#mccaffrey goated in this scene.

[emmaswanned]

"have you found my partner? agent casey?" "yeah, we found him. in the woods. he had a close encounter with the shadow. it did something to him."

[pumathoughts]

Super Bowl 58 Rundown

Super Bowl LVIII

CBS 6:30pm

Here we are again. I feel like that scene in the movie Groundhog Day when Bill Murray’s character, Phil, punches Ned in the face when he sees him in the street for the umpteenth million time. Well, this Super Bowl is the equivalent of that. The Kansas City Chiefs making their fourth trip in the last six years to this game, and the San Francisco 49ers making their second trip in as many years. Patrick Mahomes is already being GOATed after 6 full years as a starter. I never thought I’d have to defend Tom Brady so soon, or, even at all but TB 12 won 7 Super Bowls and went to 10. I get Mahomes’ 2 chips in 4 appearances (pending this outcome) is impressive but the odds of him going to 18 Super Bowls in 20 years is literally impossible. Andy Reid isn’t going to coach forever, right!?  Tom Brady is the one player who handed Mahomes his first regular season loss, first playoff loss, and first Super Bowl loss. TB12 was the only one who could've saved us.

This game is honestly going to go either way depending how each defense plays. The 49ers gave up a lot of yards to the Lions but Brock Purdy being the “game manager” Cam Newton says he is led a comeback to put him in 49er lore. Now the former Mr. Irrelevant sits 21-5 in his career as a starter with a chance at a Super Bowl. Wild that this team a year ago tried to start Trey Lance. The 49ers top to bottom are the most built team the league has seen in a long time, with the right players in the right system that when they are banging on all cylinders it is damn near impossible to stop. Christian McCaffrey is a cheat code and the key to everything the Niners want to do. The 49er offense is the second-best offense in the league. Third in rushing, fourth in passing, and third in scoring. On paper, it’s no wonder they open as the 2 ½ point favorites but beware they are 9-9-1 against the spread. San Francisco is making their eighth Super Bowl appearance, tied for second most ever, and is seeking its record-tying sixth championship. The 49ers lost their two previous trips in 2019 and 2012 and haven't won the big game since 1994. San Francisco's 38 playoff wins are the most in NFL history, and they are the eighth team to reach the Super Bowl after overcoming a second-half deficit in the divisional round and the conference championship game. Four of the previous seven won it all.

The Chiefs however shouldn’t be overlooked, especially on defense. They are the second-best defense in the league, 18th against the run, 4th against the pass and the 2nd best scoring defense. The 49ers defense in those rankings are: 8th overall, 3rd rushing, 14th passing, and 3rd scoring. The Chiefs are making their sixth Super Bowl appearance. They lost the first Super Bowl to Green Bay, beat Minnesota in Super Bowl IV, then waited 50 years before beating the 49ers four years ago. The Chiefs are one of seven franchises to have reached consecutive Super Bowls more than once. The Patriots in the 2003 and 2004 seasons were the most recent to win two in a row. Coach Andy Reid would tie Hall of Fame coaches Joe Gibbs and Bill Walsh for the third-most Super Bowl wins with his third. He is coaching in his fifth overall. Mahomes can pass Hall of Famers Terry Bradshaw, John Elway and Peyton Manning for the third-most playoff wins by a QB in NFL history with his 15th. Mahomes needs two TD passes to move past Manning (40) and into the top five in NFL playoff history. Travis Kelce has an NFL-record 159 postseason catches, while his 1,810 yards receiving and 19 touchdowns trail only Jerry Rice in history. Kelce has 257 yards receiving in the Super Bowl. He needs 67 to move into the top five and 108 to climb to No. 2 in history. Chiefs WR Rashee Rice needs 20 yards receiving to pass Torry Holt (242) for second among rookies in the playoffs. He needs 146 to break Ja’Marr Chase's record.

Now to the only thing the world cares about, Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift has openly spoken about the number ’13’ being her lucky number. The San Francisco 49ers will take on the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII (58). With that basis of information, take a look at the below list of coincidences between Swift’s lucky number and this year’s Super Bowl.

This will be Super Bowl 58. If you add five and eight together, you get 13.

San Francisco 49ers are playing in the game. Four and nine added together equals 13.

The 49ers are the 1 seed in the NFC, while the Chiefs are the 3 seed in the AFC.

Taylor Swift is scheduled to take a plane from her concert in Tokyo, Japan to Las Vegas, Nevada. While not exact, the flight time from Tokyo to Las Vegas is roughly 13 hours.

