Dragonholder tells the story of Anne McCaffrey’s life up to 1988. It ends at the time when Mum’s dragons had flown high enough and far enough to repay her investment in them—to provide her with a Hold of her own, which she called Dragonhold because “the dragons paid for it.”
Between 1988 and the end of her life in November 2011, Mum had many more amazing adventures:
Her books flew in the Space Shuttle to the International Space Station.
She acquired three more grandchildren.
She received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime contribution to young adult literature and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America’s prestigious Grand Master award, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future.
She bought a forty-seven-acre farm and built a house of her own design on part of it, naming it Dragonhold-Underhill.
There, she had a heart attack in the year 2000 and a stroke in 2001. With those two warnings, we all knew that we were on golden time.
And what golden time! In the decade before she died, she produced, either solo or in collaboration, more than twenty books.
“Age is not for the timid; I wouldn’t wish it on the faint of heart,” Mum was fond of saying. She passed away at about 5:00 p.m. on Monday, November 21, 2011.
Anne McCaffrey changed the lives of countless people with her stories, and her spirit lives on in every word of her writing.
Todd McCaffrey
Corona, California
May 21, 2014