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Post by TheSantaBarbarian on Nov 23, 2011 19:11:58 GMT -5
Anne McCaffrey, author of The Dragon Riders of Pern series is gone. I greatly enjoyed her stories. Thank you Anne, for your wonderful creation and many hours of entertainment. (I use "hide-bound" to describe the culture in which I work quite often.)
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Post by mikegarrison on Nov 23, 2011 21:31:48 GMT -5
I really liked her books when I was a pre-teen. The older I got (and the older she got), the less interesting I found them.
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Post by BoilerUp! on Dec 2, 2011 10:08:59 GMT -5
Anne McCaffrey also mentored a lot of my favorite authors. So, she had a great impact on my life. She is one of my favorite authors. People always put down her books as too simple in writing style, but she hooked me. And she had a lot of positive lessons for young readers. I would say she made an impact on the world.
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Post by OverAndUnder on Dec 13, 2011 21:28:31 GMT -5
Wow!
I had no idea she died recently, but about three weeks before Thanksgiving I woke up on a Sunday morning with the strange out-of-nowhere urge to re-read Dragonflight, after not thinking about it for (literally) decades. So I hunted down my old worn green-and-gold paperback (I almost never get rid of any book I've read) and dove in.
I was shocked at how clumsy it was. In my memory from mid-adolescence, reading it seemed almost a life-altering experience, and many times when the library bookmobile would come to our neighborhood I would go and pester the librarian to see if a new Pern book had arrived. My self-perception was that I was always a highly sophisticated reader. And maybe I was, relative to the average kid my age. But reading Dragonflight so many years later took just a few hours. The plot wasn't very thick and the supporting characters so vaguely sketched out, that I was able to merely scan through whole paragraphs of dramatic exposition that was pretty self-evident and not very dramatic. It kind of felt like reading just the dialogue word-bubbles stripped from a Graphic Novel. Like a story-board pitched to movie studio producers.
In fact, I noticed a medium-sized plot discontinuity toward the end of the book. I don't recall now exactly what it was, but I remember it had something to do with Lessa's trip between Time to go bring back the extra Weyrs they'd need for the imminent Threadfall. Either she said something or some other character said something to her that demonstrated a knowledge of events that happened in a part of the timeline that nothing in the story indicated they would have known.
But still, that doesn't diminish the fondness in my memories of the series. And my guess is that the dissonance between memory and reality is worse for a series of books, because I'm thinking of the whole story of Pern including all the sequels and prequels and characters who got a whole section of a later book devoted to them. It's not really fair to expect the author's first tiny novel to carry all that weight.
I wonder what would happen if I were to go back and re-read The Gunslinger by Stephen King. Maybe I'd get 100 pages in and think "OMGLOL what the Hell is this crap?!"
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Post by mikegarrison on Dec 13, 2011 21:42:56 GMT -5
I had a similar experience. When I re-read them much later, I was more than a bit surprised how much I would have dismissed them as clumsy and cliched. But to be fair, some the cliches are, in part, cliches because McCaffrey had so much success with them.
For instance, what teenager wouldn't want a telepathic friend who unconditionally loved them and who was super-powerful? That's one you see over and over and over again in YA science fiction or fantasy. (And often in adult SF too.)
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Post by Deleted on Dec 14, 2011 9:53:35 GMT -5
well, there is this one book where the hero unconditionally loves you. and is super-powerful. happens to be the most-read book ever. and it gets better every time you read it. even if it's been a while. but you won't find it under "sci-fi"...  |
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Post by geddyleemarvin on Dec 14, 2011 13:18:44 GMT -5
well, there is this one book where the hero unconditionally loves you. and is super-powerful. happens to be the most-read book ever. and it gets better every time you read it. even if it's been a while. but you won't find it under "sci-fi"... You read "Dune" too? Cool! |
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Post by mikegarrison on Dec 14, 2011 15:39:38 GMT -5
well, there is this one book where the hero unconditionally loves you. and is super-powerful. happens to be the most-read book ever. and it gets better every time you read it. even if it's been a while. but you won't find it under "sci-fi"... Like I said, it's a very common fantasy that people wish were true. |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 15, 2011 11:07:13 GMT -5
well, there is this one book where the hero unconditionally loves you. and is super-powerful. happens to be the most-read book ever. and it gets better every time you read it. even if it's been a while. but you won't find it under "sci-fi"... Like I said, it's a very common fantasy that people wish were true. like i said, you won't find it under sci- fi... |
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Post by TheSantaBarbarian on Dec 15, 2011 18:36:13 GMT -5
cvvcdad, you really can't help yourself can you. It is really a complusion.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 21, 2011 10:45:39 GMT -5
you're absolutely right, tsb. it is a compulsion. i am compelled to spread the Good News to others.
if you knew the one way out of a room filling with smoke, would you feel compelled to share that with others -- even if the others rather enjoyed the smell of smoke...?
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