There's this big void in my science-fiction now.

My daughter sent me a text message late at night: Anne McCaffrey has died. Although my wife was sleeping, I woke her up to tell her. We called our daughter and talked to her about Anne McCaffrey and how she influenced our reading.

When Dragonriders of Pern first came out with the awful cover of a woman wearing gauzy strips of cloth and riding side-saddle on a small dragon, I was not impressed. But friends persuaded me to try the book. "Really, it's not like the cover art or the blurb," they told me.

I was introduced to the indomitable Flessa and the implacable F'lar, and their quest to rid their beautiful world of a terrible invasion of silvery thread-spores that would consume anything organic. The dragons were not small--they were huge, immense engines of flaming destruction. The dragonriders wore furs and leathers as armor against the cold and thread-spores. Their dragons and riders drilled in constant preparation for flying against thread.

All of this was nearly lost after a 400 year hiatus where nearly everyone came to believe Thread would come to Pern no more. Enter Lessa, the heroine. Lessa was not some cowering female becoming strong only thanks to her male companion. She was not some sultry vamp who manipulated men by sex appeal. Nor was she some sexless termagant, all muscles and no gender. Lessa was a person of immense willpower and fortitude.

Anne did not hesitate to portray both the good and the bad of Lessa. Lessa's far-sighted strategy and tactical planning also carried a vindictive streak a mile wide and a tendency to nurse grudges. Able to coldly assess situations and size up potential opponents, she also carried her heart on her  sleeve and made no secret of her feelings. Lessa's life was dominated by her passions, but not ruled by her appetites. Her growth as a character was not only to learn to command, but also to become diplomatic, to make concessions to achieve a greater goal.

For Lessa's saving grace was she cared. She cared deeply about Pern and it's people. For all her insistence on the rights and perogatives of dragonriders--and queenriders in particular--without hesitation she cast herself and her dragon back 400 years in time to bring forward the needed weyrs to fight the modern-day menace of Thread, to save her world.

After Anne McCaffrey's writings I never looked at female heroines the same way again. Her characters are real, not the stereotypical "real" where everything about the female character is in contrast to the male character, but real where the character is able to stand alone, make long-range plans not based on revenge or romantic conquest but to save a world and it's people--no matter the cost to herself.