Via James I heard this morning that Anne McCaffrey had died on Monday; it’s not been a good month. I haven’t read a book of her in at least a decade or longer, but once upon a time she was very important to me, as she was to a lot of (proto) geeks. She managed to get blokes interested into horsey stories long before bronies were invented, which is a huge achievement in itself, but what also impressed me was how many queer folk said they got their first hints about their own sexual preferences from her matter of fact references to homosexuality in her Pern stories. Just having that out there as something natural, no big deal at a time when positive examples of homosexuality in science fiction were far and few between makes up for all of her own weird ideas about it.