Anne McCaffrey was my first science fiction author, and hence one of my favourites. She got me hooked on science fiction, and then later into fantasy.

McCaffrey's strength is her ability to create characters which are instantly likeable, and others who you can hate just as quickly, and while some of her characters across all of her series can sometimes have a certain 'sameness', the background story for each and the plots of the books they're involved in make each one different and interesting.

Her most famous series is certainly the dragon series, based on the planet of Pern which has dragons who fight an organism that falls from the sky called Thread. Thread kills and devastates the planet's ecosystem when left unchecked by dragon fire. Here McCaffrey blends science fiction and fantasy in a rather unique way, and certainly an original one. Th humans on Pern arrived two thousand years before the time hen most of the books are set (some of the books are set at early times in Pern's history, but they stand apart from the first batch of books and operate as a 'filling in' of the history of Pern, even though Dragonsdawn, a prequel, is my favourite book of them all), and then encountered Thread. They also found small creatures called fire-lizards that look like dragons and breathe fire. These are genetically engineered to become fully fledged dragons.

Brilliant.

The series works because of great characters, and a great premise, and McCaffrey has managed to make a very progressive series without the need to buy later books if you don't want to. Recently she has tended to re-hash and reexamine some of her older material, but even these books manage to hold the reader's interest, especially if you are a true devotee.

Her other series tend to be more scifi; her Tower and the Hive series focus on humans with kinetic powers who hurl vessels and cargo across interstellar space while confrontin
g a hive species in space. Good, but not quite so interesting later on in my opinion.

A good author for those who want to slide into fantasy and scifi in a non-taxing manner.