Anne McCaffrey isn't a young adult author. I've mentioned her a few times on the blog when I talk about my favorite books, but besides that, I've usually tiptoed around my love for her.
I can't do that tonight.
Earlier today, Anne McCaffrey passed away. She wasn't a young spring chicken - she was 85 - and she had had heart problems, so it's not exactly a shock. It hasn't stopped me from crying hysterically for the past two hours.
Anne is the author of dozens of science fiction novels. This includes the DragonRiders of Pern series, the Petaybee series, and the Tower and the Hive series, just to name a few.
I grew up on these books.
I didn't just grew up with these books; they shaped my life. I found The White Dragon when I was 9 and didn't really understand what I was reading at the time. I found a box of them in my garage a few years later and fell in love with them.
I don't know if I read them because of my natural love of dragons or because they were my dad's favorite novels. My dad passed away when I was 7 and I never really had a connection with him through anything until I read these books. I understood him, then, in a way I never had before. What he loved, how he saw the world through the things he read. I held the same copies he did, loved the same world he did.
Loved the same world created by Anne McCaffrey.
Anne knew that my father loved her books; my mom had contacted her a year or so before he died requesting her autograph as a birthday present to him. She wrote back and asked how many books he owned. At that time, he owned every one she had ever written - over 40.
She sent back autographed bookplates for every one.
So maybe I'm sobbing because one of the connections I had to my father has passed on and joined him in whatever there might be after death. Maybe I'm sobbing because her and my father are now having a conversation about dragons and how awesome they are and how they're so glad that I grew up loving them.
Or maybe I'm sobbing because a genuinely nice person died; a woman who made an effort to connect to her fans.
Maybe I'm sobbing because the first women to ever win a Hugo award and the first woman to ever win a Nebula award and a fantastic sci-fi author died. A brilliant author of a dozen different series that were each equally fantastic and amazing and wonderful has passed on, and we shall never see another work come from her.
Maybe I'm crying because the mind that invented the worlds I've wanted to live on since I was a child has disappeared, and I'll never find a sci-fi author who connects to my mind the same way again.
Rest in peace, Anne McCaffrey. Tell my dad I said hi, and know that you will be missed.
"Oh, Tongue, give sound to joy and sing/ Of hope and promise on dragonwing."