If Swift does indeed make it to the game, this will be her 13th appearance at a Kansas City Chiefs game this season.

The date for the Super Bowl is February 11, 2024. Two and 11 added together equals 13.

If you subtract 13 from 100, you get 87, which is the jersey number of Swift’s boyfriend and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

Chiefs by a billion. Bet your mortgage on it. Bet your first born on it. It’s going to happen. Thanos in Avengers Infinity War said it: “Dread it. Run from it. Destiny arrives all the same. And now it's here.” For everyone’s sanity the 49ers need to win this game and be the heroes we need but not the ones we deserve but everything in my gut tells me Chiefs are winning this game because the NFL NEEDS Mahomes to be better than Tom Brady. Kelce will propose to Swift after they win. I wonder if their song is slamming screen door, Sneakin' out late, tapping on your window. When we're on the phone, and you talk real slow, 'Cause it's late, and mama  Kelce don't know. SEE WHAT I DID THERE!?

A modern day love story for all those Gen Z’ers out there. A few other interesting things I found is the team traveling west to the Super Bowl is 7-0 in the last 30 years. The Chiefs are traveling west this year. The team with the best record entering the Super Bowl is 1-15 against the spread. the 49ers are 12-5, KC is 11-6. The team that wins the coin toss is 1-9 in the last 10 games, but 15 of the last 18 SB winners wore white jerseys. So, there you have it. The Super Bowl will cap a crazy season and the Chiefs will stand tall as the best.

[firecoloredwater]

Dragonflight Chapter 1 Commentary

And, after way longer than planned, I have finally gotten that commentary written for the first scene/chapter of Dragonflight.  Under a cut because this is long, and both spoilers and tangents abound.

(This is also being crossposted on pillowfort here, so if you have an account please consider this encouragement to comment.)

Plot Events

Lessa wakes up with a bad feeling and tries to figure out what danger is approaching.  She fails and resolves to wait.  The watch wher adores her.

Worldbuilding Details

Lessa trusts the watch-wher to be very aware of/sensitive to danger, so that her sensing something it doesn’t is very strange.

The watch-wher has an “odorous lair” and is kept on a chain in the courtyard.  Also: clipped wings, a scaly head, and pointed ears.  It flees into the den when the sun rises.

Kitchen drudges all sleep together in the cheese room; Lessa is described as “curled into a tight knot of bones” so presumably drudges aren’t fed well (at least in Fax’s Ruatha).  They have sandals and sleep on straw, but apparently do not have any means of brushing their hair (or else Lessa hasn’t been making any use of it, and this isn’t terribly unusual for a drudge).

When describing Ruatha’s deterioration, it’s referred to as “the once stone-clean Hold.”

“Hold” seems to be roughly equivalent to a castle; Lessa refers to the “paved perimeter” of the Hold, as if a Hold is a very physical thing, more a place than a culture or a city which can expand just by building houses/roads/shops.

“the craftsmen’s stony holdings at the foot of the Hold’s cliff” implies that the Hold is built into a cliff, and that craftsmen have stone houses/shops/both that are built at the foot of but outside the cliff.

Lessa’s Hold is initially referred to as “Ruath Hold,” with “Ruatha” used in a way that seems like it might be more equivalent to “America.”

There are a lot of tales and ballads about “the dawn appearance of the red star.”

“Milchbeasts” are probably milk cows, but I suppose could also be goats or other animals used for milk.

The watch wher seems to be able to understand speech, though it doesn’t speak itself.

Commentary

I had forgotten how Anne McCaffrey began every book (every chapter?  From the format it looks like it’ll be every chapter, but see, I don’t remember) with an in-universe song excerpt.  Not that I wouldn’t have recalled when reminded, but without prompting I wouldn’t have come up with it.

As a result of this feature, the very first words I ever read of Pern (and, of course, the first in this reread as well) were not prose, they were lyrics:

Drummer, beat, and piper, blow, Harper, strike, and soldier, go. Free the flame and sear the grasses Till the dawning Red Star passes.

I like the lyrics, and I think they’re fitting for my experience of enjoying Pern.  These lines are very imagistic, very emotional; it’s a remarkably martial feel, considering three of the four characters/archetypes in the lines—drummer, piper, harper, and soldier—are musicians, and only the last is, well, the soldier.  It gives me the feeling of all of Pern together gathering themselves and preparing and marching to war… which is what F’lar ends up spending most of this book trying to make happen.

