Because of this thread (...heh) I just reread Dragonsdawn and man, my current self is so disappointed with the lack of detail surrounding the genetic manipulation. I wanted to get into the meat of it, I wanted to know what the genetic material was (implied to be similar-to-but-not-DNA), I wanted to know exactly how Kitti Ping was tweaking things, how she was controlling growth and how she managed to program future generations to progressively get bigger without intervention and selective breeding! I know it's unreasonable, but dangit, that's what I wanted!
Re: future generations getting bigger: could be epigenetics, because that's actually been happening on a small scale to humans for the last few hundred years. People whose parents consistently got enough to eat are on average slightly taller than people whose parents didn't.
but that's her stupid handwavium for how greenriders turn gay, not how queen- and bronzeriders turn... straight? you know what, actually, I've got it. previous to their dragons' mating F'lar and Lessa were both gay and thus hated each other on principle, because men and women can never get along unless they're in a relationship, obviously. during their dragons' mating they had sex, which, in a manner similar to that of the illustrious tent peg, turned them both straight. once straight, they quickly fell for each other, because straight men and women who spend a decent amount of time with each other always fall in love!!! obviously!!!! I want to know all that too, but no, the book is full of boring things like characterization and relationships instead. >:( oh, yeah, that sounds super plausible! if you flip an epigenetic marker on and/or tell it when to flip itself off again, you can do a lot of genetic engineering at a distance, as it were. also, I just thought of something—if what colors of dragon a dragon mates with dictates their rider's sexuality, then why wasn't Jaxom ace? Ruth certainly didn't want to fly anybody. although I do remember Jaxom thinking Ruth would fly greens at some point, and I gotta say, missed opportunity to see the magical sexuality-warping powers of anal sex at work there. also missed opportunity to have a queer protagonist, dammit.
Wait, so, does this mean that among Pern humans, sexuality magically flips so you're automatically attracted to whatever gender you last had sex with? :::PPP
...apparently? I guess people are bi because they last had sex with multiple genders of people at once. and idk if people start out with a sexuality, or are ace before having sex, or what... any of those options are terrible anyway, so it probably doesn't matter. :/
I thought Lessa continued to hate F'lar for quite some time after they had sex. I mean, I only read one or two books once, in high school, before deciding it wasn't really my bag, but I distinctly remember F'lar wandering around the Weyr brooding because Lessa was nicer to one of the other dragon riders than she was to him, despite the fact that they'd had sex. So the expectation that the sex would make her warm up to him was definitely there, but I don't remember it actually happening, at least within the scope of that book.
...I mean, I don't remember it at all clearly, seeing as I read it once or twice when I was about nine, so you're probably more likely to remember accurately than I am. but, although that "wandering around the Weyr brooding" thing sounds both a) very F'lar and b) like something that did in fact happen, I seem to remember his specific complaint being that Lessa was nicer to another of the riders despite the fact that she was his Weyrwoman? or like, despite the fact that he was the one who discovered her, lifted her up out of squalor, etc. etc.? and I seem to remember she was, like, his Weyrwoman-by-default before they had sex. or something. I could be completely off the mark there. in any case I think they warmed up to each other earlier than you think—definitely before the end of Dragonflight, and I definitely remember it being alarmingly fast, like a couple chapters at most. but again, that latter recollection could be entirely incorrect.
Likewise, I seem to recall F'lar thinking that getting dragon sexed would magically chill Lessa out and being rather bewildered that she was still mean to him. I think over time she warmed to him but it took a while.
Spoiler: Epigenetics talk Human height correlates extremely well with nutrient and disease status. Comparing current humans to, say, the point in time after the Black Death (when crowding was down, so disease was more controlled and people had better access to food), the past humans are only 4cm shorter on average. It's epigenetics, but rather than just "a trend toward bigger humans" it's more "epigenetics that allows the full exploration of the confines of what's possible in a human body plan under relatively normal circumstances (e.g., normal expression of growth hormones, etc.) when you have a good supply of food". It's not really a directed change, and it's also not permanent: if we experienced a huge plague or had sudden food shortages, you'd get shorter humans again. Also, epigenetic changes to genetic code are by definition triggered by outside influences and environmental states. So she'd have to have chosen particular genes/pathways/etc. to respond to very specific outside factors. How to choose? Something like nutrients wouldn't be good, because you can't necessarily ensure that there will always be a plentiful supply of prey for the dragons. What could she possibly have chosen that would track into the future to perfectly ensure that the dragons reached a specific (larger than current) size? I guess her fancy Eridani training covered all of this and obviously it's just fiction but I'm still left with questions.
