#dragonflight and dragonquest are excellent

[dragongirl-casca]

Context: I'm reading the Dragonriders of Pern series, having recently restarted and then finally finished Dragonsdawn after a long hiatus from the series.

Renegades of Pern is not a very artful book, in terms of realistic decisions, clever dialogue, or compelling narrative. The arguments characters have make little sense, and it frequently feels very expository.

But it is a very functional book, in that it introduces characters, introduces places, and creates a reasonable framework for those characters to explore those places, leading to the rediscovery of ancient knowledge.

I hope All The Weyrs of Pern is better, though.

[dmmdipodcast]

Is there any obvious reason *why* McCaffrey included a second variety of female dragons (green) instead of just going with the idea that the gold dragons are female and all the rest are male? The greens are deliberately not allowed to reproduce, so unless it becomes a plot point somewhere, the only function of green dragons being female seems to be introducing the "(male) dragonriders frequently get really horny for each other (as a direct result of their psychically bonded soulmates wanting to have straight sex)" aspect that McCaffrey didn't actually seem to want and has all kinds of follow-on implications. (I suppose maybe she just wanted an excuse for *all* dragonriders to periodically get the super-horny-due-to-dragon-sex effect to drive the weyrs' unusual norms and didn't think through the genders, but that seems like a *really* big and hard-to-overlook detail when she made it literally all male riders other than for gold dragons.)

What an excellent question! The short answer is that no, there really isn’t an obvious reason to do that, and this is the kind of ANNE, WHY?? that made us want to start this podcast in the first place.

As for the long answer... I (Tequila) think most likely she had two competing narrative priorities and this ended up a sort of awkward compromise position

McCaffrey clearly wants Lessa to be the Only Gold Dragonrider circa the start of Dragonflight, both for Special Unique Protagonist reasons and because she wants Lessa to be very alone at the weyr at first so that she can triumph later. Having (almost) all male riders is a feature and not a bug.

Your point about Everyone at the weyr getting an opportunity to be horny. McCaffrey doesn’t want the mating flights to be unusual or up for discussion; she’s building them in as an unquestioned norm of Weyrs and part of what makes them notably distinct from Holds. This means she’s gotta have other female dragons.

There’s also the possibility that she felt it would be unbelievable to have such a drastic skew in gender ratio; diegetically, dragons were bioengineered, and green fire-lizards do lay eggs. It’s implied that green dragons could lay eggs, but chewing firestone makes that impossible, so Weyrs have deliberately chosen to keep greens in combat rather than have them reproduce—Dragonsdawn leaves it ambiguous but suggests that gold dragons were deliberately designed not to be able to chew firestone successfully, unlike greens. Sky Dragons, by Todd McCaffrey, does have green dragons laying eggs, and he "cowrote" it/consulted with Anne McCaffrey, so even though We Don’t Read Those it can give a rough sense of what she considered canonical.

Or perhaps McCaffrey wanted to emphasize how special and fancy gold dragons are by giving them a hierarchical advantage over other female dragons; she certainly seemed to replicate that in her writing about humans, where she frequently surrounds her compelling, complex female protagonists with cardboard cutout female supporting characters who range from “evil slut” to “mom” to “whiny gossip.”

Lleu points out that McCaffrey puts a lot of narrative focus on her central cast, especially in Dragonflight and Dragonquest, and doesn’t actually engage much with the background characters. She stated at one point (extradiegetically) that green dragons are 50% of the population, but if you count up the dragons we meet on the page they’d be more like 20% and most of that comes later in the series. So it’s not totally implausible that she really didn’t think about it until after Dragonflight and then she’d backed herself into a worldbuilding corner and couldn’t dig herself out!

More specifically, the moment that introduces green mating flights to the series is the beginning of Dragonquest. In the context of the book’s overarching plot, T’reb is being used to set up Kylara’s later transgression of not paying attention to Prideth and taking her out of the Weyr when she was close to mating. There’s also some Gender Politics at work here, insofar as the homophobia of the way this scene is handled (and for that matter some of the portrayal of green riders throughout the series) involves portraying gay men as effeminate—hysterical, in this case—and so distancing them from the “fully male” bronze riders Dragonflight focused on. T’reb works as foreshadowing for Kylara because he’s gay and so, in this homophobic schema, not-quite-a-man.

If we want to be generous to Anne, having the Weyrs be full of men having sex with men (especially introduced in this extremely dramatic way) also serves to really drive home how different Weyr sexual mores are from Hold and Craft ones, which we as readers expect will align with generic popular culture pseudomedieval feudalism (and which largely do so). The scene with T’reb and B’naj then also brings Weyr sexuality into the (commoner) public sphere (and this is I think a nontrivial part of what the Weyrleaders are concerned about), in keeping with the way the series as a whole is obsessed with the management of sexuality.

