Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011)Anne McCaffrey, the veteran SF author most famous for her Dragonriders of Pern series, has died of a massive stroke at age 85, at “Dragonhold-Underhill”, her self-designed home in County Wicklow, Ireland. She was a groundbreaking pioneer in the genre – the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction (1968), the first woman to win a Nebula Award (1969), the first person of either gender to have a hardcover science fiction novel on the NY Times bestseller list (1978). And she was a hell of an author. A terrible loss to SF, literature, and the world. For more information, see her Locus Online obituary.