Anne McCaffrey is a writer of many firsts: the first woman to win science fiction's coveted Hugo and Nebula Awards; the first sci-fi writer to break into the New York Times bestseller lists; and the first sci fi writer to be awarded the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in young adult literature. Her award-winning "Dragonriders of Pern" series, fifteen strong and growing, rank, as James and Eugene Sloan noted in the Chicago Tribune Book World, as "the most enduring serial in the history of science fantasy." The series has proved so popular, with each new volume hitting the bestseller lists, "that it has almost transcended genre categorization," Gary K. Reynolds asserted in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review. There are fan clubs galore, several Web sites, reference books that delineate the geography of McCaffrey's fanciful planet, Pern, other reference works that deal with all...