The Mother of Dragons...
News from yesterday: Science fiction author Anne McCaffrey dies at 85.
She was the first science fiction author I ever read; I loved Dragonfight, which I bought at a roadside bus stop somewhere between Ramsgate and London when I was seventeen. I loved it. Or, to be some specific, I loved F'lar.
As the years went by and Anne McCaffrey wrote more and more books, I found them more and more unreadable, and soon stopped. But I'll always have a soft spot for her because of Dragonfight.
I bought a John Wyndham novel at the same time; it was a good start for me, for science fiction.
And I've heard people argue that Anne McCaffrey didn't write science fiction, but fantasy; and that she even said so herself. I never believed this. At least in the first book, the dragons were fully rationalized: it was a futuristic society on a distand and different planet. I liked that.
Maybe we could split the difference, and call it speculative fiction. (But isn't all fiction speculative by default?)