Line #9 Creator/AnneMcCaffrey


1	[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/0003a4t0_6112.jpg]]
2	[[caption-width-right:300:A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.]]
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4	Anne Inez [=McCaffrey=] (1st April 1926 - 21st November 2011) was a prolific sci-fi/fantasy writer of over one hundred novels, short stories and compilations. Best known for the Literature/DragonridersOfPern series, she also authored several other popular, long-running series. Those include:
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6	* '''"Literature/TheShipWho"''' (Five books, including one each in collaboration with Margaret Ball, Creator/MercedesLackey, Jody Lynn Nye, and Creator/SMStirling)
7	* '''Literature/CrystalSinger''' (three novels). Set vaguely in ''Literature/TheShipWho'' universe, though the former series does not mention the latter.
8	* '''Dinosaur Planet''' (two novels)/'''Literature/PlanetPirates''' (three novels, written with Nye and Creator/ElizabethMoon). Both series are set in the same universe, with some of the same characters, but have different focuses.
9	* '''Literature/TowerAndTheHive''' aka ''Rowan'' or ''Talents'' (five novels)/'''Literature/ToRidePegasus''' (three novels)
10	* '''Literature/{{Petaybee}}/Twins of Petaybee''' (six total, co-written with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough)
11	* '''Literature/{{Catteni}}''' (four novels)
12	* '''[[Literature/AcornaSeries Acorna]]/Acorna's Children''' (ten total, with Ball and Scarborough)
13	* '''The Barque Cats''' (Semi-SpinOff of the Talents series, one books so far with Scarborough)
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15	[=McCaffrey=]'s best known compilation of short stories is probably ''The Girl Who Heard Dragons''; notable not only for the title story (which was eventually expanded into ''The Renegades of Pern''), but for a 1956 speculative fiction story that predicted surrogate pregnancy more than two decades before the first successful such birth.
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17	Her writing--starting with the short novel ''Restoree''--was lauded for its groundbreaking feminist attitudes. These may seem extremely subtle to young readers, but simply having a female protagonist in a science fiction story was [[FairForItsDay novel at the time]]. Throughout her writing since, her female characters have become even more powerful and independent, proportional to the expectations of her audience.
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19	As is common with many of the writers who arrived early to the science fiction genre, quite a lot of the tropes she explored for the first time in her writing have since been used ''ad naseaum'' [[OnceOriginalNowCommon by subsequent writing]].
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21	[=McCaffrey=] became almost as well known for her odd ideas regarding gay people as for her writing. In particular, she has stated a belief that any gay activity, particularly [[RapeAndSwitch anal penetration]], will make a man instantly and irretrievably gay (an idea first put forth in the infamous, but still unverified, "Tent Peg" interview and implied in her on-the-record "Renewable Air Force" interview). Ironically, in the last book of the Talent series she turns a previously [[NoBisexuals exclusively]] gay character totally and apparently permanently straight for a LastMinuteHookUp with a female main character -- [[CleaningUpRomanticLooseEnds can't leave anyone single]], after all. Despite this, she has written at least two short stories involving [[MisterSeahorse men becoming pregnant]], though both involve alien/fantastical females doing the impregnation: "Babes In The Woods" from her ''Get Off the Unicorn'' collection and "A Horse From A Different Sea". She also was a rather adamant defender of copyright and had a tendency to sic lawyers after any gathering of fanworks published, [[NewMediaAreEvil especially once the internet started taking off.]] This policy was relaxed later on.
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23	In her later years, [=McCaffrey=] herself wrote mostly collaborations and largely turned over the continuation of the Pern series to her son, Todd. Pern, while originally being a high-fantasy story with some (very loose) science-fiction aspects, has recently undergone a metamorphosis, in which the original Pern colonists' landing site is discovered. While 'modern' Pern society has neither the capability nor the desire to return to the stars, they have embraced the technological aspects of the original 'Landing' settlement, becoming computer-literate fairly quickly and re-discovering much of the technology that was lost centuries before.
