Oh, to be Todd McCaffrey! His mother, renowned author Anne McCaffrey, is letting him play in Pern. But this hasn’t been as easy for him as it might seem. “If I go play with my mother’s characters, she’ll kill me,” he joked, adding that they decided he needed to come up with his own characters and then tell their stories.

His first venture into Pern will be Dragon’s Kin, due out in December 2003 from Del Rey, which he co-authored with his famous “mum,” as he fondly calls her. The story centers on a young lad named Kindan, a young woman name Nuella, and watch-whers. “Pern is such a big planet that it really hasn’t been explored,” McCaffrey said, leaving plenty of room for him to exercise his own creative genius. In fact, he found writing the end of the book so exciting that he wrote 12,000 words in 24 hours, because he “just had to finish it.”

Todd McCaffrey is currently writing his first solo Pern novel, Dragonsblood.   Whenever he mentions it, eager Pern fans unanimously cry “finish it!” He laughs and says he’s working on it, but it’s getting a bit long. “The longer the better!” they shout. McCaffrey says readers will find the answers to a few mysteries in the upcoming book, including the identity of the young rider who was found entombed in stone. Again they plead, “finish it!” and Todd McCaffrey smiles.