SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) Grand Master Anne McCaffrey, 85, died November 21, 2011 of a massive stroke at home in Ireland.
McCaffrey is best known for her long-running Pern series of SF novels and stories. She was the first woman to win both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, with “Weyr Search” (1968) and “Dragonrider” (1969) respectively. Pern novel The White Dragon (1978) was the first hardcover SF novel to make the New York Times bestseller list. Many of the later books in the Pern series were written in collaboration with McCaffrey’s son Todd.She was a great storyteller. According to her website, she wrote her first novel as a reaction to how poorly women were depicted in 1950's and 1960's science fiction. At last count she had written or coauthored over 100 titles.
She said in a Locus interview in 2004,
I think the best story I ever wrote was 'The Ship Who Sang'. It still causes people to cry, including me. When Todd and I were reading it at Brighton, they had a BBC crew filming it. So there were these BBC cameramen hunkered down filming us, and comes the end of the story (which Todd always reads, because I can't go through it without weeping), I saw that these cameramen had tears rolling down their faces.If you want to read "The Ship Who Sang", you can download it or read it here.
That's terribly sad news. Anne McCaffrey is one of my favorite authors and the Dragonriders of Pern series was my first foray into scifi/fantasy. As a tween I gained a reputation with my tiny hometown library for constantly requesting interlibrary loans to get through a few of her series. I'm not sure I ever read any of the Ship series, but Moreta was the first and only book to ever make me cry.
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