13 thoughts on “RIP Anne McCaffrey”

  1. You do realize that she would have been very upset at intimations her work was fantasy, right? But I do agree with you that was the “feel” of it and arguably how she managed a bestselling sf series (she had careful explanations for everything) in a time when fantasy was very ascendant.

    1. I don’t, actually. That’s how little of her stuff I read (I may have read one, decades ago). I guess I judged the books by the covers. So whatever she did worked to get fantasy fans, but not me.

      1. The first few Pern books (Up through the end of The White Dragon) didn’t do anything to self-classify as either Fantasy or Science Fiction, despite the teleporting dragons.

        Towards the end of TWD, it’s brought suddenly home that this was Science Fiction all along. Which wasn’t a surprise, because so much of Fantasy involves super-human forces that the human battles are proxies for. Pern just had people.

        The Ship Who Sang series, and many others, were flat-out SF.

          1. It is actually about as far from fantasy as you can get once you know the whole story. There is no magic involved – just orbital mechanics, a little genetic engineering, and some imagination about what a total technological collapse of a post colonization civilization would look like. It is actually pretty amazing where she let science take her stories. If you are patient enough to actually get to the space walks, I highly recommend the entire dragonriders arc.

          3. That’s actually one of the things about SpaceX that I’m not thrilled with. I’d have come up with a different name. But I imagine each ship will get its own name, unless they just number them.

  2. I don’t know, it at least pre-empted potential Chinese use of it (even if our European notions of dragons are quite different from Asian ones)…

    1. Somehow I doubt that someone else actively using the name will stop the Chinese from also using it if they want to. 🙂

  3. She made it clear that the dragons had been genetically engineered in the distant past by the original settlers on Pern & there’d been,like Jrman said,a societal collapse long ago.
    She was good friends with Isaac Asimov,who,when they sang together,would complain that she could hold a note much longer than he could by pointing at her ample chest & saying “No fair,she has extra lungs!” 😀

  4. I confess to a weakness for dragons, coming from a city whose symbol is the dragon and whose people often refer to themselves as dragons. Now, for my books the sign I’m in trouble and back and filling madly is when I get centaurs in. My husband is used to the moan “oh, no, I have centaurs” which means something went badly wrong with the novel.

  5. I drive past a bay with many buoys where cormorants like to perch. They’ll spread their wings wide and just stand there on these little balloon buoys. They’re far enough away that they make a pretty convincing fire lizard (details like feathers and skull shape fuzzed). Something about the wing conformation just screams ‘reptile’ to me.

    Anyway, RIP Anne.

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