Display MoreAll the recent talk about corvettes prompted me to revisit Milk Run, the Christopher Stasheff novella that proceeds End Run, for its story about a Venture-class ship in action behind enemy lines. On re-reading it, I was struck with a question I somehow never pondered before: who is the TCS Johnny Greene named after, anyway?
The second corvette in the story is named the TCS John Bunyan after the English preacher who wrote The Pilgrim's Progress in 1678. Knowing this and that Christopher Stasheff was an English professor who loved literary references I think I simply assumed that Johnny Greene was a similar figure. It turns out the real story is a little more interesting!
The real John Greene was a dear friend of legendary SFF author Anne McCaffrey, creator of the Pern series. He was killed in France in November 1988 while serving with the French Foreign Legion. An Easter Egg page quotes McCaffrey on the subject: "Here is a picture of our very dear friend John Greene, who was killed one evening in Orange, France. He was [a] sergeant in the French Legion and his murder has never been solved. So to give him a life because his was cut short, he has appeared in every book I've written since, using variations of his name and nicknames, which were The Fist of Bray, Golly Greene, and JG. You'd know him better a Jayge in Renegades and Gollee in The Rowan Series, and various other manifestations. See if you can figure out who he is in the books I haven't mentioned: starting with Renegades." Fans have taken up exactly this challenge: here's a list put together by a fan archivist. The Renegades of Pern is also dedicated to him:
JOHN GREENE
Maréchal de logis
1958-1988
"O, Johnny, why did they do ye?"The SFF world of the 1980s was even smaller than it is today. Anne McCaffrey was deeply connected to several writers who would go on to shape Wing Commander. She coauthored books with Freedom Flight's Mercedes Lackey and even helped introduce Privateer 2 writer Diane Duane to her late husband, Peter Morwood. In this case, though, the connection goes through her friend and coauthor Jody Lynn Nye. In late 1987, Nye and her family spent ten days in Ireland with McCaffrey at her home while developing a series of guides to the Pern universe. Included in this were Greene and also Nye's husband, Bill Fawcett, the editor and book packager who would go on to sell Baen the Wing Commander series in 1992.
When Greene died the next year, Bill Fawcett helped take up the job of honoring him in fiction. Fawcett and David Drake had recently developed a book series called The Fleet which collected novellas from this same group (plus other SFF writers including, you guessed it, Christopher Stasheff) to form a shared universe. The third volume, Breakthrough, was published in 1989 and included a dedication to Greene: "A special memoriam to Johnny Greene, a soldier, a warrior, and one who wasn't afraid to care or be a friend." It also features an amazing cover! Even more interesting, the fourth volume includes a short story by Fawcett called War Paint… about characters serving on a space corvette named the Johnny Greene!
Anne McCaffrey herself would be honored with a star system on the 1997 Wing Commander Universe map. It's located in the Rodenberry Quadrant of the Enigma Sector.
You can read the entire Milk Run novella online here and Pilgrim's Progress here (perhaps the quips about it in Milk Run have a double meaning in the post-Wing Commander movie era…).
