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Trailblazing Sci-Fi Legend Anne McCaffery Passes Away At 85

Has it really been just over a decade since I met her? Anne McCaffery was one of my childhood idols. I remember carrying the Dragonriders of Pern with me to school in eighth grade, and just after Terry Pratchett, she is, perhaps, one of the most influential authors in my life. She passed away yesterday at the age of 85.

It was at DragonCon 99 that I met Ms McCaffery as she went from place to place on her scooter. I remember getting to shake her hand. At the time, I was a journalist for the now long defunct Sojourner, a sci-fi web mag.

McCaffery was, we believe, the inspiration for the Pratchett character of Sybil Ramkin-Vimes, the dragon lady and dragon breeder in his Discworld novels. This we only knew after meeting her for the first time. She had a rather regal bearing back then.

She was a trailblazer. She was the first sci-fi writer to hit the top of the New York Times Bestsellers List- even before Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. Wired’s Matt Blum wrote that “McCaffrey helped pave the way for women writers in fantasy and science fiction, and was both the first woman awarded a Hugo Award and the first awarded a Nebula Award. Even in her 80s she continued to write, and over her lifetime produced a prodigious number of books and short stories. She was still answering readers’ mail on her website as of a few weeks ago.”

Anne Inez McCaffery was born in Cambridge, Mass back in 1926, but lived much of her life “in a house of her own design, Dragonhold-Underhill (because she had to dig out a hill on her farm to build it) in Wicklow County, Ireland.”

CBS noted that

Her most famous work was her Dragonriders of Pern series, although in an interview, she professed that her novel, “The Ship who Sang,” was her personal favorite.

In August, her son wrote on her blog that she was having health issues, and would be unable to attend a popular science fiction gathering, writing: “Mum very specifically asked me to apologize to those who had hoped to see her there, saying: ‘Sorry that old age came up and bit me on the a**.’