Slashdot Mirror
Anne McCaffrey Passes Away At 85
JSC writes "Anne McCaffrey died Monday at her home after suffering a stroke. 'In the late 1960s she became the first woman to win a Hugo Award for a work of fiction and the first woman to win a Nebula Award. She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2006.' She will be missed by Dragons and their Riders the world over."
I'm sad that she's gone, but she did spend her entire life doing what she loved (writing), and we will always have her legacy to enjoy. Farewell, Dragonrider!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
She has passed for all time between; we accord her a dragon tribute. May she always sing the black, and cut well.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Out of life, and into legend. Even Arthur C Clarke had a soft spot for her.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Thanks, Anne McCaffrey, for introducing generations of slashdotters to the joys of Pern.
Thanks to her, my reading ability at 11 was that of a 16 year old (with plenty of credit to my grade one teacher too, of course). Her Pern books still have a special place in my heart (hear hear! to the dragon tribute).
Well, may she forever fly with Moreta.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
While Anne had a tendency to romanticize her stories and characters, there's no doubt that she had a great imagination. I'll always have a soft spot for the Harper Hall trilogy (Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, Dragondrums). One of my favourite series, and I thoroughly recommend them to anyone of any age. Her music training in life really showed through her writing, and she wrote it well.
Her Dragonriders of Pern were one of my first Fantasy Novels )i dicovered them in the 80's) and had a huge impact on my reading behavior since then..
I will dearly miss her.
Martin
I remember the countless times on her website and on the newsgroups (which she also posted to by the way) she was always asked about doing a movie. She had been approached countless times. But it always fell through because she didn't want the series butchered and she wanted creative control. Of course as the 2 or 3 times we heard the news of talks of a movie fall through, us on the newsgroup and on her website were sad but also happy that some 2-bit director wouldn't horribly butcher her magnum opus.
I know her son has been continuing the pern saga the last few years with Anne's blessing. But it just don't feel like Anne when reading the newer stuff. Although good, it's hard to explain.
I am saddened, but very glad and honored to have been able to come across and fall in love with her books so many years ago, which included a rereading of the Pern beginnings as my son got little older and I started reading him Pern as a bedtime story.
Never ends your light
But forever is the night
Where flies your spirit.
And in the cold of Between
Shall our hearts forever keen.
I always loved the poems she put at the beginning of the chapters in many of her dragon books. I hope she likes it.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Being a geeky kid at school I often sought sanctuary in the library where someone cool wanted us to have an alternative to the same dry stuff and regularly donated great boxes of sci-fi and fantasy. These helped me through that era of life far more than anything else. The Dragonriders were and still are a favourite that I look forward to sharing with my kids. Rest IN Peace Anne.
According to her blog, she had serious heart problems in mid August. It's hard to say if her stroke now is related, but it wouldn't surprise me.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I spent a lot of time as a youngster at the public library. Fortunately my mom was a big reader and took me there often (it was too far from our house for me to ride my bike or walk.) In grade school I'd already figured out that Science Fiction and Fantasy were my favorites. I don't remember what year it was exactly but it doesn't seem like it took me too long to read through everything interesting in the kids section and I moved over to the regular Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelves.
I do remember clearly pulling the White Dragon off the shelf one day and there on the cover was a guy, sitting on a dragon, with little dragons around them both. Well, that was it. I grabbed it and I tore through it.
I still chuckle because my parents were rather conservative and some of the content in that book would have made them flip out. I just loved every bit of it, and then went back to the library to actually read through the series in order. The Pern books became lifelong friends, from that introduction as an adolescent, to bringing Masterharper of Pern with me on my honeymoon (read it on the flight) and today I still am reading the books. Not too many authors have that kind of long term impact.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I grew up before video games and even though I wasted far too much time in front of the TV I still found time to lose myself in the works of authors like McCaffery, Zelazny, Tolkein, Maxwell and others. In college I could read for half an hour between classes. Sometimes it was classwork but towards the end of the day I needed entertainment. I still remember the day I found the first two Pern books on the shelf of a used bookstore. The cover art sold them. I wore them out reading them and wanted more but had to wait until the first book of the Harper Hall series was released.
She has had a full life doing what she loved. I loved her work, it is a legacy that will live on. The world is a sadder place without her. Thank you for the stories.
And PernMUSH was one of the first of them, starting just a couple years after TinyMUD. All text of course. The "book and imagination" analogue to the 3D MMOs we have today.
McCaffrey's love scenes, wooing, and relationships were very different from typical SF fare. Typical for a romance novel, perhaps? (I wouldn't know, don't read that genre.) Some people don't care for that in their SF, but I enjoyed the novelty.
Most SF leans towards casual, kinky sex, like Niven's interspecies sex on the Ringworld. Treats it all technically and distantly, or as a tool for manipulation or sealing deals. In Star Trek, seems the crew is often getting drugged with strange fluids, hit with plant spores, tempted with sexy robots, shapeshifting aliens, holodeck creations, or otherwise being enticed or forced into some sort of quickie, cheapie when they are busy with other matters. Sex as a mere plot device, and love as an impediment that could interfere with your duties, an inconvenient holdover from primitive times that has little place in modern life. Worst of all, you always knew almost all the changes in relationships would be rebooted for the next episode. True, the dragons of Pern imposed upon human sex life. However, McCaffrey cared enough about it not to do stuff like reboots.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I've been reading Anne McCaffrey since I first found "Dragonsong" and "To Ride Pegasus" in my school library in year 8 (~13 years old) - some 25 years ago. To this day Dragonsong is still my favourite of the Pern books. I spent the next few years hunting down and buying (with my very limited money at the time) every Anne McCaffrey book I could get my hands on. I still have all of them - I love seeing "RRP: $3.75" ... I don't have every one of her books - I've missed some of each of the Ship books, Tower and Hive series, Peetaybee and Acorna. One of these days I need to fill in my collection, but with the price of books these days ...
"Restoree" is possibly my favourite of her books. It's her first, and it has a rawness to it that I find very appealing. You can see the genesis of many of of the ideas that appeared in her later stories - for example the inhuman aliens that are so evident in several series.
Interestingly, I've been re-reading a random selection of her books the last few days - "Red Star Rising"; "Dragonsdawn"; "Dolphins of Pern" and "Pegasus in Space". It's one of the things I love about her writing - if you know the worlds she's built, you can pick up nearly any of her books and enjoy it in isolation. Less so for a tight series like "The Crystal Singer" though.
The Dragonlady has gone between.
Anne was one of the first female authors that I managed to find in the SF&F field. She was one of the first authors I read that had really great, strong female characters. She helped teach me that you don't have to be a man to be smart, strong, successful, that you don't have to be a man to be a hero. Her fiction helped shape my perspective, along with authors like Andre Norton and eventually (scoff if you will) Mercedes Lackey. Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.