doesn't everyone want Pern but better done? like, I thought that was more or less the entire point of this thread. :P
Being owned by Anne McCaffrey made that a little difficult at first. But yeah, I kind of wish that Lessa remained a ruthless psychic sociopath. She was definitely more interesting that way.
I re-read Dragonflight a couple days ago. Here's a brief review. Spoiler: There be spoilers here Characters Lessa is our main viewpoint character, and we stay with her about 2/3 of the time. The rest of the time we're in F'lar's head. McCaffrey does a good job of staying with her viewpoint characters and not jumping around randomly. We stay in Lessa's head unless the plot requires something the happen when she isn't around, and then we spend some time with F'lar. Randomly jumping around between viewpoint characters is a pet peeve of mine, and McCaffrey doesn't do that. McCaffrey is really good at creating minor characters with just a few strokes. Robinton says and does very little, but you get the feeling that you know him. Same thing with Madora. And holy cow! When C'gan died, I got a little something in my eye. She seems to run into trouble with her major characters. Lessa's actions and motivations are a mess. While I spent a lot of time in her head, I don't feel like I know her very well. F'lar is even worse--I don't feel like there is anyone there to know at all. F'nor, a middle non-viewpoint character is a complete cypher who seems to have no purpose except to feed information and straight lines to F'lar. World-building The world-building here is actually sufficient for one novel. We have little bits of world backstory like Moreta's Ride and other tales. There is a lot more history suggested by the architecture of the Hold and Weyr, which I find nicely done. As a whole, I think it works and the holes in the world-building aren't really apparent in this short novel. I believe in Pern throughout the novel and that's good enough. Editing/Style Points This book really needed a good editorial pass. I'll identify two things that I disliked. First, It is irritating that the name of Ruatha Hold randomly fluctuates between "Ruath" and "Ruatha". This is clearly an editorial error and should have been caught and corrected. It's a rookie-level mistake. Second, the fact that this is an expansion of some shorter works is readily apparent in the dragons. In the original "Weyr Search" novella, the dragons don't "talk". Instead of mental dialog, we get a narrator's description of what they said. About halfway through Dragonflight, the dragons find their voice, as it were. Now, I love the dragons' voice, even though they mostly come across as having only a single personality. The dragons provide a kind of laconic snarky commentary on the silliness of their humans that makes the books something special. This voice should have been there through the whole novel. Plot It has a beginning, a middle and an end. And that's a good thing. The "send F'nor and Kylara to the South Continent" subplot went nowhere in this book. It becomes important for the later books, but here it's a waste of time. At least McCaffrey doesn't spend much time on it. Time travel always sucks, but the time travel in this book is barely time travel at all. Really, the missing Weyrs could have just been on the SouthernContinent or something and the basic story would have been the same. So, while it sucks, it only kinda sucks. Overall It sounds like I've ragged on this book, but it's out of love. This is a really good book. I believe in Pern. The story is pretty good. Even though our viewpoint characters are either confusing (Lessa) or boring (F'lar), they aren't too irritating. And, since we don't delve deep, deeper, deepest into their heads (I'm looking at you, CJ Cherryh!), it's pleasant to ride along.
Dragonriders of Pern is one of those 'really neat world setting plagued by bad writing and bad sex/sex tropes' series for me, along with the likes of the Anita Blake and Black Jewels series. I always did want to find a Black Jewels RP thing (I DID play in an awesome 'Anita Blake setting minus Anita' game for a while till it closed sadly), but never did.
just finished catching up and have some thoughts: do we even know what Thread is? i remember something about a gooey sack with string and other junk inside like some kinda fertilized space egg. but that raised more questions than it answered. is it alive? is it the full life form or some kind of intermediate stage? what does it get out of falling from space and wrecking shit? is the meteor thing it comes from some kind of life form? is it a space whale? is it trying to fertilize Pern? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS what happened to the rest of humanity? people have colonized and lived on Pern for however many thousands of years and yet no one has checked up on them? you're telling me they were able to get people from earth to Pern in less than three generations but no one since has ever thought "hey what happened to the hippy commune planet?" or hell, no tween has ever went "fuck this shit imma go live with the space hippies on Pern" DO YOU EXPECT ME TO BELIEVE THAT ANNE what about lube? so during a mating flight everyone is out for the queen's rider but only one person gets to bang them because of Dragon Sex Magic. everyone else bangs each other out of sexual frustration. except everyone else is Magically Gay by anal penetration and everyone else is male... so do they just...lube themselves up before hand just in case? or is it chafed assholes all around? if they aren't aware enough of their physical surroundings to stop themselves from humping everyone in sight how the hell do they stop long enough to get lube, much less apply it? you'd think they could predict this shit (my next point). i bet its the fucking tent peg all over again. THAT IS NOT HOW ANAL SEX WORKS ANNE what even are fertility calendars? fucking cavemen-style humans were able to keep track of their fertility cycles on scratched out marks in 28 days. yet somehow the descendants of spacefarers who subsequently lost most of their tech can't figure out to maybe keep a little calendar of their dragon's mating flights? like "oh shit its been about as long between the last flight and now as it was between the last flight and the one before. better lube my butthole everyday just in case" i mean i know almost all the riders were men but ONE OF YOU HAS TO FIGURE THIS OUT SOONER OR LATER. or at least steal the idea from one of the many women who work in that environment who realizes its a good idea.
