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.
My latest is a family-centered satirical series of "purranormal mysteries" featuring Spam, an enterprising orange tabby. In SPAM VS THE VAMPIRE, Spam's guardian, Darcy, suddenly disappears, leaving him and his 14 feline housemates alone with full litter boxes and empty kibble dishes. Although he has never been outside the house before, Spam makes a daring escape during a break-in and seeks information about Darcy, who was last seen in the company of a vampire she met on the internet. The next adventure in the series is a seasonal novelette, FATHER CHRISTMAS, in which Spam learns what Christmas is to the wild animals in his neighborhood and also has an opportunity to get acquainted with his own dead-beat dad. The most recently published is THE TOUR BUS OF DOOM or Spam and The Zombie Apocalyps-o, in which Spam's home town is invaded by zombies under the influence of a power-hungry zombie master. Scaring Spam's friends at Elevated Ice Cream is bad enough but when the zombies put the hoodoo on his pals at SeaJ's fish'n'chips, the situation becomes intolerable.
9 TALES O' CATS and SHIFTY are both collections of my previously published short stories.
For more description and information, visit my new book-dedicated website, http://scarbor9.wix.com/beadtime-stories