It’s also deeply ironic, considering that I think soldiers exist in Dragonflight and Dragonseye and… well, some of the colonists in Dragonsdawn are retired former soldiers who don’t want to talk about it.  But as far as I remember, soldiers just flat out don’t exist in any Pern book other than those two three.  Even guards, and the concept of guards, seems to vanish.  I’ve heard that national leaders are under much tighter security now than they were a century or two ago—which makes sense, it’s a lot harder to keep an assassin with a rifle out of murder range than an assassin with a sword—but medieval leaders still had guards.

Pernese leaders, on the other hand, seem to be operating under the philosophy that if you can’t personally defend yourself from assassins, then you kinda deserved it anyway and the assassin will probably rule better than you did.  You’d think that people would at least be a little concerned about what happens to Jaxom considering he’s the sole possible heir to Ruatha once Lessa and her descendants are ineligible due to dragons, and I can only guess what sort of political mess would result if Jaxom died.  But off he goes, wherever he feels like at any time, with not only no guards but not even a ‘visiting my secret girlfriend on her farm, send a search party if I’m not back by the morning’ note.  Which I believe of Jaxom easily, but why does no one worry?  Why is there no Zazu trying to make Simba-Jaxom behave himself?

And F’lar!  Okay, sure, he has a great big dragon to protect him, but on the other hand so did his father, who was assassinated.  I think it’s implied that F’lar put extra effort into learning knife fighting so that he could defend himself if someone tried to murder him like F’lon, which is… something, anyway… but F’lar, have you ever considered asking any of the hundreds of men in the military organization you have absolute power over to, say, do literally anything other than stand aside and watch when someone tries to murder you?

Now, to be fair to F’lar (and to all his subordinates who never suggest such a thing) the murder attempts were usually narratively framed as duels (even though they were never initiated with the formalities that would surround dueling when it was a thing in real, Earth cultures).  Between that, F’lar’s pride, and the culture just not having the concept of guards, I have no trouble believing that F’lar wouldn’t come up with the idea.  But how did we get to a culture that doesn’t have a concept of guards for world leaders?  And how come no one else ever tried to interfere?  Stab the evil Oldtimers in the back if you must!  They went through zero formalities, they just pulled out a knife and aimed for murder, this is closer to a tavern brawl that an honorable duel.  The other Oldtimers who value tradition so highly are not gonna side with the guy who tried to murder his peer just because he used a weapon to do it!  Hell, Lessa can just psychically smack them down and be done with it, no death needed.  Have Ramoth order their dragon to yell at them until they cut it out, just do something.

…Alright, I’ve gone on for a full page and not even read an actual sentence yet.  Time to move on.

…Soooo am I the only one who just kind of… forgot that Lessa can see the future?

Okay I didn’t forget forget, the explanation for it is half the plot of the book, but I don’t think it ever quite clicked for me until rereading that Lessa can see the future.  The very first thing that happens in the first chapter of Dragonflight (and therefore the very first thing that ever happened in all of Pern) is: Lessa has a bad feeling.  She immediately interprets this bad feeling as an indication that something dangerous is about to happen and tries to figure out what it is.  The next few chapters are about F’lar and Fax arriving, both of whom are dangerous to Lessa and her plans in different ways.  Fax is the usurper who killed her family and would kill (or perhaps forcibly marry, then kill) her if he knew who she was; F’lar immediately takes her away from the Hold she just won back after (I think) a decade of hiding and plotting, and ensures that neither she nor her children can ever rule it.  For a good cause and all, but still: pretty dangerous for Lessa’s plans to rule Ruatha.

I’ve gotten off track.  Back to the point: Lessa can see the future.  Or sense it, anyway.  More interesting to me is the fact that she never questions her ability to do this.  We know that she went back in time twice to give herself these feelings, to save herself from Fax as a child and to sense incoming danger at the beginning of the book, which is where these feelings come from and why they’re right.  I don’t question her trusting it as a scared kid, but as an adult who’s just expecting danger and not yet in it, I’d expect a little more skepticism.  Some degree of ‘hm, what if this bad feeling is in fact not world-changing prophecy, and instead is just about the way my boss seemed stressed yesterday and tends to kick me when he’s in a bad mood?’  Or, ‘what if this is just residual feelings from a nightmare, since I just woke up and the watch-wher isn’t bothered?’

