For over 20 years I hosted the website The Pern Museum and Archives, which housed the Pern Encyclopedia, the Pern Bloodlines and much other stuff, all involving the works and books of one of my favourite authors: Anne McCaffrey, who came to be a personal friend.
I started reading Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books during the second half of the 1970’s and subsequently became and have been a Pern and McCaffrey fan ever since. I am a book lover and have been reading and collecting science fiction and fantasy books now for about half a century.
I got involved with Pern on the internet during the second half of the 1990’s, first in the usenet newsgroup alt.fan.pern. When Anne McCaffrey started a website of her own, ‘The Worlds of Anne McCaffrey’, with a forum board and chatroom I quickly became involved, first as a host and later as an administrator, webdesigner and technical administrator for Anne’s website under Alec McCaffrey, Anne’s oldest son. This all ended when son Todd McCaffrey took over from his brother and the chatroom and forumboard were discontinued, early 2005. I then set up, and became one of the administrators of the website that wanted to be the successor of the old ‘Kitchen Table’ forum board, under the name The New Kitchen Table. My friend of long standing and also former host and administrator of Anne’s forum board, Cheryl Miller, set up her own forum board with the title A Meeting of Minds, and I became a staff member there instead. The website The Pern Museum & Archives was discontinued in 2020 after serving the Anne McCaffrey fan community for about 20 years.
Together with my friends Cheryl Miller and Anneli Conroy, I edited and published a commemorative book titled “40 Years of Pern” with essays of many friends, (co-)authors and fans of McCaffrey, which was presented to Anne at Eurocon in Copenhagen, Denmark on September 22, 2007 where she was Guest of Honour. The book is still available through print-on-demand and as an ebook (please click the title to order your copy).
Because I spent so many years of my life serving the fan community, Anne herself and maintaining te website, I felt the need to preserve some selected data in this Pern section of my website,