[zardoru]

A Dragon Fan Takes A Pernese Dragon Ride

I’m not sure where to start. 

I’ve lately been reading the Pern series. A phenomenon that back in 1999 had a whole track in DragonCon called the Weyrfest, back when fandom was something that you had to get out of your way to get to. But more importantly, it’s a series written by Anne McCaffrey that has a writing style that I loathe, but that has masterful worldbuilding, stories, and ideas that changed the face of fantasy -- even considering that technically, the series is science fantasy, not fantasy! I’m not going to give you details as to why, so that that statement makes you curious.

I’m what you would call a modern dragon fan. Love ‘em. The variety, the personalities, power, flight, you name it, there’s just so much to love! With series such as Wings of Fire, How To Train Your Dragon, or Temerarie there’s no shortage of series that put dragons front and center as heroes and sensible characters that you can relate to rather than humongous beasts to be killed. I can’t really explain my obsession with dragons, but my friends can bear witness to it, to my potential chagrin. I’ve written OC-based fanfiction in the Wings of Fire universe, and am, at the time of writing, doing my own original story with a dragon protagonist.

So as such, I had heard of how Pern had been a Harry Potter equivalent of like, 1967, where people pretended to bond with a dragon (called Impressing in the Pernese world) or fire lizards, small, feisty and chittering wyrms, doing the duties of musicians called Harpers, or Holders, the masters of the land, or Riders that fought the quintessential threat of the world of Pern, called Thread. I had to give the series a shot, if only to see what people had been enamored with and how it paved the way for me, a modern dragon fan, as well as understanding the treaded tropes of yesteryear in my quest to write more about dragons.

I don’t mean to review the books as much as talking a bit about notable aspects of the series as a whole. At the time of writing, I’ve only completed the original trilogy, Harper’s Hall, Moreta and Nerilka’s story, plus the epilogue that is Beyond Between. 

There’s a few notable aspects. The series gives a great deal of importance to the intimacy between Rider and Dragon through a highly prominent narration of the acts of intercourse that occur among dragons -- of which the rider is not only witness, but a remote participant, even living the events through the eyes and scales of their mostly intelligent partner. Anne doesn’t describe the processes of linked minds, that is, the experience of their ability to have a transparent mind to each other, though it is stated that both parts of the relationship simply know how the other feels. This has led to a joke of lovingly nicknaming the series Dragonriders of Porn.

Of course, not only a special group of people are able to join in the magic; fire lizards, basically small dragons, also Impress. That means that most common people of Pern has a chance to have the experience of being friends with a small dragon. You can probably see the appeal of that.

The intelligence of dragons and fire lizards isn’t equivalent to that of a human, but they’re not animalistic either. It’s somewhere in between, though fire lizards are incapable of communicating verbally; not that they can’t communicate at all! Both fire lizard and dragon eyes change color according to how they feel. 

I don’t want to spoil all of the details of the worldbuliding, because you don’t really fall in love with the characters. Not quite. You fall in love with the world, and getting to know it, and the experiences of the people that live in it, is the appeal of most of the books. Not to mention that it is expansive enough to warrant a huge wiki!

Unfortunately, the series doesn’t have a dragon protagonist. It is mainly about the humans that inhabit Pern. But rejoice, Wings of Fire was a series inspired by inverting this choice, so it is not all bad. That said, it doesn’t make the series any less valuable for those fans that love the idea of good dragon characters. Give The White Dragon a chance. Ruth, the deuteragonist, is the titular White Dragon, and happens to be exemplary, and particularly disinterested in the frisky activities of his peers. Wink. Or give Moreta a chance, where the interactions between Moreta and her dragon Orlith are quite special, appearing almost as lovers.

It can be tedious at times. Not really because of what happens, but because of the choice of vocabulary and style, and long winded paragraphs of relentless description that may have you searching the words febrifuge, perfidy, zestful, or paroxysm. Give me some credit if these are common words, though, English is my second language! Not that any of my friends have ever used any of those words. 

The series starts rough. Dragonflight was originally separate stories rolled into one. To say “it shows” is as tautological as being redundant, dealing with the fall of a villain, the impression, and Lessa’s um, heroics, to be as loose as possible, should you decide to read it. Dragonquest underwent heavy rewriting, and while some scenes were incredible (Brekke! My heart! You deserved better!) the main theme of the conflict between the old ways and the new ways was not particularly appealing to me. 

Apparently, some details become contradictory. I have not read carefully enough for any of these details to jump at me. That said, the Harpers Hall series, particularly the first two books, are beyond excellent if you want an introduction, dealing with the struggles of Menolly, fighting against the idea that ladies were not meant to be Harpers. The third one is weaker, but can still be a welcome addition. If you want to reference something from these books, let it be Piemur’s love of fresh-out-of-the-oven bubbly pies. Wink again.