There was a little bit in Dawn about the colonists wanting to be cut off/distant from/untied to the rest of humanity (they make a big deal about sending a help beacon thing), but I'm not sure if it was more to it than that. No help ever came, as far as I know.
yeah but when has that EVER worked in human history. SOMEONE is gonna get curious, especially after thousands of years still: ouch
About halfway through my Dragonquest re-read, and it seems to me McCaffrey didn't really have a comprehensive Theory of Pernese SexyFuntimes. It kind of feels like she tossed it together as the characters and plots developed.
In Chronicles, there was a rescue mission that found Stev Kimmer and a bunch of people still in the Southern Continent. Kimmer tried to smuggle a shitload of gold onto the rescue shuttle, and also told the rescue people that everyone else had died. So the Federation marked the planet as a death trap and wrote it off the list of places to care about. They sort of figured out Thread a bit in All the Weyrs. It's apparently a life form that is native to the Oort cloud and relies on liquid helium to function as anything other than everything-eaters that eventually digest their own organs if left alone long enough. It's definitely crippled in some fashion by the time it starts falling through the atmosphere. Going to Pern is a big step down in quality-of-life for Thread. The scientists didn't really care to learn more at that point because they were going to shift the Red Star anyway.
ah i don't think i read that one so that explains that a bit more good to know okay i remembered the part about shifting the origin away but not the rest of that so thanks for the clarification so basically she Anne Rice'd it ...that really is the root of so much of what fandom finds wrong with Pern isn't it? she wanted to write pulpy erotica but what we all fell in love with was the background decorations
Despite its existence mainly as a plot device, I loved how hateful AIVAS was. The dragonriders hated Thread but would have been content to just have it go away, to not be their problem anymore, but AIVAS was just like "No, you are going to completely exterminate an entire species, because I hate Thread." The ZBDs are at least a plague and possibly a genocide. And I liked that this was called out, both by the humans and by AIVAS. Project Overkill. "[AIVAS is] more vindictive than F'lar!" 99.99% of the time, in sci-fi a machine capable of that level of hatred and destruction is against the humans. If it's not, then it's all cold computations and probabilities. But AIVAS helps the humans and understands that it's really going overboard and then once everything is done, AIVAS self-terminates because it knows that it can't do anything more. "And a time to every purpose under heaven." What a purpose that was!
