Anne McCaffrey

Life

Anne Inez McCaffrey was born on 1 April 1926 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the daughter of an army colonel and city administrator, George Herbert McCaffrey, and Anne Dorothy McElroy. She grew up in New Jersey, a strong-willed girl who read Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs and was, by her own account, determined to be different. She studied Slavonic languages and literature at Radcliffe College, graduating cum laude in 1947, and worked in advertising and as a copywriter while also studying voice and performing in musical theater, a passion that surfaces in the singing Harpers of Pern.

In 1950 she married H. Wright Johnson, and they had three children. Her first story was published in 1953, but she wrote seriously only from the late 1950s, as a young mother in Wilmington, Delaware, and later on Long Island. Weeks after filing for divorce in 1970 she emigrated to Ireland with two of her children, drawn partly by the country's tax exemption for artists. There she eventually built Dragonhold-Underhill in County Wicklow, where she kept horses and hosted a stream of fans and collaborators. She was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2005 and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2006. She died at home in Ireland after a stroke on 21 November 2011.

Work

McCaffrey's early stories, collected as The Ship Who Sang (1969), were about a woman whose mind operates a starship. Then, in October 1967, Analog published "Weyr Search." On the planet Pern, colonists who have forgotten their origins live under the periodic threat of Thread, a spore that falls from a wandering planet and devours all organic matter. Their defense is great dragons, which breathe fire after chewing phosphine-bearing firestone, can teleport "between," and bond telepathically for life with the riders they choose at hatching — a process called Impression. The novella won the 1968 Hugo; its sequel "Dragonrider" won a Nebula; and the two were combined into the novel Dragonflight, published by Ballantine in 1968.

Dragonquest (1971) and The White Dragon (1978), one of the first science fiction books to reach the New York Times best-seller list, followed, along with the young-adult Harper Hall trilogy beginning with Dragonsong (1976). Over four decades Pern grew into more than twenty books, later written in collaboration with her son Todd McCaffrey. Together they are Dragonriders of Pern. McCaffrey insisted she wrote science fiction: the dragons turn out to be genetically engineered descendants of a small native species, and the lost history of the colony is gradually recovered.

Legacy

McCaffrey's greatest innovation was to turn the Dragon from the hoard-guarding enemy of myth and Tolkien into a beloved companion, telepathic partner and hero in its own right. That reversal has had a vast afterlife: the bonded dragon-and-rider pairing runs through later fantasy and games, from books like Naomi Novik's Temeraire series and Christopher Paolini's Eragon to the dragon-riding Romantasy of Fourth Wing.

McCaffrey is not on Gygax's Appendix N, and Pern did not supply D&D with rules or monsters — its dragons are closer to Science Fantasy than to the chromatic and metallic dragons of the game. But Pern crossed into games repeatedly. Epyx published Dragonriders of Pern (1983), a strategy game of diplomacy and Thread-fighting for the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers; Ubi Soft released Dragon Riders: Chronicles of Pern for the Dreamcast and Windows in 2001; and a board game of the same name was also produced. Most enduringly, fans built Pern-themed text worlds online. PernMUSH, one of the early MUSHes, became part of the lineage of the widely used PennMUSH server software, and Pern-themed MUSHes became a fixture of the roleplaying corners of the MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) world through the 1990s — players Impressing dragons and flying against Thread in pure text.