There are other writers in the science fiction and fantasy fields who have enjoyed careers as long as Anne McCaffrey's, but few have demonstrated such consistency of inventiveness and achievement. While never achieving the literary clout of Ursula le Guin, McCaffrey remains the favourite female genre author of many aficionados, and her Dragon sequence has maintained an impressive standard over many years. Her speciality is a seamless melding of SF and fantasy elements: the universes she creates are always plausible, always assiduously detailed, and this skill is fully evident in Freedom's Road, her most innovative novel in some time. Characterisation here is up to her usual standard, but the new levels of imagination in the plotting categorically show that McCaffrey is not content to rest on her laurels.

Anne McCaffrey is one of the world's leading science-fiction writers, and has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Born and raised in the US, although of Irish extraction, she now lives permanently in Ireland, in the heart of the Wicklow Mountains, where, as well as writing, she breeds horses. She has recently been awarded the Margaret A. Edwards' Lifetime Achievement Literary Award. She is the creator of the Dragons of Pern series, currently being filmed for TV.