Science & Tech Quote by Anne McCaffrey

There is a quiet swagger in how matter-of-factly McCaffrey frames the early Internet as both library and living room. She starts with the civic-sounding pitch - "the availability of information" - a phrase that nods to enlightenment ideals and gives the medium moral cover. Then she pivots immediately to the personal: correspondence, a chat line, fans. The subtext is simple and shrewd: this technology isn’t just changing how we learn; it’s changing who gets to have access to the creator.

Coming from a novelist whose work helped define modern fandom, the line reads like an author watching the old gatekeepers lose leverage in real time. Pre-social media, writers were buffered by publishers, conventions, and postal mail. McCaffrey is excited precisely because the buffer thins. She can bypass intermediaries, cultivate loyalty, and keep her audience warm between book releases. That’s not crass; it’s pragmatic. A fan base is a community, and community is an engine that keeps genre fiction alive.

The context matters: for writers of her generation, embracing online life wasn’t default behavior, it was a choice to remain porous. She isn’t romanticizing the Internet’s chaos or pretending it’s a utopia. She’s praising its utility: information when you need it, people when you want them. The quote captures an early optimism that now feels almost quaint - but also prescient about the modern author-reader relationship: less pedestal, more thread.