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25	!!Works by Anne [=McCaffrey=] with their own pages include:
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27	[[index]]
28	* ''Literature/AcornaSeries''
29	* ''Literature/{{Catteni}}'' series
30	* ''Literature/{{Doona}}'' series
31	* ''Literature/DragonridersOfPern'' series
32	* ''Literature/CrystalSinger'' series
33	* ''Literature/{{Petaybee}}'' series
34	* ''Literature/PlanetPirates'' series
35	* ''Literature/{{Restoree}}''
36	* ''Literature/TheShipWho...'' series
37	* ''Literature/ToRidePegasus'' trilogy
38	* ''Literature/TowerAndTheHive'' series
39	[[/index]]
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41	!!Other works by Anne [=McCaffrey=] provide examples of:
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43	* AbsoluteXenophobe: Inverted in ''Decision at Doona'', where mankind's "no contact with intelligent aliens ever" policy came about when, upon the first-ever such contact in history, the alien species in question [[spoiler:promptly committed mass suicide]].
44	* CanonWelding:
45	** The incidental details of ''Crystal Singer'' series include BB Ships, the main plot device of [=McCaffrey=]'s earlier ''Literature/TheShipWho...'' stories.
46	** The short story "Duty Calls" includes both a BB Ship and a Hrruban (the alien race from ''Decision at Doona''), tying those two series together.
47	* CatFolk: The Hrrubans in the ''Doona'' series.
48	* DeathWorld: Ireta, the setting of ''Dinosaur Planet'', has an extremely active ecology, complete with a mix of toxic alien life and adapted prehistoric Earth life. There are even insect swarms that eat dinosaurs bones and all.
49	* {{Demythification}}: ''Black Horses for the King'' is a demythification of Myth/ArthurianLegend, told from the viewpoint of a stable boy.
50	* FaceFullOfAlienWingWong: In the short story "Horse From A Different Sea", a small town doctor notices that a large number of his male patients are having odd symptoms like nausea, weight gain and unusual cravings. The men have nothing in common but visiting one particular person in a "house of ill-repute". After running every test he could think of the doctor finds out the men are pregnant, and the woman they all visited is dying - and she burns up ''quickly'' with one cigarette when he goes to investigate. Looking at contacts and news reports the doctor discerns that this is happening all along the East Coast.
51	* FirstContact: The first contact that accidentally happens in ''Decision at Doona'' isn't technically mankind's ''first'' first contact, but the fact that that first-ever alien culture encountered [[spoiler:committed mass suicide]] in response drives much of the novel's plot by informing the human policies established afterwards to prevent anything like that from ever happening again. One of these is "non-coinhabitation"; humans aren't allowed to live on the same planets as intelligent alien lifeforms, period. Which creates a problem when the first human settlers on the new colony world of Doona run smack into just such an intelligent alien lifeform that the initial surveyors somehow managed to miss... [[spoiler:Because the "natives" are actually new colonists from another planet, who find themselves in the same boat!]]
52	* HighlyConspicuousUniform: In the short story "Duty Calls", the Hrruban officer first appears wearing shades and dyes that would seem to make her stand out a mile away. It is explained that the camouflage was chosen specifically to hide her from the alien race occupying the planet she's infiltrating, since they do not ''see'' the same way.
53	* MasterOfYourDomain: The ''Dinosaur Planet'' books feature "Discipline": a full-featured body-control/pain-control/emotion-control/adrenal-control technique that many of the characters practice.
54	* MisterSeahorse: A short story in which an alien prostitute impregnates several men living in a small town. The title, "A Horse From A Different Sea", references the seahorse analogy. The doctor gives all these patients abortions as he doesn't know how these pregnancies will end, and doesn't describe what the embryos are like but they are certainly not human.
55	* NamingYourColonyWorld: ''Nimisha's Ship'' has a planet named Erewhon, which is perfectly descriptive.
56	* RescueSex: In "The Thorns of Barevi", which [=McCaffrey=] wrote as a ... profit-seeking experiment with fantasy softcore, a young woman and a male HumanAlien evade pursuers with the help of the eponymous plants, then have sex.
57	* SesquipedalianLoquaciousness: Not all the time, but in the anthology ''Get Off The Unicorn'', she prefaces two of the stories with "Both are unashamed love stories. That's what I do best: combining either science fact or fantasy with heterogenous inter-reaction"

Context Creator / AnneMcCaffrey