Nerilka’s Story, by Anne McCaffrey (Ballantine/Del Rey, $3.95): McCaffrey tells an unusual love story as she focuses on one of the minor characters from her best-selling novel, Moreta ...

Anne McCaffrey, a fantasy fiction writer whose vision of an interstellar alliance between humans and dragons spawned two dozen “Dragonriders of Pern” novels, has died in Ireland. She was 85.