R.I.P. Anne
You gave a lot of pleasure to a lot of people.
I enjoyed your books.
Author of the Dragonrider series of books, Anne McCaffrey, died on Monday aged 85, having authored a huge number of books that straddled the border between science fiction and fantasy. The author suffered a stroke at her home in Ireland on Monday, and passed away shortly afterwards. Her publisher, Del Rey, posted a …
Sad news - the Pern books were amongst the other books that I read while growing up, but they are the only ones that went from a fantasy-world to a science-fiction world, they showed what a good story teller could do.
I agree through that the descriptions of people were enough to tell if someone was to be a goodie or a baddie, still interesting stores.
ttfn
Most events have a multitude of different interpretations - basically, for every event where there are N number of observers / participants, there are N+1 stories - One story for ecah viewpoint, but the objective actual event. And no two of those stories are the same - each one is fitered by the viewpoint character's perceptions.
So - Re-examining a particular story line through many different points of view is not only valid and innovative, but is an interesting and efficient way of telling stories.
I've actually read this story. It was, as she said, fairly soft porn, soft enough to be included in a collection of her short stories that could be bought in normal bookshops.
And no, it wasn't among her best writing, either. As porn it suffered by having too much of her hallmark political intrigues, and as political intrigue it suffered by having too much porn. A sort of lose-lose situation.
Unlike most Authors she helped newcomers. Her love of Opera and Music is obvious.
The later Pern books maybe suffer by being more written to satisfy the demands of Pernese Fandom than her own. Plenty of good reading apart from Pern or the later Pern books.
Many of her books are better than some more popular authors. Depends what you expect. Pern is a tricky mix of SF and Fantasy actually.
not that i disagree mind you.. but this has got to be an attempt at winning FOTW..
the early dragon books were worth the effort .. but then i grew older and wound up re-reading a couple a few years later.. i still enjoyed them. they were3 per force short books and therre's only so much you can do given the space.. but on the whole, lovely fun reads.
i alsways liked her biog '..subject to change without notice'
She'll be missed.
It's been a while since I've picked up a Pern book (and I never could get into any of her other series), but I remember getting so involved reading Moreta that I started to panic when I sneezed while reading it. Then, of course, my brain kicked in and I remembered the plague was only happening in the book. The really funny thing is that I watched my room mate do the exact same thing two weeks later.
Few books can draw me in that way. I consider it the mark of greatness when it happens.
She was for many years one of my favourite authors. So much, that I paid full price on launch day for "Dragondrums" IN HARDBACK, in the days when books were published in hardback many months before they appeared in paperback, and were horribly expensive.
I'm trying to think of a suitable quite from something like "The Ship who Sang" or "Masterharper of Pern", or even from "Dragonsong" (something from the dirge sung by Menolly during Petrion's Dirge would be suitable), but memory fails me.
One rather telling comment was that her health was failing noticably over the past few years and people close to her stated that it was her fans that kept her going. Many of the later stories driven by her massive and dedicated fan base, many of which would visit her at home.
Jacqui
p.s. get some of the audio books read by the author - deffo adds something to the tale.
I read the Pern books as a teenager and student before giving up when the sequel to The White Dragon was released (and it all seemed too neatly tied off, thanks, with excessively blatant disregard for physics). However, it left an impression somewhere, because twenty years later, the name of one of her characters bubbled out of my subconscious into the name of an MMORPG character I was creating. (And then eighteen months later I finally looked it up to see if I could find out where the name had come from...)
My first reaction to the news was: Oh, no more stories for young girls with the ponies replaced by fluffy dragons. But a quick look at the bookshelf was a pleasant reminder of what an entertaining and varied author she really was. Starting off with Restoree as a first novel was impressive all on its own. But then the Ship Who... and Crystal series really brought it home to me. While I may not be much of a Pern fan, she certainly knew how to tell a good tale. Get Off The Unicorn remains one of my favourite collections of short stories, serves as the source for several longer works and has one of the best tales about naming a book to boot...
... and The Tower and the Hive are the two series I keep going back to. Pern is so rich, but I am never sure how I like the change from the original books' fantasy underpinnings to the somewhat dodgy sci-fi of the later books (AIVAS just wasn't plausible enough in terms of surviving all that time, and I am a Star Trek fan!)
... about homosexuality in specific:
"It’s a proven fact that a single anal sex experience causes one to be homosexual. The hormones released by a sexual situation involving the anus being broached, are the same hormones found in large quantities in effeminate homosexual males. For example, when I was much younger I knew a young man who was for all intents and purposes, heterosexual. He was mugged, and involved in a rape situation involving a tent peg. This one event was enough to have him start on a road that eventually led to him becoming effeminate and gay. "
I read all her books growing up but she started going wacky kookoo near the end. Still sad to see her go, she did bring a unique character to the SFF world.
Yeah. Mmm. Had some odd ideas indeed. One laughable one from the Pern stories involved a computer that had survived thousands of years intact and that housed an AI with a human speech capability and interface reminding its students to "back up their hard drives" after a learning session.
Authors. Can't stop putting their own life experiences on paper no matter how silly.
As for the unpronounceable F'nor and Mnementh: Really? Okay, F'nor is pronounced like Fynor without the "y", and Mnementh is pronounced in the same way anyone who deals with computers for a living would pronounce "mnemonic", it being a fairly common word in IT.
Even I know *that*.