So after making this thread I literally stopped being online as I reread and blasted through ALL the Pern books. I think the only ones I didn't read are Todd's books, but a quick google search says that I missed Dragon's Kin, Beyond Between, and The Impression (which I think is a short story?). I have a LOT to say here and will be quoting people left and right and wall of texting behind spoilers so as to not take up too much space all at once. God I still love these books. I cried like a baby with Moreta, Nerilka, and Masterharper of Pern, and at Robinton's death in... All The Weyrs of Pern, I think. I noticed that several times, after Impression, the new dragonriders are told that dragons live only in the "here and now", not the past or future, and as such need and depend on their human partners to balance out that tendency. It looks like dragonriders have to be instructed to help plan ahead for their dragons. My hypothesis is that Kitti Ping engineered these bad memories in order to create that dependence on their human partners, since they had to ensure that the dragons would not just go "lol no not gonna do what u say imma flame here and eat all the heardbeasts I want, lol u can't stop me". It also probably served as a safety feature in the already naturally very dangerous dragons. If I ever want to sell the series to someone, I might have to quote you. Ok but now I am in Homestuck in Pern mode. Spoiler: Terezi would be ecstatic John (J'on) would be the very picture of the charming, self-assured and somewhat feckless bronze rider, not quite that serious outside of Thread. Rose would be an imposing queen rider, heck, I can see her as an intimidating Weyrwoman. Karkat (R'kat? K'rkat?) rides a sport, a grey or red dragon ala Ruth as white. Much shock, very amaze. Vriska is... a bit like Kylara. God I hate Kylara ._. Kanaya would probably be a ridiculously serene blue rider, and the best needle in all the Weyrs. Jane as headwoman or a Weyrwoman? But I want her to have a dragon too, hmm :/ I guess there can be an "everyone has dragons" AU, and one without that requirement. Aradia lost her dragon in a terrible "accident" involving Sollux (S'lux) and Vriska. She lived, but for quite sometime she might as well not have been alive for all she could feel. Guys this is fun COME PLAY. It turns out that there were two "felines attack dragons in Southern". One in Red Star Rising, with a blue and green, and their gay riders, which is the one I was remembering, and the more emotionally charged Tai and F'lessan green and bronze in Skies of Pern, which was more post-sex attack than midst-sex. I like your thinking, please think more and tell me all of it, ALL OF IT. Like, I am now really tempted by a Pern rp here with whoever wants to.. one where we fix the more glaring flaws in canon. Crackpot Theory: the second, burrowing stage of Thread left weird trace substances in the soil. Later, upon being ingested by humans through reuptake during crop cultivation, affected human psyche in a way that I can't think of that made it so that they were less likely to do something that resulted in the obvious changes we are talking about here. It took several passes with little Thread burrowing thanks to dragonriders, for the remaining traces from the passes before Pern's colonization finally decreased in concentration for Pern's population to suffer less from its influence by the time dragonflight and etc come along. Menolly is our cinammon bun and I was not ready for how angry and sad I got on her behalf when I reread her book :( It's weird how this makes me like them more as a couple now versus when I became a fan of the series in the first place. They're wonderful fuckheads. I love Tai. She made me feel much better about that egregious lack of female green riders (which I imagine she was meant to do). Mirrim somehow never did that for me. In Red Star Rising, her portrayal of P'tero and M'leng left me really uncomfortable. That portrayal of two gay lovers was very... Having read the book last week, I can see where she what she was going for in the story. There were bits where she did build up on their misunderstandings and to small resolutions, and transitions of greater understanding, but it wasn't enough to properly convey the fraught, tense, and hard-won trust that developed between the two. I can see it now. It wasn't well written, but I can actually see it. I kind of want to write more about it but that would require me to reread it again right now since the last book I read was Masterharper. I read that scene as him brooding but being self-aware that he was being ridiculous for being jealous of other riders and his dragon, which didn't help his mood improve, since now he was annoyed with himself on top of everything else. He certainly was possessive of Lessa, which is funny in hindsight. If I want to be charitable, it might have come from feeling that they were united in their quest to prepare Pern to face Thread. But Weyrleaders being possessive about their Weyrwomen is kind of a thing throughout the books... Yes please, thank you. Also the shoulder knots always struck me as a bit unwieldy, they got tangled a few times throughout the books, imagine the pain it must be to rearrange them. Healers had red in red sky rising, but by the other books they were all dressed in a more intuitive green. And Harper Blue apparently matches sapphires, since sapphires were the rank stone for MasterHarpers. It wasn't so much that those were completely only for those jobs - you could have some of those colours in your outfit - but if they were predominant in your clothing, you were certainly assumed to be part of the Craft Hall. Considering the strong emphasis of how only the bigger and stronger bronzes could last long enough to fly a Queen, I think you are right. That type of mating pressure would certainly drive the gene pool to larger genotypes. Hmm, perhaps most Holds and Halls did supply basic textile production in their homes, basic and tough every-day wear, including the clothes for drudges. The Weaver Hall probably fulfilled more specific needs and provided a guarantee of quality that some small holds wouldn't have. Besides, in Nerilka's story, she mentions the Hold's weaving rooms, and she did not specify anything about apprentices or journeymen working there. The most specific mention was about an aunt of hers that knew the specific Fort Hold patterns that were not shared with others, making her valuable enough to one of the first people vaccinated against the Plague in Hold. Considering that the initial dragon population was a mere 16ish dragons... I'm going to theorize that dragons were more likely to be attracted to those who are genetically more distinct :/ Of course Benden was fucked anyways XD It was directly stated that it was impossible to determine what the oldest age of a firelizard was. No explanation was given.
