The Lost Final Chapter: What Anne McCaffrey’s Unpublished After the Fall Is Over Might Have Been

When Anne McCaffrey died in 2011, she left behind more than a legacy, but she left a mystery many newer fans might not be aware of. Somewhere in her agent’s files sits the manuscript for After the Fall Is Over, the intended capstone to the Ninth Pass storyline that began with Dragonflight in 1968. For over a decade, Pern fans have wondered what McCaffrey planned for F’lar and Lessa’s final adventure, and whether we’ll ever get to read it.

The answer, according to her son Todd McCaffrey, is likely no. And based on what little we know, that might be for the best.

If you’ve not read Pern, this article will contain spoilers.

What We Know About the Manuscript

McCaffrey announced After the Fall Is Over in May 2007, initially calling it “New Era, Pern” before settling on the final title. The title was a play on words of the classic song, “After the Ball Is Over.” According to Pern fansite administrator Hans van der Boom, she drafted approximately 60,000 words “around her birthday” and completed the manuscript by the end of April 2007. The book was conceived as the direct sequel to The Skies of Pern (2001) and the concluding volume of the Ninth Pass arc.

By 2008, McCaffrey herself was warning fans she might not be able to finish revisions due to declining health. She underwent surgery and faced mobility issues in her final years, and the manuscript never received the polish McCaffrey typically brought to her work. Del Rey, her longtime publisher, rejected it twice between 2007 and 2011.

Van der Boom, who apparently saw the manuscript or fragments of it, was blunt in his 2012 assessment: “I don’t think Anne’s latest book is ever to be published. I’m hesitant to talk about the plot and the story, but I didn’t like it, and I did tell Anne.” He added that “the people at the publisher’s obviously didn’t believe in it.”

Todd McCaffrey has been even more circumspect. When I spoke with him years ago, he told me the book “would not have made Pern fans happy” and that it was “not worthy of print as it stood,” declining to elaborate further. In a 2012 public statement, he said he was “uncertain whether the material would be finished as a standalone novel or simply left as an expanded fragment,” noting that “the latest version of the manuscript is with Mum’s agent.”

As of 2025, no official publication, excerpt, or outline has ever been released, and the McCaffrey estate has made no announcement about completing or adapting it.

The Setup: Where The Skies of Pern Left Off

To understand what McCaffrey might have attempted, we need to revisit how The Skies of Pern concluded. That novel resolved the 2,500-year threat of Thread by permanently altering the Red Star’s orbit, ending Threadfall forever. The dragonriders, whose entire civilization was built around fighting Thread, suddenly faced obsolescence.

McCaffrey’s solution was the aforementioned “Star Craft,” involving F’lar and others deciding that dragons and riders would become astronomical guardians, watching the skies and using dragon telekinesis to deflect meteorites and comets. The book ended with F’lessan and Tai forming a romantic relationship at Honshu, symbolizing Pern’s evolution toward a more open, scientific society. The Abominators, anti-technology fanatics who opposed the use of Aivas’s knowledge, were defeated and exiled, though their ideology remained a lingering threat.

The Skies of Pern was about a transition from a militarized society defined by constant crisis to one that had to reinvent itself for peacetime. The dragonriders retained purpose, but their role had fundamentally changed.

What After the Fall Is Over Likely Attempted

Based on the title, the timeline, and McCaffrey’s late-series thematic patterns, the novel almost certainly focused on the political, social, and psychological aftermath of Thread’s end. This would have been a “quiet apocalypse” story about institutional collapse and reinvention.

The most logical plot threads:

F’lar and Lessa’s twilight years. McCaffrey announced the book as continuing their story specifically, which suggests they remained central characters. After decades as Benden’s Weyrleaders and Pern’s de facto military commanders, both would face the question of legacy. Lessa’s health—always a concern in later books—would likely have featured prominently, as would F’lar’s struggle to shepherd the new Star Craft while ceding power to a younger generation.

The Weyrs’ fight for relevance. Holders and Craftsmen, no longer dependent on dragonriders for survival, would inevitably push for downsizing or demobilization. The dragonriders would argue that sky-watching and disaster response justified their continued existence, but that’s a harder sell than “we’re the only thing standing between you and being eaten alive.” McCaffrey had already explored this tension in The Skies of Pern; a sequel would have intensified it.

Cultural and ideological upheaval. Aivas’s revelations—that Pern was a lost colony, that the “Old Ones” were scientifically advanced colonists, that dragonriding itself was bioengineering rather than natural evolution—would continue destabilizing conservative elements of Pernese society. The Abominators were exiled, but their core anxiety about losing traditional identity wouldn’t disappear. McCaffrey might have shown new movements emerging, or legal and religious debates about how much of the past to preserve versus how quickly to modernize.

Generational conflict within the Weyrs. Younger riders like F’lessan embraced science and change; older riders like F’lar were more ambivalent. A natural tension for McCaffrey to explore would be whether the Weyrs could evolve fast enough to remain relevant, or whether they would calcify into ceremonial relics.

The title After the Fall Is Over suggests something darker than simple transition. “The Fall” refers to Threadfall, but it’s also a biblical allusion—humanity’s fall from grace. McCaffrey may have intended a double meaning: Thread is gone, but Pern’s paradise is lost too, because the unity and purpose that Thread imposed are gone. What comes after isn’t necessarily better; it’s just different and harder to navigate.

Why the Manuscript Failed

Van der Boom described the draft as feeling like a “retread” of The Skies of Pern and Dragonseye, with heavy reliance on deus ex machina and plot conveniences that test readers found unconvincing. This matches what we’d expect from an unrevised first draft by an 81-year-old author facing serious health challenges.

McCaffrey’s late-career work showed signs of repetition. The Skies of Pern itself recycled themes and plot beats from earlier novels, particularly All the Weyrs of Pern. If After the Fall Is Over felt like more of the same—another crisis resolved through convenient dragon abilities or sudden technological breakthroughs—it would explain both the publisher’s rejection and Todd’s assessment that it “would not have made Pern fans happy.”

The other possibility is that McCaffrey took the story in a direction that felt tonally or thematically wrong. The Ninth Pass novels grew progressively darker and more cynical, with institutional corruption, political maneuvering, and moral compromise replacing the heroic clarity of Dragonflight. If After the Fall Is Over pushed that trend too far—showing the Weyrs collapsing into irrelevance, or F’lar and Lessa’s relationship ending bitterly, or Pern descending into factional violence—it might have felt like a betrayal of the series’ core optimism.

Should It Be Published?

Todd McCaffrey has indicated that neither he nor his sister Gigi plan to complete the manuscript, and the last conversation held about it was back when Gigi was working on her manuscript for Dragon’s Code, the last Pern novel that’s been published to date. Given the “moral pressure” he mentioned Gigi feeling, and his own reluctance to discuss the book’s content, it seems the family has decided the manuscript is best left unpublished.

That’s probably the right call. Pern fans have The Skies of Pern as a functional, if imperfect, conclusion to the Ninth Pass. F’lar and Lessa get their moment of triumph, the Weyrs find a new purpose, and Pern stands on the edge of a new era. It’s not a perfect ending, but it’s an ending.

What do you think of the decision not to publish After The Fall Is Over?

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