Todd McCaffrey - Dragons

Dragons

As a boy Todd had accompanied his mother to her meetings with writers, editors, publishers, and agents; and had attended conventions from age 12. He was exposed to Pern before its beginning: soon after the move to Long Island when he was nine, his mother asked him what he thought of dragons; she was brainstorming about their "bad press all these years". The result was a "technologically regressed survival planet" whose people were united against a threat from space, in contrast to America divided by the Vietnam War. "The dragons became the biologically renewable air force."

About thirty years later, Todd McCaffrey recalls,

the editor at Del Rey asked me to write a "sort of scrapbook" about Mum partly to prevent Mum from writing her autobiography instead of more Pern books. That was Dragonholder . The editor had also pitched it to me that someone ought to continue Mum’s legacy when she was no longer able. At the time I had misgivings and no story ideas.

Soon after selling his first stories, he had contributed the chapter "Training and Fighting Dragons" to The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern (1989). Mother and son had also discussed Pern and its setting for years, and she had suggested that he "write the military science fiction prequels" to the colonization, but that never progressed far.

Todd McCaffrey's work on Pern started in earnest with Dragon's Kin (2003), co-authored with his mother. His first solo Pern novel Dragonsblood was published in 2005. Both books are set around the beginning of Pern's "Third Pass", about 500 years after human settlement on Pern and 2000 years before the "Ninth Pass" events chronicled in most of Anne McCaffrey's Pern books including the inaugural Dragonflight. Anne and Todd published two sequels to Dragon's Kin, Todd has published two sequels to Dragonsblood, and they co-authored two further sequels to the latter, Dragon's Time in 2011, and Sky Dragons in 2012.

Todd McCaffrey was a Guest of Honor along with his mother at Albacon 2008, the annual sci-fi convention in Albany, New York. He was Literary Guest of Honor at ConDor 2009 in San Diego and at AggieCon 2009 in College Station, Texas. Todd attended DragonCon in Atlanta (September), where the 2011 Artist Guest of Honor was Michael Whelan, creator of cover art for some early Pern books including The White Dragon.