Was the time travel in the second book, or the second half of the first book? I don't remember titles, just plot. Lessa definitely still hated/was afraid of F'lar when she went back in time, though, because while she was still sick from the time travel she had a crying jag about how F'lar would be angry and shake her when he found out what she'd done. In fact, if I remember correctly, I noped out of the series shortly after that scene, because Lessa's constant anger and misery were making me feel depressed. I'm *pretty sure* the specific incident of F'lar brooding that I'm remembering happened after they'd had sex, though, but since we're all going off years-old memories here the only way to be SURE is for someone to read the dang books and check. XD
I'm happy to help! >>; Do you know how many feels I have about this. There is canonically both flax and wool, but furs/leather are used to a much greater extent than in most areas of our world, and are apparently much more readily available in the Weyrs. But it sure sounds like clothing is pretty much made out of fabric, because flying leathers are different from normal clothes, which means there's clearly a significant textile economy going on. And since we can pretty much assume they're operating at a pre-industrial technological level, and that fabric is hella expensive, that means that villagers and artisans are probably doing just as much spinning and weaving as they were in our world. And what that means is that ostentatious displays of fabric and embroidery were likely signs of wealth and power, just like they were here. And it also means that people probably had crazy, fancy ways to conserve and reuse fabric and thread as much as humanly possible. There also seems to be some implication that certain colors - blue, green, etc. - were reserved for particular earned jobs, and there were "shoulder knots" that displayed rank, which suggests to me that there may have been some informal equivalent to sumptuary laws that restricted those articles to those who had earned them. Also: Tapestries. I demand Pernese tapestries. -lays here, yells at sky-
Could she have instead programmed in greater competitiveness / seriousness in dragon flights, and a stronger preference for large partners, which would end up leading to larger dragons over time? I mean, I could see flights going from "I'll let the fire lizard I like best win" to more "I will be won only by the strongest, and I will reject everyone if no one is up to my standards". And certainly some elements of what makes an attractive partner seem based on genetics.
... I will probably end up rereading and yelling about textiles some more. -facepalm- ETA: A further note: The three- and four-year-olds in our world were spinning. So the fact that Lessa is not involved in textile production at all... My suspicion is that she was just loudly ruining things until everyone went fine, go be a drudge or something! stop breaking everything you touch oh my god.
There's definitely quite a history of women writers doing this, and I think that their works get insufficient credit today. Remember, they were moving into a world of essentially zero women and forcing out a space for women's experiences and were having to work with the really sexist territory they found themselves in. Instead, their works just get treated as embarrassing, and not feminist works at all -- I feel that a lot of young feminists even discount the feminism of these earlier writers, because from a modern viewpoint their stories still contain a lot of sexism. There's also the fact that many of these stories straddle the line between science fiction and fantasy. A lot of readers seem to like them to stick to one or the other these days, but for a long time there was no market for pure fantasy, and after that there was no market for fantasy that wasn't dude-centric. But these were the stories that I grew up with. Pern. Darkover. Andre Norton. Cherryh's Morgaine, which is essentially female!Elric in a Norton-esque universe. My beloved Kencyrath novels are related to this too, in that they're a series written by a woman with a strong female protagonist but in a society as horribly sexist as many of those others. They're just a bit later; while there's a slight sci-fi tinge to the backstory in some respects, it was possible by the 1980s to publish pure fantasy with a female protagonist, even if it wasn't getting anyone huge sales.
Yes, that's true, and probably the most reasonable answer. Bacterial genetics has not prepared me for dragon genetic engineering!
oh man, I loved Andre Norton! Plague Ship was my favorite. it's sad that she had to use a pseudonym to get published, though. :(
Jirel of Joiry could be a mascot for tumblr feminists! A female hero with a sword who defeats supernatural enemies by getting superhumanly pissed off? But I bet even if people *did* read C.L. Moore (another woman who had to write under a pseudonym to get published) they'd just talk about how lame it is that she fell in love or something point-missing like that.
It actually shows how much Anne McCaffrey was a trailblazer: she was one of very few with an unambiguously female name.
