Wow, I just read, in a Facebook comment no less, that she died this week.
So sad.

That woman brought far more creativity directly into this world in her 30s than that wanker businessman Steve jobs did in his entire life. It's a shame she wasn't eulogised even a fraction as much by the popular press.

She was a great woman and really blazed a trail for female fantasy and SciFi writers everywhere. she was even one of the first writers to include themes about couples living in positive, loving homosexual relationships and even raising children in a time when writers still routinely portrayed homosexual people as sick, twisted freaks who's only honourable course was to kill themselves. -Far more progressive than the Harry Potter lady who even in the 2000's all she could do was say cowardly that one of her characters was gay after the fact…

McCaffery is a writer who had a very significant effect on the literately landscape (particularly in SciFi and Fantasy) world wide for multiple generations.

Never read any of her books but have been meaning to for years. true about the paving the way thing, now female fantasy authors out number the male ones.

I tried to read one of her dragony books as a teenager, but just couldn't get into it. However, I had a friend who was simply bonkers over her books. I can definitely say the Pern books were a huge inspiration to her, so I can respect the books and the lady who wrote them, even if they weren't my thing.

Her Pern series (the dragon stuff) was her early big breakout success, so inevitably she became chained to them as her bread and butter series- she had to keep making them because the fans, her publishers and the market demanded it.
The earlier ones were great, but the quality fell off as she got older and lost her enthusiasm for them.
I personally came to her through that series because I was big into fantasy back then and I'd read all the fantasy books in the school library. The Pern books were a clever cross-over into SciFi…

But her other series became far more interesting to me. She really excelled in more pure SciFi, but SciFi from a very “female” perspective. Her characters and situations were a lot more “human” and more solidly characterised than most of her counterparts, she didn't just focus on the situations and plot, but rather rounded out her characters by giving them logical and interesting relationships, she also grounded them in the mundane and domestic (preparing meals, sorting out sleeping arrangements, tidying up), and that contrast with the SciFi setting helped to give things a lot more reality and colour, made the scenarios more immersive.

Now two of my absolute favorite scifi writers (Andre Norton being the other) are dead? :(

I hadn't heard this one yet, and I will have to share it with my mother.

I loved her Pern books. “The White Dragon” was a favorite of mine, and “All the Weyrs of Pern” really killed me in the end. I also came to REALLY love her Brainship/city series. You want to talk about complicated relationships? The brain/brawn interactions in her books are heartwrenchingly real. Of the series, the best I thought was “The Ship Who Searched.”

This is really sad news indeed. RIP Ms. McCaffery, thank you for sharing your superb talent with the world and inspiring girls worldwide to be writers…to stretch their boundaries…

I just started reading a collection of her short stories a mere three days ago. So yeah, this comes as something of a surprise.

Naturally, I only have a very basic grasp of her work since I'm just now dipping my toes in it. Still, what I like about her stuff so far is that it doesn't seem like a lot of the fantasy/sci-fi I've gone through in the past. More than a few writers in this genre tend to put more effort into world building than into characterization. It reminds me of that scene in Lord of the Rings where Tolkien goes on about a glass of water for what seems like seven goddamned pages.

Anne MCafferyseems to have a very expansive universe that she populates her characters in. At the same time, however, all the stories I've read have placed the feelings, motivations, and foibles of the characters first.

I like that.

Air Raid Robertson wrote:
I just started reading a collection of her short stories a mere three days ago. So yeah, this comes as something of a surprise.

Naturally, I only have a very basic grasp of her work since I'm just now dipping my toes in it. Still, what I like about her stuff so far is that it doesn't seem like a lot of the fantasy/sci-fi I've gone through in the past. More than a few writers in this genre tend to put more effort into world building than into characterization. It reminds me of that scene in Lord of the Rings where Tolkien goes on about a glass of water for what seems like seven goddamned pages.

Anne MCafferyseems to have a very expansive universe that she populates her characters in. At the same time, however, all the stories I've read have placed the feelings, motivations, and foibles of the characters first.

I like that.

Very eloquently put!