate a strange mineral discovered in a newly explored star system. It is believed that the stuff may have properties similar to Ballybran crystal, but when samples of crystal are placed in it, it creates a strange synergy that changes both the planet and Killashandra's mind.

Omnibus editions

The trilogy was published in omnibus editions The Crystal Singer Trilogy (US: Del Rey Books, 1996) and The Crystal Singer Omnibus (UK: Corgi Books, 1999).

Crystal universe

Beside the Crystal Singer trilogy, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database places in the "Crystal universe" (series) both The Coelura, a 1983 novella, and Nimisha's Ship, a 1998 novel.

In turn, the Crystal universe is only one of several series that share the "Federated Sentient Planets" background; they are set in a universe governed by the FSP. Federation regulations and officials appear substantially in the Crystal Singer trilogy, in sharp contrast to the Dragonriders of Pern series among others.

Awards

The Crystal Singer placed seventh for the 1983 annual Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, voted by Locus readers. It was one of six finalists for the Balrog Award in the novel class.