Doylistically, the answer is that Lessa is right, her sense of danger establishes suspense for the first few chapters, and ‘but does the danger Lessa sensed actually exist?’ is not a subplot that fit into the rest of the story or that Anne McCaffrey had any interest in.  (Presumably.  Maybe there was a draft where Lessa doubts herself until Fax arrives, but I doubt it.)

I like Watsonian explanations better though, so let’s look at it that way.  The degree to which Lessa trusts this sense of danger makes it seem to me like she’s experienced this before, and probably several times; one distant, panicked memory from when she was a kid is not good evidence of having a reliable, invisible ability that no one else does (or, probably, has ever even mentioned as a fictional concept, considering that Pern doesn’t seem to have fiction beyond slight inaccuracies in historical ballads and maybe room for the possibility of made up characters for love songs and similar).

It’s also fairly plausible that Lessa could have psychically sensed danger before it arrived previously.  Her immediate interpretation of what happened, after all, was not ‘I traveled through time and read my own mind’ but ‘I sensed malice from someone with my telepathic powers’ which is definitely a thing she can do, since she spends the next several paragraphs psychically searching for the danger that woke her up and confirming that it’s not anywhere she checks.  A handful of instances of that happening (and her actually finding the source of the menace) would give her a pretty good reason to trust her ominous feelings, and might explain why neither Fax nor any of his cronies ever found her.

Lessa has spider sense, is what I’m saying.  Go forth and crossover, fandom.

Anyway, Lessa spends a few paragraphs scanning the surrounding area, which is used to give us a sketch of the setting: Ruath Hold is a place contained by walls and set into a cliff; outside it is a paved area and stone buildings where craftsmen live, and a causeway to “the valley.”  Wind blows to Ruatha from the shores of Tillek, which seem to be pretty close.  Further out is the Pass, which is further than Lessa has ever psychically scanned before.

Then we get a slight detour as Fax is mentioned.    He’s described as “the self-styled Lord of the High Reaches” and Lessa is pleased that he’s infuriated by Ruatha’s deterioration and hasn’t been there in three turns.  Turns is capitalized for some reason.  Was that a thing in 60s scifi?  Capitalizing words that replaced ordinary words to draw attention to how scifi the vocabulary is?  I remember between always being italicized, and I think I’ve seen similar italicization of new words in fantasy series, but at least ‘between’ is a new use of a word for a new concept.  Turn is just an invented synonym and capitalizing it makes no sense at all.  I just… don’t know what she could possibly have been thinking, much less what her editors were.  Maybe she had an editor who knew nothing about scifi and thought that was a thing?  I think I’ve heard that she originally wrote romance, so maybe she just kept a romance editor who’d never read scifi before and decided that fake it til you make it was an acceptable strategy.  It’s the closest I have to an explanation.

Moving on, then Lessa gets up.  She finds her sandals, brushes straw out of her ��matted” hair, and twists it into a knot.  I… I have objections to this.

I actually can and regularly do put my hair in a knot at the base of my neck without using any hair ties or anything other than the hair itself to hold it, and doing that when my hair is badly tangled doesn’t work.  It’ll go into the knot, sure, but it’ll also just come undone in a minute or less.  Getting it into a knot that it will stay in for any length of time requires either something to hold it in place or getting the balance exactly right, and you can’t do the latter with tangled hair.  A few small tangles, sure, but anything approaching matted is just… not going to work.  If I can’t run my fingers through my hair, it won’t stay in a knot.  (Also, ‘matted’ makes me think of fake “dreadlocks” and that there must be mold growing in her hair, but that’s probably more that the connotation has shifted over time.  At least, I hope.)

Also, humans are primates that like grooming ourselves and each other; even if for some bizarre reason it’s illegal for drudges to own combs, the drudges should just be finger combing their own and each others’ hair.  (Or cutting it all off.  Or hiding illegal combs in that straw they sleep on.  Whatever.)  The matted hair is there to indicate that Lessa is living in a really bad, physically deprived, barely surviving situation, same as Lessa waking up on straw in a cold, smelly room full of other drudges, but that really should’ve been done by making her hair oily or something.  She’s going to wash it in a few chapters anyway, at the same time as she combs it.

Granted, I don’t have much trouble imagining Lessa shunning all the other drudges’ company during hair combing time so that she can plot vengeance more, so maybe it’s just her and all the others have only slightly tangled hair.