At the time, the Pern series was fairly progressive, though there’s a few modern sensitivities that don’t quite agree with some parts of the first book especially, having a hero considering the um, forceful relationship (exaggerate that in your head to its logical conclusion) he wanted to give to Lessa after their dragons “flew,” an euphemism for things you can probably imagine.

The views Anne had on homosexuality were, uh, not ideal, and I’ll skip over them, but given the circumstances, they do exist in Pern. They are treated fairly and have become the riders of female dragons that were not originally engineered to allow for that to be the case. There’s bi riders as well. There’s a notable absence of Trans representation, but given the time it was written in… I believe Anne would’ve liked for everyone to be comfortable in Pern, hardships and all. Reach out to me if you’ve got thoughts on this.

For Anne, the series had begun as an attempt to have empowered women and good dragons. It started a phenomenon, and her son, Todd, said she “first set dragons free on Pern and then was herself freed by her dragons,” due to the financial success and stability it brought her. I must admit that as someone that is trying to turn an obsession into stories, Pern is a reflection of the hope I have that perhaps one day I might write something for other dragon fans that will touch their imaginations. One day…

Of course, I also think Pern’s also significantly contributed to the overall idea that fantasy, as a genre, is extremely horny under the surface. I don’t know what to add to this idea that would be productive, but if you read it, you’ll probably know why.

Wow! That’s a lot of words. I haven’t even gone into the details of the stories or the blog Anne kept where she kept a very welcoming and warm disposition to the Pern fandom, not only endorsing fan activities, but even giving guidelines as to how to perform them respectfully, praising the lengths that people had taken Pern to, saying that she herself couldn’t have ever matched it. Nor talked about my favourite characters, which, again, I kin Ruth. Sorry kids, he’s taken. But if I may take away something from all this, it would be that Pern has cemented a special place in my heart, right under the thatching and walls that Wings of Fire put up for me, inspiring me to read once more.

Maybe it will, or it already has in yours too.

[muggle-writes]

do I have that book challenge

tagged by @elizabethsyson and while photos were absolutely helpful (for example, in explaining the first question) I did this mostly from memory in downtime at work so I couldn't exactly take pictures as I went, and tbh I don't trust tumblr not to eat my post if I upload a bunch of pictures at once

Do you have a book with deckled edges?

thank you so much for the picture because if that's the thing with the pages not exactly matching up, (but within a small deviation from perfectly square) yes, my copy of the first three Dragonriders of Pern books in one volume has deckled edges. also probably some other books, but I've been reading that one recently so I'm sure about it

Do you have a book with 3 or more people on the cover?.

yeah: Inverloch (Volume 1)

it's the printed version of (the first portion of) a webcomic, which I didn't know when I picked it up at a garage sale or something. I hadn't even heard of webcomics yet

and. hm. don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the premise of the story and it was never really bad... I was thrilled when I realized it was a webcomic and still online and i could read the whole thing.

but

the major plot twist, one the author had apparently planned from the very beginning, honestly had some very unfortunate implications that would haunt me if I ever attempted a reread.

Like, it was set up well enough to be a surprise but not a shock. and it enabled the happy ending. but I probably would have preferred almost any other happy or vaguely positive ending, or even a meaningful depressing ending, I was that disappointed

on the other hand the rest of it was written well enough that I cared so.... eh. it is what it is

I'm just not sure I still love it enough to recommend, but I also wouldn't stop someone from picking it up off my shelf to read, you know what I mean? Especially just that first part, which was plenty good.

Do you have a book based on another fictional story?

D&D guidebooks are totally based on Lord of the Rings, right?

lol in reality uh

the copy of Scandinavian folk tales including my favorite fairy tale ever was always my dad's, not mine, no matter how many times I read it before moving out

uh

my wife has several Halo books? like the video game. I'm not actually sure which came first and I haven't read any of those, but they are on "my" (our) shelf

I also have a lot of Harry Potter meta/derivatives, including that themed Haggadah I think I posted a picture of recently. But the phrasing of this question makes me think the intent is "fiction based on other fiction" so none of those quite count.

so yeah, Halo's the closest I've got. also there's a Star Trek book on that shelf that I didn't even know we had until I went looking for clocks on covers

Do you have a book with a title 10 letters long?

Sadly I don't have my own copy of Dragon's Kin, which kicks off an excellent subseries of Pern books, (nor Dragonsong but I didn't expect to have that one) but what I did find was

The Visitor (which is animorphs#2)

Do you have a book with a title that starts and ends with the same letter?

