{"id":462,"date":"2011-11-23T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2011-11-23T10:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/?p=462"},"modified":"2011-11-23T12:00:33","modified_gmt":"2011-11-23T10:00:33","slug":"a-sad-day-in-sci-fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/?p=462","title":{"rendered":"A Sad Day in Sci-Fi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Authors come and go, and as with all of us, eventually they grow old and die.\u00a0 The passing of Anne McCaffrey<\/a> hits home with me in a peculiar way \u2013 her Dragonriders <\/em>novels were the first real sci-fi I\u2019d read (though now as an adult I see it more as a fantasy bit than sci-fi).\u00a0 I\u2019d read Lord of the Rings as a voracious nine- or ten-year-old, and immediately jumped into the Science Fiction Book Club.\u00a0 Those pulp-paged hardbacks were an amazing value for a kid like me at the time \u2013 cheap, good, and durable.<\/p>\n

Wandering through the Weyrs and nations of her fictional world Pern gave a geeky kid a great place to escape to \u2013 when growing up in an unstable world.\u00a0 We moved every few years back when I was a kid, and having at least those books to return to gave me at least something I knew would be consistent.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t hurt that it was also adventurous, fun, and exciting in a lot of ways.<\/p>\n

She was also the first (and to my recollection, only) author I ever wrote fan-mail to.\u00a0 She was living in Ireland at the time, I think, and I remember scribbling some wishful thinking and heaping praise into my letter before sealing it up and sending it on.\u00a0 To my astonishment, I actually did get a reply \u2013 though not from Mrs. McCaffrey herself.\u00a0 Instead, her daughter took the time to respond to a little boy who was struggling with his own adaptation to the world, and who found a useful refuge in her mother\u2019s writings.<\/p>\n

I never read much of her other work \u2013 it didn\u2019t appeal to me, for a variety of reasons I won\u2019t go into here.\u00a0 But suffice it to say, that child is still in here somewhere, and as the adult custodian of him, my gratitude goes out to her family.\u00a0 Her writing was a tremendous gift to me.<\/p>\n

The world is a lesser place without her, but a better place for her having been a part of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Authors come and go, and as with all of us, eventually they grow old and die.\u00a0 The passing of Anne McCaffrey hits home with me in a peculiar way \u2013 her Dragonriders novels were the first real sci-fi I\u2019d read … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":463,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borkedcode.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}