Anyway, Lessa goes outside.  She interacts fondly with the watch-wher, in a very similar way to how a person might interact with a dog, though the watch wher is probably meant to be a bit smarter than dogs are.  Then she climbs up to the ramparts and we get a little bit more of the setting: the Hold has a massive gate, and the Pass is within sight.

(How close is Tillek?  Technically it said that the danger ‘didn’t scent the breezes from Tillek’s cold shore’ but I refuse to interpret that literally, Lessa is not psychically smelling emotion on breezes.  I can only assume that she psychically scanned a significant part of the way to Tillek’s shore, if not all the way there.  That was within her ‘I’ve gone this far before’ range while the Pass wasn’t, and now she can see the Pass.  Mountains can be seen a pretty good distance away, but ‘the stony breasts of the Pass rose in black relief’ sure doesn’t sound like a smudge on the horizon.  How close is Tillek?  I’ve been thinking of Holds as capital cities controlling small-nation-sized areas of land, even if most of the land is unpopulated, but this is making them seem more like small towns with barely any space between them.  Could I walk from Ruatha to Tillek in a day?)

Lessa stares into the east, then the northeast, and notices the red star (which isn’t capitalized even though it’s clearly a proper name like the North Star, which I just googled because this made me doubt myself, and North Star is indeed supposed to be capitalized.  I can’t just have a really old and unedited version, this is the omnibus, there was time to fix this, where is her editor).  The sight of the Red Star makes a bunch of “incoherent fragments” of stories about the Red Star at dawn flash through her mind too quickly for her to make sense of them, which conveniently leaves us with the ominous feeling we were supposed to get and no distracting other details.  On the other hand, I’m now wondering if all those Red Star story fragments were projected by future!Lessa, so maybe there’s some foreshadowing along with the narrative convenience.

Lessa’s instincts tell her that while there is danger coming from the northeast, the danger from the east is more important, so she goes back to staring that way.  But then the warning feeling fades away, presumably because future!Lessa finally figured out what was going on and went back to her own time.  Present Lessa accepts that she’s been warned, and just has to wait to see what she was warned about.

Then she looks over the valley a bit and muses about how Fax gets no profit from Ruatha, never will while Lessa lives, and has no idea that she’s the source of this.  She smiles and stretches, then panics when a rooster crows and she worries someone might have woken up and seen her with uncharacteristically confident body language, so she lets her hair back down and reassumes “the sloppy posture she affected.”

Okay, I have several questions.  First: if she’s that worried about being seen acting uncharacteristically, wouldn’t it make more sense to just return to her normal pose and not whirl around like she has secrets?  Yes, she was startled, but she’s been doing this for years.  I’m sure she’s had moments where she thought she almost got caught before, she’s had a chance to practice subtlety.

Second, are there really so few drudges that Fax’s cronies can recognize individual drudges and their usual behavior, or does Lessa think some other drudge would tell Fax who she is because they saw her standing up straight with her hair pulled back?

Third, why were there no guards to see her?  Fax slaughtered her family at this same time of the morning several years ago, and I remember a specific mention of the guard who had been paid to not sound an alarm.  Why does Fax not have a guard now that he rules the place?  Lessa was on the ramparts over the gate, she should’ve been easy for a guard to see.  She should have been standing next to a guard.

Fourth, I’m pretty sure that after years and years of “affecting” a sloppy posture, that would just be her normal posture.  I can accept the “princess is forced to work as a servant, is eventually revealed to be a princess by how her skin is just as pale and her hands are just as soft and her dancing is just as graceful and her singing is just as sweet as if she had grown up with nothing to do her entire life but perfect those things, because it’s just the inherent nature of princesses to be naturally perfect in those ways” conceit in a fairytale, but this is a novel and it bothers me.  Both because there are whole worlds of classism going on in that concept which I may not be qualified to analyze but can sure side-eye with a double dose of irritation, and also because it makes no sense.

Lessa is Cinderella (with spider sense and dragons) but she’s supposed to be more plausible, and she’s also singlehandedly sabotaging an entire Hold (however much ‘a Hold’ actually is) while maintaining a cover as an overworked and underfed servant.  Her posture is not her priority, and there are no perfect posture genes to be passed down royal lines.  Lessa slouches.  Probably she gets in a bunch of passive aggressive battles with R’gul and then F’lar over it.  That is the only reasonable option.

…Moving on from that rant.

