EditorOne
Prolific Member
Any Anne McCaffrey fans here? She's died.
I started reading about dragons and Pern ten years after she started writing the books, enjoying them tremendously. As a writer she showed a lot of respect for the thinking ability of her young readers, and the series is much broader and more complex than you'd think from the first books (which are excellent science fiction/fantasy adventures, often featuring women and girls as the protagonists.)
If you haven't read them and are interested (I especially recommend them for the younger folks in here) by all means start at the beginning. The reader shares various epiphanies with the characters as Pern's past is slowly figured out from book to book, but only if you start where they start, at their beginning. Even the obituary writers had the grace not to include a "spoiler" in describing her work.
She often sounds themes that resonate in here, like the difficulty of dealing with hidebound traditionalists and small thinkers and whatnot. A lot of her characters ( I believe there are probably scores, if not hundreds, she was prolific in her bookwriting) sound a lot like us when we're bumping up against our cultural boundaries and whatnot. A lot of her characters take intuitive leaps, also, which then turn out to be right and make sense, which is a whole lot of fun to read.
I started reading about dragons and Pern ten years after she started writing the books, enjoying them tremendously. As a writer she showed a lot of respect for the thinking ability of her young readers, and the series is much broader and more complex than you'd think from the first books (which are excellent science fiction/fantasy adventures, often featuring women and girls as the protagonists.)
If you haven't read them and are interested (I especially recommend them for the younger folks in here) by all means start at the beginning. The reader shares various epiphanies with the characters as Pern's past is slowly figured out from book to book, but only if you start where they start, at their beginning. Even the obituary writers had the grace not to include a "spoiler" in describing her work.
She often sounds themes that resonate in here, like the difficulty of dealing with hidebound traditionalists and small thinkers and whatnot. A lot of her characters ( I believe there are probably scores, if not hundreds, she was prolific in her bookwriting) sound a lot like us when we're bumping up against our cultural boundaries and whatnot. A lot of her characters take intuitive leaps, also, which then turn out to be right and make sense, which is a whole lot of fun to read.
