Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
I liked the Talent short stories, though not the novels quite as much. I have to admit I quit reading the Pern books after one in which it's tossed out at the start of a chapter that two major characters have had children, but no more details are provided. It just started to feel like Ms. McCaffrey was going through the motions to satisfy the publisher and fans, rather than writing something she actually cared about.
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I read most of the Pern books, but eventually grew tired of them. I think your analysis of Anne going through the motions to please fans and publisher when she was losing interest is apt.
I was amused at the number of folks who thought Pern was fantasy. It has a feudal society, medieval technology, fire breathing dragons... If you come in in the middle of the series, you miss the setup that Pern is a lost colony, man arrived by starship, and the fire breathing dragons are products of genetic engineering on the indigenous fire lizards, and it appeared that's precisely what many readers did.
Pern also spawned a large fan community, and a good deal of fan fiction set in the Pern universe. Anne permitted this, with an interesting twist: folks were welcome to write fan fiction set in the Pern universe, but they had to copyright it in Anne's name as well as their own. I once had to explain to a Pern fan that it was self-defense on Anne's part. There is no way she could read all of the Pern fanfic, but if she used something in a book a fan had used in fan fiction, she could be accused of plagiarism. In fact, she had come up with idea independently, and had never seen the fan fic, but how does she
prove it? Requiring copyright in her name as well as the author's neatly sidesteped the issue.
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Dennis