Acclaimed science fiction writer Anne McCaffrey was born in 1926 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. McCaffrey published her first short stories in the 1950s, both to great success. While one earned a $100 prize, another was published and later anthologized in The Year's Best Science Fiction. She attended her first Milford Writer's Workshop in 1959. It was at a later workshop that she began work on her first novel Restoree, which was inspired by the desire to see a powerful woman in a science fiction story instead of one needing to be rescued. She began publishing her first dragon stories in the late sixties, earning both the Hugo and Nebula awards for her short fiction. She was secretary-treasurer for Science Fiction Writers of America from 1968 through 1970. In 1970, emigrated to Ireland, where she lived for the rest of her life. McCaffrey was one of the science fiction writers to make it to the New York Times Best Sellers list. She was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Indicted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and received the prestigious Robert Heinlein Award. She passed away in 2011 at the age of eighty-five.
Her Dragonriders of Pern series is her most popular and influential of all her work. She released two novellas in the late 60s, collected and released as Dragonflight. Dragonflight earned her a Hugo and Nebula award. She was the first woman to receive each. The White Dragon, the third in her original trilogy, was the first science fiction novel to reach the New York Times Best Seller List. McCaffrey published twenty-four Pern novels in her lifetime. She also began co-writing them with her son, who has continued the series after her death. This intriguing mix of science fiction, fantasy, politics, and survival remains one of the best-loved speculative fiction series of all time. Today, we take a look at some of the best quotes from the series.
“Living was struggling to do something impossible - to succeed or die, knowing you had tried!”
--Dragonflight
“There's something wrong in not appreciating one's own special abilities, my girl. Find your own limitations, yes, but don't limit yourself with false modesty.”
--Dragonsinger
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“Exchange information, learn to speak sensibly about any subject, learn to express your thoughts, accept new ones, examine them, analyze. Think objectively. Think toward the future.”
--The White Dragon
“To cry was to release all sorts of ugly little pressures and tensions. Like waking out of a long, dark dream to a sun-filled day.”
--Nerilka's Story
“We spend long enough in one place to make friends and understand different ways of doing things. That’s far better, to my mind, than never moving out of one valley all your born days, and never hearing a new way of speaking or a new way of doing. Keeps the brain blood circulating; shifts ideas and opens eyes and hearts.”
--The Renegades of Pern
“When speech is restricted, all men suffer,”
--All the Weyrs of Pern
“One can forgive almost anything except one’s own stupidities.”
--Dragonseye
“Always, in the end, only we can answer our own questions”
--Dragon's Time
“I choose not to wrap myself up in grief over things I cannot change, cannot control, and, instead take joy in all the gifts I've been presented. Rather than rail against the moments I cannot have, I will cherish those I do--instead of squandering them in useless rage.”
--Dragon's Time