Lessa hugs and pets the watch wher, which is at least as ecstatic about this attention as a dog would be after being left alone for a week.  Lessa thinks about how the watch wher is the only living creature that knows who she is, and also the only one she’s ever trusted since her family was killed and she survived by hiding in its den.  She reminds it to be vicious to her if anyone else is nearby, it’s reluctant but promises to obey.  The sun rises, the watch wher runs back into its den, and Lessa sneaks back to the cheese room.  End of Chapter 1.

So, uh, another question: why didn’t Fax just kill the watch wher and replace it with a watch wher bound to him?  I can’t imagine there were none available in however many years it’s been, even if watch whers were originally conceived as nighttime guards for Holds and nothing else.  I also can’t see Fax being inclined to spare it out of pity or similar.  Did all the watch wher breeders refuse to let him have an egg?  Couldn’t he have made a breeding pair out of all the watch whers from all the Holds he rules and used eggs from that to replace the watch whers bound to families he’s usurped?  Is this another example of ‘Fax doesn’t even want to think about Ruatha’?

Anyway, now I’m going to go even deeper into English major mode.

I really wish I could give this to one of my old English professors and see how they critiqued it.  This chapter is a bit under two and a half pages long in the book I have, I’d guess no more than five pages in a regular sized paperback format.  There’s no dialogue and very little action.  There are several points where the phrasing seems like it’s trying too hard to me, though I suspect that that is due to changes in what’s considered standard in the last fifty years.  I kind of suspect that if I had turned in something similar to this for a class, it would’ve been ripped to shreds, mostly on the basis of having lots of exposition with no dialogue and little action.

Despite that, this chapter does a lot of things in a very short time.  It introduces us to the setting: we have a decent idea what a Hold is and that a properly maintained Hold is supposed to be clear of grasses, and we have a decent idea of what drudges are and how they’re treated, and we have a sketch of the surrounding landscape and significant nearby locations.  We have a pretty good idea of Lessa’s character and motivation, and we know that Fax is an enemy of Lessa’s and that he goes around conquering Holds to add to the one he rightfully inherited.  We know the Red Star is ominous.  We have pretty good foreshadowing for the discovery of time travel.  We know that watch whers have scales and wings, live in dens, and are vicious to most people but adoring of a few, which sets us up pretty well for the dragons that appear next (who might not be strange to us now, but which would have been a lot stranger when this was published).  We know that Lessa has psychic abilities, and a broad range in which she can apply them.  That’s pretty good for a few pages.

We also have an established tone, and Lessa acting in contrast to it.  The scene puts a lot of emphasis on how cold everything is, and how much stone is around, and generally works to make the reader feel how chilled and oppressive and deteriorated everything is.  For the first half of the chapter Lessa fits into this: she’s bony, she’s huddled on the floor, her hair is matted and full of straw.

Almost exactly halfway through Lessa starts moving, and she glides.

There have been indications that Lessa rules Ruatha already; she’s psychically tracking everything, to start with.  But that is the moment where Lessa breaks out of the general cold-decay-oppression and is shown as a ruler, in secret or otherwise.  Starving, oppressed servants don’t glide.  Queens do.

The rest of the scene continues to present Lessa as powerful; she stands above the gate and muses about how Fax will never get any profit from Ruatha, and will never know that Lessa is behind it.  She tells the watch wher what to do and it promises to obey even though it doesn’t want to.  And then she vanishes back into hiding, biding her time.  The next chapter will be F’lar’s POV, and this one does very well at establishing Lessa as someone lurking in Ruatha, ready and motivated and able to screw up F’lar’s plans.  F’lar doesn’t know she’s there, but we do and are waiting for the collision.

I’ve seen people call Anne McCaffrey a bad or even a terrible writer, and… I suppose it’s possible this chapter is an anomaly, but I’d call this pretty good.  Old fashioned in some ways that make it seem pretentious or overdone by modern standards, but we can hardly blame her because styles changed over time.  I certainly have objections to her characterization of many characters, and I’d say that her worldbuilding consists of cool ideas which were warped by various prejudices, and there are several details which were glossed over for narrative ease that I wanted more realism on (which I think is partly an example of shifts in what’s considered standard over time).

But when it comes to the actual, literal, technical writing?  Anne McCaffrey knew what she was doing.  There were a lot of things that she had to accomplish in this scene, and I think she did them all pretty well, and for the most part pretty subtly.  She knew how to communicate what she wanted to; just because we would’ve liked her to communicate something else doesn’t mean she was bad at communicating.  There’s a reason this series created a fandom which is still going a full half a century later.