RIP Anne McCaffrey

Trawling through my emails this morning took me to Collins Bookshop (who have recently bought Seekbooks), where I discovered Anne McCaffrey passed away two days ago, aged 85.

Image from The Guardian, UK.

She is most well-known for her Dragonriders of Pern series, but she also co-authored at least a dozen novels with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. More recently, she co-wrote more Pern novels with her son Todd.

Not only was McCaffrey a talented and prolific writer, she was also a spearhead for women in genre fiction. In 1968, she was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for a work of fiction, and in 1969 became the first woman to win a Nebula Award. Also, she took the SF/F genre to the masses when she became the first author with a science fiction title on The New York Times Best Seller list in 1978 (The White Dragon).

McCaffrey was one of my first introductions to the Fantasy genre. I had no idea that these kinds of world could exist. I read Dragonflight straight after reading Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper and suddenly my world expolded with dragons and new and wonderful civilisations.

I must now go and find me a second-hand copy of Dragonflight...



ETA (26/11/11) - I also found out that Australian Fantasy author Sara Douglass passed away from ovarian cancer at the end of September. A beautiful obituary written by her friend Karen Brooks can be found here.