Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand

Vonda N. McIntyre (1948–2019)
From The Future Is Female! More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women

Interesting Links

“Back to the Hugos: Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre” (Sam Jordison, The Guardian)

“Obituary: Vonda McIntyre” (Jeremy Sim, Clarion West)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Positive Obsession,” Octavia E. Butler
• “When It Changed,” Joanna Russ
• “If Ever I Should Leave You,” Pamela Sargent
• “The Day Before the Revolution,” Ursula K. Le Guin

Buy the book
The Future Is Female! More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women
522 pages
List price: $27.95
Web store price: $20.95

The title page of “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,” with an illustration by Leo Summers, in the October 1978 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and the dust jacket for the first edition of Dreamsnake, featuring artwork by Stephen Alexander.

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In 1969, the year Vonda N. McIntyre turned twenty-one, she sold her first story, “Breaking Point,” to Venture Science Fiction. She was still an undergraduate majoring in biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. In the spring of 1970 she graduated with honors, and the following fall she began graduate study in genetics.

During the summer between, however, she traveled to Clarion State College in Pennsylvania to participate in the third annual Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop. Each week of the six-week course was conducted by a different science fiction writer; the instructors that year were Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, Kate Wilhelm, and Damon Knight. During those six weeks McIntyre lived next door to another student, twenty-three-year-old Octavia E. Butler, who became a lifelong friend and (decades later) a fellow Seattleite. At the workshop, McIntyre finished her second published story, “Only at Night,” which appeared in the Dell paperback anthology gathering the best stories by both students and instructors from the Clarion workshops.

The director of the summer sessions, Robin Scott Wilson, left Clarion for other another academic position and, with his blessing, McIntyre worked with colleagues at the University of Washington to establish the Clarion West Writers Workshop, which from 1971 to 1973 hosted such well-known authors as Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Robert Silverberg, as well as Russ, Ellison, and Delany. Even though McIntyre was neither an instructor nor a student for the workshops, she would occasionally participate in the classroom exercises. And, as she later recalled, that’s how her most famous story came to be:

I know where I got the idea: Avram Davidson’s exercise at the 1972 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Avram made up two lists of words, one pastoral, one technological. Each of us drew a word from each list. We were to write a story using both words. We went off to lunch, moaning piteously about the ridiculous assignment. How could you write a story based on Alpha Centauri and laughter, or psychoanalysis and lizard, or snake and cow?

How did I end up with snake and cow? Maybe the slips got mixed up. Maybe Avram didn’t consider snakes pastoral. Maybe it was a joke. In any event, I thought life was hard.

“Why don’t you name your main character Snake?” said one of the other students. . . .

I was stymied. What was I to do with the wretched cow?

Somewhere around midnight the secondary meaning of cow, the verb form, wandered in out of left field (or possibly the back forty), and I wrote, “The little boy was frightened . . .”

She finished the story before the six-week session was over, and the result, “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,” was published the following year in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. It was honored with the Nebula Award for Best Novelette (a category for stories between 7,500 and 17,500 words), and it was the runner-up for both the Hugo and Locus awards.

Over the next couple of years, McIntyre abandoned her graduate studies to become a full-time writer, and she realized there was more to say about the adventures of Snake. “I hadn’t planned to expand the story, but the characters didn’t like being left, figuratively, hanging by their thumbs,” she later wrote. “A writer’s character will walk into the writer’s mind and start talking. When this happens, any smart writer doesn’t ask where the ideas came from—she’ll shut up and take dictation from her characters about their lives.” Her award-winning story became the first chapter of the work many readers and critics consider to be McIntyre’s masterpiece, Dreamsnake, which was published in 1978 and went on to make a clean sweep of all three SF awards—Hugo, Nebula, and Locus—for best novel.

In a 2010 interview, McIntyre credited her success to the previous generation of women science fiction writers, including Wilhelm, Russ, and Le Guin, who “kicked down doors in their generation that people in my generation got to walk through. I don’t think I would have existed as the writer I am now if it weren’t for those writers. . . . And the time frame is actually kind of short, but there was a huge difference between publishing in the early 1970s and publishing in the 1960s.” McIntyre was instrumental in the publication of the first all-female science fiction anthologies: she connected Pamela Sargent with the company that published Sargent’s Women of Wonder anthology in 1975, and in 1976, with Susan Janice Anderson, coedited her own anthology, Aurora: Beyond Equality.

Over the course of her career, McIntyre published sixteen novels (including the novelizations of the second, third, and fourth Star Trek movies), over three dozen short stories, and numerous essays. She died at home in Seattle of pancreatic cancer in 2019; she left her literary estate to the Clarion West foundation, the successor to the workshops she had established a half century earlier.

McIntyre’s remarks above, concerning the development of her story and novel, are excerpted from an afterword included in recent printings of Dreamsnake.

