It has been a long dry spell and I long for new Pern stories and I wonder if Todd McCaffrey is working on any?

 

Anne McCaffrey my favorite author died of a stroke in Ireland.

Pern

The Ship who sang

Crystal Singer

And in so many more works she will live on in her wonderful stories

We no longer will hang in bated breath waiting for the next book.

MEDDLE NOT IN THE AFFAIRS

OF DRAGONS FOR YOU ARE

CRUNCHY & GOOD WITH

KETCHUP!

I received “Dragongirl” by Todd McCaffrey for Christmas and just finished reading it. It was wonderful!!! It is set in the “Third Pass” of the red star and has Pern in big trouble with a plague hitting humans hard and a plague also hitting dragons had enough that they are all in danger. The main character is Fiona a queen rider at Fort Weyr who becomes weyrwoman at Telgar when ALL their dragons die between.

I had not cared mush for Todd’s previous Pern efforts but in this book he has hit his stride and it is awesome and much like his mothers work.

I am looking forward to the sequel “Dragonrider” which he and his mother are working on. It is due in the Spring.

It has been a while but I am now re-reading the Pern Series by Anne McCaffrey.

I started with Dragons Dawn and then First Fall and now working on Dragonseye.

Enjoyment of my old friends on PERN is awesome as always.

Helva had been born a human female but her body was useless. Her parents had a difficult choice to make because while Helva’s body was not viable there was nothing wrong with her brain. So her brain was saved, cared for, schooled, programed and implanted in the sleek titanium body of an intergalactic scout ship.

Anne McCaffrey’s inventive mind tells the story of this little girl who became a guiding intellegence for a space ship. And what a story it is!

The space ship Helva XH-834 started life deep in debt for the cost of the ship and the training of her brain plus the joining to the ship cost a lot of money. To top it off she needed a human partner to be the brawn part of the partnership for her travels through space. She could choose either male or female partners and she would out live many of them. She was indestructable in her titanium shell.

The connections to her brain gave her control over the whole ship including speakers and mics that allowed her to carry on a conversation with people on board, partners and passengers. She loved to listen to music and then one day she started to sing and discovered that she had the voice of an angel. Soon she became known as the Ship who sang. AND then she fell in love.

The second book in the series is called “Freedom’s Challenge.”

Once the slaves were dropped on the planet to be tested they were free to do what ever they wanted. They were a mix of ailen beings of all shapes and languages but speaking a basic language taught by the slavesrs who had dropped them there. Should they scatter, or seperate into their respective races and form new communites. On the otehr hand would they do better by forming a single community.

Almost as soon as they began waking up the grusome reality hit that this planet had some nasty native residents who lived undergound and would eat anything that moved. Living in the rocks of the hills was the only safe bet so off to the hills they went as one community.

One of the Catteni a mercenary for a race called the Eosi had been dropped with them but not as a guard but as an exile himself for killing another Catteni. Kris Bjornsen, lately of Denver, knew him to be one of the good guys and befriended him saving his life when other wanted to kill him. It turned out that saving him was a valuable thing to do for he turned against his own and against the Eosi.

Their new home had another surprise, it was being farmed by remote control by yet another powerful race they called the farmers. Would they become Allies or more foes?

Read this great story by Anne McCaffrey to find out.

You are walking down the street to your home on a clear summers day and suddenly the air is full of alien space ships.  As you stare in unbelief a beam hits you and you are stunned. Then you are loaded aboard a ship and put into suspended animation. Your last thought is this is not good.

When you awake it is not earth but another world with many alien beings and you are one of many slaves taken from many worlds. You are forced to learn a new language and submit to all kinds of unpleasant conditions. Then just as you are getting uses to these new life conditions it all changes because you were caught up in a slave riot. Again  you are stunned and wake up on a different world. This time you are marooned on a planet that is being tested by your overlords as a possible new home. You are among the “test” slaves that are left there to survive, thus proving the safety of the planet or you die showing that is it not safe. How do you make it your home?

This is the premis of a series that starts with “Freedom’s Landing” and once again Anne McCaffrey transports me to a different universe in an exciting novel that I can’t put down. Then I must contune with the next book in the series because I am hooked once again by the magic of Anne McCaffrey,

Killashandra Ree had a lot of painful memories that she wanted to loose. When she joined the Heptite Guild on Ballybran, she knew that she would be forever changed. Crystal singing brought both ecstasy and pain, healing and near eternal life, and most of all a gradual loss of memory.

What she hadn’t counted on in loosing those painful memories was the loss of good times and friends kind of memories as well. Crystal had destroyed Killashandra’s memory but a new discovery by a close friend she no longered remembered was that crystal could restore it as well – if she dared. She would have to trust another person, one who claimed to love her. Killa would have to learn to open herself to him and restore even the unpleasant memories.  It worked and she remembered her lover and where her black crystal could be found.

Reading anything by Anne McCaffrey is are real treat and the Crystal Singer is indeed a wonderful treat. The only sad thing is that there are only three books. But then she needed more time to write about the Dragonriders of Pern.

The second volume of the Crystal Singer trilogy is called “Killashandra.”

The life of Killashandra Ree was on catastrophic change after another. She had applied to the Heptite Guild to become a Crystal Singer and passed the test and agreed to the sever warnings about Ballybran and singing crystal. Killa chose this life to forget her past failure and to prove t hem all wrong by getting rich singing crystal and at that she was awesome.

In her first season on Ballybran she struck god by finding and singing the coveted “Black Crystal” that made her a wealthy woman. To top it all off she met a man who became her lover and filled her with joy. All her past sorrows faded away.

BUT behind every silver lining is a black cloud. Only a year later one of Ballybran’s devastating storms shattered her Black Crystal mine and turned all that wealth into useless rock. The trouble was that now she had crystal in her blood and the only way to deal with crystal sickness was to be off Ballybran for a while but she was broke. The only way to deal with it was to take a jobe settign white crystal in an organ on a distant world. That would be another adventure that would have her kidnaped, marooned on an island and then meet the man of her dreams who just happened to be the one who snatched her away and marooned her.

What a stoy but to know the rest you will have to read the book.