Part of Series
Like Helva, the Ship Who Sang, (and Nancia from PartnerShip, Tia from The Ship Who Searched, and Simeon, who runs The City Who Fought) Carialle was born so physically disadvantaged that her only chance for life was as a shellperson. And again like those others, Carialle decided she would strap on a spaceship. Her brawn is a guy named Keff. Their mission: to search the galaxy for intelligent beings, to travel where no shellperson and her brawn have gone before... Alas, intelligent life is thin on the galactic ground, so when Carialle and Keff arrive on a very nice little world with very nice little aliens, fuzzy and polite and eager to please, they are overjoyed. But their joy does not last: their fuzzy friends turn out to be virtual slaves to a race of sorcerers, sorcerers who really do seem to possess magical powers of frightening potency, and who are neither fuzzy, polite, nor the least bit eager to please.
Author
Anne McCaffrey was born on April 1st, 1926, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her parents were George Herbert McCaffrey, BA, MA PhD (Harvard), Colonel USA Army (retired), and Anne Dorothy McElroy McCaffrey, estate agent. She had two brothers: Hugh McCaffrey (deceased 1988), Major US Army, and Kevin Richard McCaffrey, still living. Anne was educated at Stuart Hall in Staunton Virginia, Montclair High School in Montclair, New Jersey, and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College, majoring in Slavonic Languages and Literatures. Her working career included Liberty Music Shops and Helena Rubinstein (1947-1952). She married in 1950 and had three children: Alec Anthony, b. 1952, Todd, b.1956, and Georgeanne, b.1959. Anne McCaffrey’s first story was published by Sam Moskowitz in Science Fiction + Magazine and her first novel was published by Ballantine Books in 1967. By the time the three children of her marriage were comfortably in school most of the day, she had already achieved enough success with short stories to devote full time to writing. Her first novel, Restoree, was written as a protest against the absurd and unrealistic portrayals of women in s-f novels in the 50s and early 60s. It is, however, in the handling of broader themes and the worlds of her imagination, particularly the two series The Ship Who Sang and the fourteen novels about the Dragonriders of Pern that Ms. McCaffrey’s talents as a story-teller are best displayed. She died at the age of 85, after suffering a massive stroke on 21 November 2011. Obituaries: Locus, GalleyCat.
