Farewell to Anne McCaffrey
Typing this just a short while after the news came through – first on Twitter, then Facebook – that Anne McCaffrey has passed away of a stroke at the age of 85.
Like so many people, Anne and her creations have been a part of my life for decades, ever since my sister came back from university in 1990 with The White Dragon and told me I had to read it. I was ten, and some of it went over my head, but I still remember the moment a couple of years later when re-reading TWD in the car park of Tesco in Newton Abbot when it all suddenly clicked together.
That kick started a lifetime of Pern-related…stuff. First the inevitable self-insert fanfictions, in the days before the Internet when you wrote fanfic for yourself, furtively, in the back of school exercise books (the queens I inevitably Impressed were variously called Empeth and Radiath – really). Then, at any opportunity, dragged into my school work – to the dismay of my English teachers to whom fantasy was Not Literature. For my GCSE coursework I wrote a continuation of the saga – which was only at about All the Weyrs of Pern – mapping out where I thought it would go (I didn’t clock flying watchwhers, so – fail); at A-level I wrote a dissertation on the portrayal of women in fantasy, touching on Pern. By the time I’d gone to university the Internet had just started to get mainstream, and I launched into the world of online Weyrs with enormous gusto (and wrote my degree open paper on the phenomenon of fan fiction, which was really an excuse to justify the amount of time I spent writing fan fic when I should have been in the library). I renamed the bibliography the Pernography. No one laughed.
It was while I was at university that I met Anne, in 1998 – she was doing a book signing in Manchester, and I duly made my way over there to meet some friends from Lakesedge Weyr to go to the signing. There was a Q&A session; we asked about dragon sizes and got a murky answer that metres weren’t right. We were allowed to get up to three books signed, and I dropped my three right in front of Anne in a fit of nervous excitement. I’m looking now at the book she signed for me; a hardcover, cloth-bound special 30th anniversary edition of Dragonflight, one of a limited run of 1000, numbered 955. She got the date wrong – 11th June, when it was 12th June – but I wasn’t going to correct her.
Dragonchoice and its sequels have of course been the major output of my Pern fan fiction writing career, and although I’ve sometimes been critical of certain directions in which Pern has gone over the years, I think of DC as a love letter to the series that’s meant so much to me for so long; filling in some of the gaps that Anne never had time to fully explore.
A final thought: half the people on my Facebook are friends I met via the community of Pern fans.
RIP Anne. Pern was not the only world you enriched with your talent.
Continue to Dragonchoice 3: yes, finally, soon