#I know ENTIRELY TOO MUCH pern lore so trust me this post is shorter than it could have been

[kogiopsis]

Took me a bit to reply to this because a) Tumblr’s reply function is stupid and New Xkit’s seems not to work and b) I was dealing with the whiplash of realizing there are readers who don’t know who Anne McCaffrey is because when I was a kid she was big enough that Skies of Pern was on the rack at the checkout of my local grocery store. ANYHOW.

@benkinsky​: Dragonflight is the first book of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series and, while in some worldbuilding elements it diverges from later canon, it generally establishes the setting of a pseudo-medieval planet menaced by a spaceborne... let’s call it an ‘organism’, from which the inhabitants are protected by people who ride telepathic, fire-breathing dragons. (Please note that while the edition linked above makes it sound like it’s early-2000s YA it is VERY MUCH NOT. It’s adult SFF from the 60s.)

Bearing in mind that I haven’t reread Skyward since it came out, there are a lot of thematic similarities, included but not limited to Spensa’s cytonic abilities being very close to the discovery Lessa makes in Dragonflight which pretty much completely reshapes the future of her world. There’s also the plot element of ‘faceless threat falling from the sky’, though varying degrees of actual facelessness; and said threat must be faced by a special group of people who have access to flight; and the protagonist comes from a family which was brought low through conflicts relating to her father, but then ends up connecting with the most special and important flying machine/creature to discover (or rediscover) secrets which will change the fight. And the whole ‘space colony that has forgotten where it came from’ thing. And there are probably even more parallels between M-Bot and AIVAS than I can recall right now because it’s been a loooooong time since I reread Masterharper of Pern.

I am about 90% sure that I remember Brandon talking about having read Pern in a Writing Excuses ep or two but whether or not I can find the exact episode doesn’t matter because he says it point-blank here. (The White Dragon is technically the third book of the first Pern ‘trilogy’, of which Dragonflight is the first and Dragonquest is the second.)

Pern is one of those series that was absolutely formative to me, but I do want to caution you that if all of this has made you curious about it, it’s important to be aware that it is very much the product of its times and of a VERY different culture around gender and sexuality, as well as a publishing industry with, let’s say, a cavalier attitude towards sexual assault. There’s... telepathic dragon-facilitated dubcon, basically, and McCaffrey said some things about it which can be read as pretty damn homophobic. (They can also be read as ‘clueless but not ill-intentioned’ but YMMV and in the interest of a warning, I want to emphasize the potential hurtfulness of her statements).

If you are curious, I suggest starting where I did as a kid - with the Harper Hall Trilogy, starting with Dragonsong. The books are shorter and will generally introduce you to the world and the writing style without being a big commitment, and because they feature younger characters and were written for a younger audience, the aforementioned dubious consent issue doesn’t come up. It can be a good intro to a series which is, IMO, still a very relevant classic of the genre.