Anne McCaffrey, the science fiction author, died yesterday at the age of 85. From io9:
Anne McCaffrey wasn’t just the inventor of Pern, the world where a whole society is based on dragon-riding. She was also an incredibly influential author who helped transform the way science fiction and fantasy authors wrote about women, and the way all of us thought about bodies and selfhood. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award, as well as a Grand Master of science fiction.
Besides the Pern books, McCaffrey wrote the classic space-faring novel The Ship Who Sang, in which a severely disabled girl becomes the core of a starship, or Brainship, with her mind controlling all its major functions. McCaffrey’s novel provided a startling new way to think about personhood and the nature of the mind/body connection, but also helped pave the way for a whole subgenre of posthuman space opera, in which heavily modified humans explore space.
During high school, I consumed everything that McCaffrey wrote: Pern, The Ship Who …, the Pegasus books and the Rowan series, all of them. She’s one of the few authors that I read during high school that still seems to hold up in later readings.
Sigh…. I read the first three Dragonriders books as a teen. That led to reading the Crystal Singer books, the Rowan series, and eventually a few more. I enjoyed her books.
I am saddened to hear that she is gone.
I discovered McCaffrey during the summer after my freshman year in college. There were only four Pern novels out then, and I bought one of them every two weeks over the summer with what little I could spare from my summer earnings. Fortunately, paperbacks only cost about $1.25 back then.
After the first nine or ten novels, I failed to keep up with the series. Not for any particular reason, except that Life, the Universe and Everything happened to me, as they are wont to do. I don’t think I’ve read any of the collaborative novels that she wrote with her son Todd. I guess it’s time to check out the dozen or so novels that I missed in the past couple of decades.
Anne McCaffrey was certainly one of the authors that got me into the SF genre. I inhaled the Pern series and the original Ship and Doona books, as well as Restoree, starting from about the age of 11, and read the collaborations and Rowan books later, although I had read the short story from which The Rowan started very early on. I moved on from her writing a some point and I never liked her collaborations as much as her earlier books, but nevertheless I remember it all fondly. I suspect that she was one of the various influences that managed to keep me a little bit sane and a little bit open-minded in Crazy Christian World. It was probably just as well that my Mum never investigated too deeply what her adolescent daughter was reading, now that I think about it…
My son called to tell me that a dragon had gone ‘between’ for the last time. He and I are both big fans and now my granddaughter is starting to read the Pern series.