Anne McCaffrey died of a stroke at home on Monday. It's hard to believe that McCaffrey, such a huge figure in the world of fantasy literature, is really gone.

 

McCaffrey was born in America in 1926, just in time to be a child during the Great Depression and WWII. In 1947 she graduated from Radcliffe College with a degree in Slavonic Languages and Literature. WWII clearly had a huge impact on her (and her cohort), and found its way into many of her books. The epic scale, the clash against an inhuman, unstoppable force, the feeling of a nation united against a single foe, and the primacy of aerial combat are all WWII tropes which became critical elements in her Dragonriders of Pern series.

 

McCaffrey began her career as a writer with science fiction stories in the 1950s. She used strong female protagonists from the beginning, in a field which not only discouraged female characters, it was also at the time often openly hostile to female authors. Many female authors had to resort to pseudonyms or using their initials in order to get published. 

 

 

In 1970, just a few weeks after finalizing the divorce with her husband of 20 years, McCaffrey moved to Ireland with her. She was smitten with the country when she first visited in 1968, and Ireland had recently issued incentives to artists, exempting them from income taxes. 

 

The first few  years in Ireland were tough, as the McCaffrey family struggled to get by on "child care payments and meager royalties." It was in Ireland that she wrote her first short story about dragons, and demand soon snowballed into one of the world's most popular fantasy series.

 

I read the Dragonriders of Pern series when I was a young teen, and pretty much everyone I knew did, too. It was one of the few science fiction or fantasy novels with strong female protagonists, and with younger characters that we could relate to. I almost dread the thought of re-reading the Dragonrider books as an adult, for fear of losing those nostalgic feelings of excitement and enthusiasm.

 

McCaffrey didn't just re-cast a bunch of Tolkein elements to create a fantasy world, either. She created it from the ground up, and took great care to make everything scientifically valid. (Also, dragons.) She was a tough lady who kicked ass in a tough field, and I will miss her.