R.I.P. Anne McCaffrey

Anne McCaffrey died on Monday at age 85. The io9 Obituary has some wonderful anecdotes. and the msnbc article has the most information.

I really can't believe this piece of news. On the other hand, I can, she's been a fixture of my science fiction reading for so long that it's not really surprising. I kind of think that one of her books might have been the first true science fiction novel I read.

If my memory serves, it was The Dolphins of Pern, and a friend had left it in the car, so I picked it up and started to read it. Pretty quickly I was hooked - and getting scolded for not reading the series in order. Apparently, I should have started with Dragonflight and Dragonquest.

Since then though, Anne McCaffrey has been one of my favourite science fiction and fantasy authors - sharing that space with Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Elizabeth Moon.

The Pern novels weren't Anne McCaffrey's only series. She also wrote (with co-writers sometimes) the Petaybee books (Power Lines, Power Play and The Powers that Be), the Brainships series, which included The Ship Who Sang (co-written with Mercedes Lackey) and The Ship Who Searched among other books in the series, plus a whole lot of individual books.

Thank you for so many years of wonderful books and reading.