The Ship Who Sang

The Ship Who Sang (1986)

Excerpt from an interview with Anne McCaffrey (2002):

"I was out in Berkeley the year I won a Hugo, and Ray Bradbury said that he had written The Snows Of Kilimanjaro because he could not accept Hemingway's suicide, so writing that story was a way to exorcise his grief. I realised that I had written The Ship Who Sang as a way to get over my grief over my father's rather early death. He died in 1963, having fought in three wars. I was the girl in my family, and I came from Boston, old-fashioned, and girls were not supposed to be somebody, so he died before I could prove to him that I was somebody. In 1986, I think it was, in Brighton, they were doing a documentary." McCaffrey laughs and says theatrically, "I was a filmstar! We had BBC cameramen down while we were reading The Ship Who Sang. Now I can never get through the last four or five paragraphs so I had someone to read it with, Tom Christopher [sic]. He played the guy with the feathers on his head in Buck Rogers. These cameramen were filming the last part of it which Tom was reading, and I looked at them, and they were crying. I went, "Hey! BBC cameramen crying because of a story? Wow!"