Although perhaps best-known for her lightly humorous fantasies and for her collaborations with Anne McCaffrey on the Petaybee series and the Acorna series, Elizabeth Anne Scarborough has also written Healer's War, a classic novel of the Vietnam War, enriched with a magical, mystical twist, which won the 1989 Nebula Award for Best Novel of 1988. The Minneapolis Star Tribune called it "A brutal and beautiful book." Scarborough herself was a nurse in Vietnam during the war and she draws on her own personal experiences to create the central character, Lt. Kitty McCulley. McCulley, a young and inexperienced nurse tossed into a stressful and chaotic situation, is having a difficult time reconciling her duty to help and heal with the indifference and overt racism of some of her colleagues and with the horrendously damaged soldiers and Vietnamese civilians whom she encounters during her service at the China Beach medical facilities. She is unexpectedly helped by the mysterious and inexplicable properties of an amulet, given to her by one of her patients, an elderly, dying Vietnamese holy man, which allows her to see other people's "auras" and to understand more about them as a result. This eventually leads to a strange, almost surrealistic journey through the jungle, accompanied by a one-legged boy and a battle-seasoned but crazed soldier and, by the end of the journey, McCulley has found herself and a way to live and survive through the madness and destruction.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Altogether I've written and collaborated on 38 novels, 22 solo and 16 in collaboration with the fabulous Anne McCaffrey.
Among my solo novels is THE HEALER'S WAR, the 1989 Nebula Award winner for best novel, loosely based on my experiences as a nurse in Vietnam.
I have also written a traditional, though humorous, 4-book fantasy series, SONGS FROM THE SEASHELL ARCHIVES, a feminist Arabian Nights fantasy, two fantasies set in the Wild West and the Yukon Goldrush respectively, my obligatory science fiction writer's apocalypse book and the sequel, both set in Tibet, and three books about folk music and magic that made a big hit with the Library of Congress Folk Music Archives, which I blew up in the first book. Three of my books are about fairy godmothers, one is about Christmas and computers, one features Sir Walter Scott in a Victorian gothic mystery set in Edinburgh, and two are about Queen Cleopatra as the living "Past life" of two different women.
Just last week I released for the first time anywhere, a new e-book (available soon as Print on Demand as well), SPAM VS THE VAMPIRE. Spam is a cat whose mistress disappears suddenly, leaving him and his 14 feline housemates alone and soon to starve. When someone breaks into the house, Spam takes the opportunity to escape into the outside world, where he's actually never been before, to hunt for his human, or at least some other human to feed and care for him and his friends until their friend Darcy comes back. The more he hunts, the more he becomes sure that she is not going to be coming back on her own.
