RIP, Anne McCaffrey
tor.com
tor.com
Sad that slowly the writers I loved as a kid are dying. Last year was Diana Wynne Jones, who wasn't as popular as McCaffrey but whom I always loved the most. Now this. I couldn't often get into McCaffrey's style but she influenced many of the authors I loved, to the point where I can't think of dragons without thinking of her.
I hope that her life was joyful and her passing was peaceful.
Be careful with the word "hack" in this case, though; it means something very different in the literary world than it does in the tech world! :)
But I agree with you. Generally speaking, the best fantasy and sci-fi writing can raise and tackle real-world issues in very bold ways -- ways that, in almost any other genre, would be considered too ballsy, or too crazy, or too preachy to address.
Like Mozart, she created a lot of works that she and her fans really loved.
Although speaking as a poet, poetry is absolutely a hack genre, and so's magical realism and travel writing. Poetry: uses line breaks to create tension within individual sentences using enjambment, creates a visual structure that helps guide the reader from line to line, stanza to stanza. Magical realism: similar to surrealism in that it breaks the confines of reality to make a deeper, "truer" statement. Travel writing: literally hacks the world by creating a map of information (if you meant travel guides) and emotion (if you meant travel literature) which connects with the world around it. A way of bringing people to the rest of the world without the cost of gas/plane tickets/a horse/oxen.
May she rest in peace.
It's sad to see an author die, but wonderful to know that McCaffrey is popular enough to live on for a very long time.
I think I got my copy when the Science Fiction book club sent it to me because something else I had ordered wasn't in stock. I thought "sure, I'll give it a shot" and I was hooked.
Is it great literature? No. But it was one of the first fantasy series I ever read, and I still read through them every few years.
In fact, I think I'm going to start it again tonight.
RIP, Anne McCaffrey.
But man when I was young but the dragon riders series was the first one which really gave me that escapism I was looking for as a kid. Those, the Belgariad by Eddings - and (of all things) the Tin Tin series. Ah fond memories.
Now its more China Mieville, John Courtenay Grimwood and even sometimes that Stross fellow.
Her work had become merely formulaic to me as I grew, with a few exceptions. But before I knew what those formulas were - wow. Some poignant and dramatic stuff. I felt for her characters.
(I'm not Pernese myself, though I am a drake. But it seems fitting.)
If you like sci-fi -- The Rowan
I was a big fan of her stories when I was younger.
May she rest in peace.
It's tempting to try and compare one of her books to, say, one of Louis McMaster Bujold's works, and sneer that McCaffrey was just a hack. And perhaps she was, but that rather misses the point. Bujold started writing in a world that already had McCaffrey in it (and McCaffrey blurbed some of Bujold's early work very positively too).
McCaffrey was a pioneer. No, she wasn't the first, but she was one OF the first, and one of the first to be widely popular, and certainly one of the first female authors to be widely popular. All of which are major achievements.
I couldn't begin to imagine how many kids got their first taste of sci-fi/fantasy because their local library had a pile of McCaffrey's Dragonrider books. And if many of them went on to "better books" later in life, and have barely gave McCaffrey's work another thought in the years since, well...it doesn't change McCaffrey's contribution. There's a non-zero number of readers (and, come to that, authors) who wouldn't be around reading (and writing) if it wasn't for McCaffrey.
RIP Anne McCaffrey.