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RIP: Anne McCaffrey

11/22/2011 Sonia Lal6 Comments

I read online Anne McCaffrey might have passed away and my reaction was: please don’t let her be dead.

Than I read on GalleyCat she was dead.

I loved her books. Still do. In fact, I have a couple in hard cover. That’s pretty amazing, considering how few physical books I actually own. A dozen, maybe, all told. Most of the physical books I own are paperback. Maybe three or four are hard cover.

I’ve held onto them for a long, long time and despite preferring ebooks, I am not likely to get rid of them anytime soon.

So yeah. She was – and remains! – one of my favorite authors.

My first Anne McCaffrey book was Dragonsong. I was 14 and I hadn’t read anything quite like it. I loved the dragons, the fire lizards, the harpers, everything.

I read it as fantasy and discovered later the author described them (them being all the Pern novels) as science fiction. I am pretty sure that was the first time I discovered the writer could mean a book to be one thing and the fans another.

Lyon’s Pride was probably the first book I read about characters with telepathy.

Her Brain and Brawn books were pretty amazing and I still reread them every so often. I mean, the idea of an otherwise crippled person flying through space? I loved it.

And I still haven’t read anything else quite like her Crystal Singer stories.

I spent a good chunk of my teenage years reading Anne McCaffrey’s books. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t read a lot of science fiction before her, but she was a lot of firsts for me.

From what I’ve seen online, a lot of people start reading SF in grade school. So maybe 14 is a bit to really start reading a lot of fantasy/science fiction, but aside from the odd children’s book, I didn’t really read much SF until high school.

I am pretty sure Anne McCaffrey is one the reasons I love to read SF.

She’s written so many books. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read most and it’s hard to pick out just one. Dragonsong is still probably the one I reread most often.

I am very sorry she won’t be writing anymore. RiP, Anne McCaffrey.