Anne McCaffrey's Sci-Fi And Fantasy Work Stands The Test Of Time Because Of Her Respect For Traditional Masculine And Feminine Roles

Anne McCaffrey’s style of writing shaped a lot of what we see in modern sci-fi and fantasy, with a lot of tropes being misused by lesser writers to make female characters more like men, but looking at the Dragonriders of Pern and her other works from a literary perspective, one can see that McCaffrey maintains her female leads’ femininity in a manner much more akin to classic romance novels than her contemporary counterparts, a large part as to why her books are so beloved by both men and women.

If you go into a bookstore in modern times, the fantasy and science fiction section is cluttered with “romantasy” fiction, which often puts women into ridiculously powerful situations with even more ridiculous depictions of “hot men” who exemplify the authors’ most torrid fantasies and daddy issues. A lot of the tropes came from Anne McCaffrey, who pushed sci-fi into the romance realm with her work, but are being done by lesser authors who miss McCaffrey’s winning portion of the books: maintaining the leads’ femininity and her counterpart’s masculinity in the process.

It's easy to analyze her most famous work and break it down into a simple formula. A woman is in distress in a situation; she gets whisked away by a powerful man who nurtures her and gives her a start, and she comes into her own through the love she shares and with her own untapped abilities to give her agency.