license in 1988 and spent a lot of time flying, including solo trips across North America in 1989 and 1990. Meanwhile, he sold his first writings and contributed "Training and Fighting Dragons" to the 1989 Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, using his military and flight experience. Next year he quit his job to write full-time and in 1992 he attended the Clarion Workshop for new science fiction and fantasy writers. Writing under the name Todd Johnson until 1997/98 he specialized in military science fiction, contributing one story each to several collective works. Dragons As a boy, Todd 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 [1999]. 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