Erec Rex: The Dragon's Eye

Do you have a Mass Market Paperback book?

does my solid half of the animorphs series all on one shelf count or is this looking for specific branding?

Do you have a book written by an author using a pen name?

(immediately thinks of Lewis Carrol) um Edwin Abbot was also a mathematician but sadly not a penname, but I do I have a copy of Flatland

Oh, but I'm pretty sure I have some of the ghostwritten animorphs books, do those count? Specifically someone mentioned recently that animorphs 25 was the first of the ghostwritten books and I definitely have that one

Do you have a book with a character’s name in the title?

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Ender's Shadow on my shelf, the rest I mostly have as ebooks. also the first Erec Rex book (mentioned above) and the entire Kirsten (American Girl) series plus the first Kit book.

Do you have a book with 2 maps in it?

the first one I found was The Malloreon Volume 1 (also has 3 characters on the cover). it's got a map of the western kingdoms before the first book and a map of Mallorea in the middle of the third book

Do you have a book that was turned into a TV show

Animorphs again

Do you have a book written by someone who is originally famous for something else?(celebrity/athlete/politician/tv personality…)

I definitely had a phase of buying books by famous people, so I have the worst bulkiest copy of Origin of Species which is printed in a terrible font (it also has deckled edges for that matter), and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, that I could find at a quick glance. Probably something by Steven Hawking hiding somewhere

my phenomenal copy of The Elements (Euclid) doesn't quite count because he's most famous, now, for writing those so...

(Einstein's Relativity - in translation obviously because I know very little German - is deceptively short but that was my parents' book that I tried and failed to read, not my own)

Do you have a book with a clock on the cover?

Disappointingly, An Uncommon History of Common Things does not. I do have a Doctor Who coloring book with a clocklike gear pattern on the cover which is the closest I'm finding

Do you have a poetry book?

yeah someone once gave me a book of Japanese death poems, translated of course. I've been meaning to read them. for that I have to find it, and I can't right now :/ now that I remember the book I want to go read it

Do you have a book with an award stamp on it?

not that I can find? apparently Dragonflight or Dragonquest won "a Hugo or Nebula award" (bc McCaffrey was the first woman to win one of those) but wikipedia isn't telling me which award or which book, and I don't have the dust jacket for the original-trilogy-in-one-volume copy that I have so there's no telling if it "should" have an award printed on the front

Do you have a book written by an author with the same initials as you?

ooh wouldn't that be fun. I don't seem to :/

what I do have is a book written by an author with what my initials would be if I had taken my wife's last name instead of the other way around which I guess is close enough

Do you have a book of short stories?

yes, surprisingly. The Girl Who Heard Dragons and I haven't read any of them, not even the story I got it for

oh, and First Meetings, which is a bunch of short stories in the Ender universe

Do you have a book that is between 500-510 pages long?

That's... really specific. Closest I could find was 483 pages and 513 pages (Volume 2 of The Belgariad and The Malloreon, respectively) In general I have a lot of books around 300-350 pages and a fair few over 700 pages, but not many close to 500

Do you have a book that was turned into a movie?

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, for sure. I think Flatland was also made into a movie and it was as phenomenally terrible as you would expect of a story about 2d shapes. not even shapes with faces, just shapes, and one sphere.

Do you have a graphic novel?

I was going to make all sorts of qualifications of "well... if something originally published as a webcomic is now in physical book form.... (Inverloch again) but actually I have volumed 1 and 3-7 of Tomo (manga-style "preteen protag moves in with Christian family members and has both fantasy adventures and learns the benefits of being Christian" no-subtlety series that I picked up at Family Christian Stores when they were still everywhere. also I probably still have the first six Serenity "books" but I can't find them (not fantasy: rebellious "sinful" teen moves to new school and hangs out with the Christians because she wants to sleep with one of them, eventually sees the errors of all her ways, un-dyes her hair, and converts. Also no subtlety)

I had a phase when I was "too old" for veggie tales but still thought FCS was the best place ever but if that really was the best of their "teen" content it really wasn't great

Do you have a book written by 2 or more authors?

are we limiting this to novels? I have The Great Snape Debate (meta published before Deathly Hallows, with short chapters by two alternating authors, plus they got Orson Scott Card to write a chapter to draw reader attention with the big name and hey it worked, I bought it, arguing (between all of them) both sides of "will Snape turn out to be on Harry's side after all" and also The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern which as the title implies, is more of a guide than a real story.

Oh, but I do have a copy of Invasive Procedures (Card & Johnson).

Did I miss any questions? tumblr's being particularly weird today.

anyway I suppose I should tag some fellow bookworms. @knightbusofdoom @copperscales and if anyone else wants me to edit to in so you're "really" tagged, just may me know, and if you just want to do it please do and tag me back