I now desperately want someone who knows fabric crafts to put together some ideas for this so I can praise them. See, I remembered liking F'nor/Brekke, or the relationship at least, but upon re-reading I am now incredibly NOPE about that encounter. Wtf F'nor. WTF. And the less I think about the last sex scene between Jaxom and the farmer girl, the better >:/ I remember being angry about that one HOW ABOUT WE DO. AND THEN RP? :D :D :D Yep. Thread was apparently somewhat structurally analogous to mycorrhizae (fungi). Theoretically there could have been intelligent life in the Oort cloud, but what "survived" the journey towards Pern were the "rude mechanicals" inside the ovoids they caught. It was also theorized that the harsh journey was also why only 10% of the Thread that actually landed on soil entered the second burrowing life-stage. I am still really, really annoyed that we never learned what actually happened during this second life-stage, beyond desolating vast swathes of soil and leaving it unfertile for many, many years. Seriously, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE THREAD DURING THE SECOND STAGE? Assuming that this deadly space fungi spread a vast network of "roots" that sucked all the nutrients in an area to try and nourish a metamorphosis into something else, did it also die after doing this after finding it lacked some other vital component, thus eliminating the possibility of reaching a third life-stage? Considering how absolutely expensive the venture to that section of Space was for the colonists, I'm not surprised that no one went to follow up, especially since it was also resource poor. The only biological wealth there was numbweed, as mentioned by the Science Officer involved in the rescue, but since the rescue mission brought some numbweed seeds with them, they wouldn't need to go get more, as propagation would be enough to start a plantation to grow and harvest numbweed off-Pern. In the meantime, the majority of humanity was apparently busy trying to completely defeat the Nathis ("nasties"? Did she name these after Nazis or something?) before they could cause irrevocable harm to the infrastructure necessary to keep everyone alive and working as a... government of some sorts in the area. I'm mostly assuming she went with her own preferences and kinks, considering how much non-con in the form of outside alien influences her books contain. Seriously, even the short non-Pern story "The Coelura" had some alien species with empathy powers of some sort probably influencing a woman into having sex with some dude she just met. ^THIS
don't smoke Thread, kids ^my exact reaction to my most recent attempt to go back and reread her books reminds me of nausicaa and the valley of the wind, which would explain much also: imagine if you replaced her little air glider with a dragon crossover detected! ah i don't remember reading about those parts, but with this new information it makes a bit more sense why no one ever showed up now i wonder what'll happen when the pernese venture out into space and find other people like the pernese know they came from Out There Somwhere now, but the rest of humanity thinks they're all dead it'd be like some kind of prehistoric hominid coming out of the woods on motorized bicycles all "sup"
I remain very bothered by the lack of exploration of the sociological consequences of those things within Pern's worldbuilding, though, because I am a pedant. Totally putting aside the "people might not want to participate in Dragon Sex Roulette" issue, Pern does not appear to have advanced medical tech pre-computer. Therefore, childbirth is probably really dangerous. Unless they have some sort of contraceptives which are consistently usable even by people in a dubcon frenzy or a safe, reliable abortifacient, a queen rider banging the dude whose dragon caught her dragon is risking her extremely valuable dragon's life. Even if they don't care about , that ought to be an incentive for Pern to invent door locks. :::PPP
It might not actually happen... part of why they chose Pern was that it did not have the metal ores and other resources necessary for doing a lot of spacefaring. On the other hand, teleporting dragons and astronaut suits, so...
It is really strange because I noticed very differing attitudes to what could be done during a dragon's flight. In Red Star Rising, the new riders discuss this, and apparently one option is having your preferred partner with you in a separate room when the flight happens, and those whose dragon try to fly your dragon should be have a partner on standby in case their dragon succeeds. However, in other books, there is no indication that this would be possible! In another book, a very dubcon scene between two riders has the implication that some might be able to hold off on acting on the flight frenzy lust with humongous effort. Which is. Less than optimal. As for abortion, dragonrider women can easily abort by going between. It is mentioned in several books that going between is very dangerous for the zygote or foetus within a certain age, which is why a lot of dragonrider women generally don't bear children. In one book, Kilara was happy to finally get the hang of aborting via between since she didn't want more children. I always found the lack of birth control in the holds absolutely ridiculous, even the colonists had soaring population rate problems when they started Fort, you would have thought they'd know better and have the sexual education to go "SUP LETS DO THE CONDOM THING" or have some plant to make a birth control tea or something.
