R.I.P Anne McCaffrey

On the 21st of November 2011 the world lost one of it's best novelists, an award winning author of sci-fi and fantasy, Anne McCaffrey really was one in a million paving the way for hundreds of authors to come. She changed the world of sci-fi and fantasy forever and proved with her first novel Restoree that female leads could be heroes rather than damsels, and with The White Dragon being one of the first sci-fi novels to land on New York Times Best Seller List she proved that sci-fi and fantasy fiction deserved to be taken just as seriously as any other. To quote Wikipedia, 'McCaffrey was the first woman to win any Nebula and the first woman to win a Hugo for a work of fiction.'



She is perhaps most famous for her Dragonriders of Pern series, which I first came across thanks to my dad who, knowing my insane love for dragons, bought me both Dragonflight, the first in the series, and The Skies of Pern. I was young at the time, just hitting my teens and I admit I largely found The Skies of Pern out of my depth and did not understand why I was reading about sci-fi when I had expected fantasy. Dragonflight however I devoured over and over, it still to this day remains my favourite in the series, I loved Lessa and F'lar, I loved how the dragons had personalities and could talk, everything about the book just reached out to me and pulled me in.

Now I love all the series, adoring its mixture of sci-fi and fantasy, it is the only sci-fi series I own and I am glad it was able to help me see that sci-fi could be more than Star Trek and Star Wars and that somehow dragons could fit into this wonderful and original world.

I am still collecting and reading the books, I find most of them in charity shops, which for me is a real surprise and treat, and I am happy enough to extend into her son Todd's continuation of the series. I love the fact that there are so many books in the series to devour I never get tired of them.

Anne McCaffrey wrote many different series of books, so many in fact that I am simply in awe. She was a groundbreaking author and will forever be immortalised in her fiction. Her talent will sorely be missed and it is unlikely that anyone will ever hold a candle to it. She opened up the world to sci-fi, tough female heroines and female writers and changed the world of fiction forever.