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The little boy was frightened. Gently, Snake touched his hot forehead. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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If Ever I Should Leave You

Pamela Sargent (b. 1948)
From The Future Is Female! More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women

Interesting Links

“A Brief History of Pamela Sargent’s Women of Wonder Anthologies” (James Davis Nicoll, Tor.com)

“How Women Writers Speculated Fictional Futures Free from Patriarchal Control” (Lisa Yaszek, Literary Hub)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “When It Changed,” Joanna Russ
• “Try and Change the Past,” Fritz Leiber
• “Created He Them,” Alice Eleanor Jones

Buy the book
The Future Is Female! More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women
23 stories from the 1970s
522 pages
List price: $27.95
Web store price: $20.95

Left: Front cover of Women of Wonder (Vintage Books, 1975), with art by American graphic designer Charles Shields (1944–2020). Right: Sargent’s first story collection, Starshadows (Ace, 1977), which contains the unaltered version of “If Ever I Should Leave You.” The cover art is by American illustrator Paul Alexander (1937–2021).

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In the introduction to the 1975 anthology Women of Wonder: Science-Fiction Stories by Women about Women, Pamela Sargent questioned “why a literature that prides itself on exploring alternatives or assumptions counter to what we normally believe has not been more concerned with the roles of women in the future.” For the collection, Sargent selected a dozen of the best SF stories written by women during the previous quarter century—a shortlist that includes such still-renowned authors as Joanna Russ, Vonda N. McIntyre, Anne McCaffrey, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The book’s success spawned two follow-ups, one in 1976 and a third volume in 1978, yet when Sargent initially peddled the idea to publishers, she met with resistance, as she recounts to SF critic James Nicoll:

In fairness, part of that might have been because I was a novice writer of only a few published stories, but it was also because some editors, as they admitted, didn’t think such an anthology would sell. I was asked by a couple of editors if there were enough good stories to fill an anthology of sf by women. One editor said that such a book would appeal only to a “minor” part of the audience for sf. . . .

Sargent’s break came when McIntyre wrote to the editorial team at Vintage Books and asked why there had been several SF anthologies with exclusively male writers but not one containing only women. When an editor agreed to consider such a proposal, McIntyre put Sargent in touch with the Vintage staff.

Women of Wonder remained in print for over a decade, so clearly there was an audience for such a book and for two more WoW volumes. . . . For years afterwards, I would encounter people, mostly but not all women, who had thought there was nothing of interest in sf for them until they saw Women of Wonder in a bookstore or library.

Twenty years later, in the mid-1990s, Sargent compiled two more Women of Wonder anthologies for Harcourt Brace.

During the period she was assembling the first anthology, Sargent was also dealing with a bit of a nightmare; her story “If Ever I Should Leave You” had appeared in the January–February 1974 issue of the SF magazine Worlds of If, and it had been altered almost beyond recognition under the heavy-handed direction of editor-in-chief Ejler Jakobsson and a new managing editor, Albert Dytch. In 1991, Sargent recalled:

I glanced at the story after it was published, and it was horrifying—all these dumb lines I hadn’t written. The story was told in the first person by a nameless protagonist, but apparently some dufus at If—not the editor, as far as I could tell—decided my narrator should have a name. The name he decided on was Nanette. And the other changes were worse—clumsy bits of exposition that were wrong, details that made no sense. I spent months fighting with them about it, and one of the publisher’s potentates even had the gall to make veiled threats about suing me if I didn’t shut up about my grievances.

Sargent’s story was not the only victim of unwelcome modification by Jakobsson and Dytch in the pages of Worlds of If and its sister publication, Galaxy Science Fiction. As Michael Ashley reports in his book Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980, the serial version of Christopher Priest’s The Inverted World had undergone what its author disparaged as “a multitude of petty re-wording” and “an orgy of rewriting towards the end.” Similarly, not only was Harlan Ellison’s story “Cold Friend” heavily revised, but the editors even changed the title—despite a prior agreement that not a single word would be changed. Ellison found out about the alterations as the magazine was going to press, and he forced the editors to claw back the changes with only partial success.

Editor and author Barry Malzberg told Ashley: “Jake’s meddling with manuscripts was notorious. He was not only an interfering editor of the worst sort but a terrible writer who screwed up work. [Sargent’s] story was destroyed by him.” As the months passed, both Jakobsson and Dytch were replaced and, in December 1974, If published its last number and was folded into Galaxy. The first issue after the merger included a letter from Sargent: “A writer’s name is his or her stock in trade. If I am to stand or fall by what is published under that name, let it be by my own words and not those of a nameless collaborator. I must therefore disassociate myself from the story as it was published in If.” The magazine’s new editor, Jim Baen, simply responded, “Ms. Sargent has the right of it.”

In 1977, “If Ever I Should Leave You” finally appeared as its author intended in Starshadows, her first story collection—and, of course, that is the version that has appeared in anthologies since and that is the version we present below. The same year, Sargent was among eight women asked by the editors of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies about why and how they “use the genre” for their fiction, and she responded in part:

The writer of science fiction or fantasy is not as limited as the writer of other kinds of fiction. . . . Within the context of most human activities to date, women of strength and achievement are exceptions to the rule. This is reflected in novels about the past or present. Science fiction and fantasy, on the other hand, allow one to imagine and write about worlds where strong independent women are the rule, or to construct a society whose features can illuminate the workings of our own.

. . . Science fiction writers are limited only by human potential, not human actualities. SF can serve to show women, and men, how large that potential can be.

Since selling her first story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1970, Sargent has published fourteen novels and several story collections, and she collaborated with George Zebrowski on four Star Trek novels. She currently lives in Albany, New York.

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When Yuri walked away from the Time Station for the last time, his face was pale marble, his body only bones barely held together by skin and the weak muscles he had left. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.