Are the inhabitants of Pern agnostic or atheist?
It’s hard to say, as I don’t recall any scenes in the Last Pass setting that could shed any light on it. Not even Petiron’s funeral has any real religious overtones. I don’t recall if religion ever came up in Dragonsdawn, either, but I don’t think it did.
I would guess that there atheist, simply because it has never occurred to them to be otherwise. If Jaxom and Ruth showed up at your door one day, and you tried to explain religion to them, I suspect you’d just get blank looks from both.
Small Hijack, I tried to start that series many times but I simply always had something else to read. Should I give it a chance?
Sure as shootin’. While the later one’s got a little silly the first batch or two are astonishing.
McCaffrey has built a believable world populated with good characters. Some (quite a few) aren’t fully fleshed out but enjoyable.
By all means, Estilicon, at least the core novels (Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon). Of course, by then you’ll probably be hooked on the characters–I certainly was. The only books in the series that I don’t care for are Moreta and Nerilka’s Story, which I found depressing and lacking in the engaging characters that I had come to expect on Pern.
Give my regards to Robinton, and tell him I’ll see him when the Benden wine rolls in.
Since there’s VERY little mention of religion at all in the Pern books, I would say it’s not really a question of atheism or agnosticism. When religion is mentioned in one of the later books in the series, the reaction to the mention is one of almost complete indifference. Yet, in that same book, there is a sort of acknowledgement to the wisdom of one particular Bible passage, without any kind of frame of reference. I think too, in the later books, comparisons were drawn between religion as we know it and technology as the Pernese know it.
For first-time readers of the series, let me just say that it’s evident in the second book that McCaffrey hadn’t yet plotted out her Pernese history fully for the first book, so there are a few “canonical” (I think that’s the word I want) errors that are never clarified in later books. Without spoliing anything major, when you read about Larth in the first book, PRETEND it says Larth was a brown dragon. And completely ignore Kylara’s name choice for her child and the reasons for it. Other than attempting to establish the paternity of that child, his name serves no purpose anyway.
I just reread DragonDawn, which gives the story of the original settlers of Pern and the first threadfall. There are a couple of mentions of “The Age of Religions” in the context of “well, isn’t it nice that we’re beyond all that”. So, I’d say that the series is a rather aggressive agnostic one.
Spoil me.
I’ve read the first six Pern novels: Dragonflight, Dragonquest, The White Dragon and the Harper Hall trilogy. But I’ve not read the rest and don’t intend to.
But I’m curious about the following, which may have been addressed in the books I haven’t read:
[spoiler]1. Do the Pernese ever recover any of the technology that brought them to Pern? Wasn’t a working starship discovered at some point?
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Is contact with Earth ever re-established, or do other humans ever visit Pern?
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What’s the deal with the dolphins?[/spoiler]
Fiver, to answer your questions without giving it away for others, here’s what you need to know.
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Yes to the first part, and not exactly to the second part.
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Not so far.
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Their role is made much clearer in later books, but that story seems to be still evolving.
I know you said you don’t intend to read any more of the series, but I would suggest that you read JUST ONE MORE - All The Weyrs of Pern neatly wraps up almost all of the major plotlines without starting too many others.
She evidently gets the religion question (I know, I wrote to her to ask the same a long time ago!) a lot, it’s on the FAQ on her official page…
From here: http://www.annemccaffrey.org/
Re: People from Earth visiting Pern this far along,
I think that ground’s basically been covered in Arthur C. Clarke’s Songs of a Distant Earth, but it would be kinda interesting.
Y’know, I always say that Ms. McCaffrey made me an athiest. See, I started reading these books in 1978, when I was seventeen. One of the very first things I noticed in the very first book was the complete lack of religion. Now, obviously, I knew that the real reason there was no religion on Pern was that Ms. McCaffrey apparently didn’t want to deal with it… but I was working a dead-end, no-brain-needed job at the time and spent a lot of time thinking about the books I was reading. So I really pondered the religion question. I knew that the original colonists of Pern were from Earth (it’s in the prologue) and, yet, none of Earth’s religions had been transplanted in any fashion to the new planet. Why? I concluded that, by the time we colonized Pern, we had outgrown religion! This idea – that religion was something it was possible to outgrow was a real eye-opener for me. That idea led to other ideas – specifically, that God didn’t make us but, rather we made God – and poof I was an atheist!
At any rate, that was my thinking after reading just the first three books. Ms. McCaffrey fleshed this question out later on, especially in Dragondawn where she alluded to terrible, bloody religious wars on Earth and indicated that the colonists purposefully left religion and religious thinking behind.
Finally, I’ve read and reread this series many times and have come to another conclusion about religion and Pern. I think that, on Pern, dragons and dragonriders serve the same purpose that religion does to many people. In other words, I think a case can be made that Pern developed as a hero-worshipping society rather than a diety-worshipping society. Oh and, BTW, I agree that the quality has really fallen off with the last several books, but they’re still quite a lot of fun and well worth the read.
On dark days, I harbour the belief that a Pernese evangelist led his flock outside and tried to use the power of prayer to stop the thread.
And failed most horribly 
I seem to recall reading one of McCaffrey’s works where she related a story of a young woman who came to visit her and they discussed religion. The young woman was saying things like “But there just HAS to be religion on Pern” and McCaffrey responded “No there doesn’t. I created that world and I say there isn’t any religion.” The young woman wasn’t deterred and said something like “Humans can’t live without God” at which point Ms McCaffrey was saved from the conversation by her sister-in-law faking a telephone call that “she had been expecting”.
It was fairly clear from this passage(I’ll check my bookshelf when I get home and see which book it was in) that there was meant to be no religion on Pern. I’m not sure it is realistic, after all didn’t a philosopher once say “If there was no god, mankind would invent one.”?
Enjoy,
Steven
I recall reading the same thing, Mtgman – maybe it was in the Illustrated Guide she did with Jodi Lynn Nye?
Since we’re not in GD, I’ll say only that I think it is realistic that such a society could develop, but regardless, Jess has provided us with a perfectly reasonable theory to explain it in any instance.
As LifeOnWry notes, the history and culture of Pern clearly mutated over time in McCaffrey’s mind; in the early stories (which were later combined into the first novels), Pernese society is very clearly something like a communism with stricty defined class divisions; by later entrants in the series, it’s pretty rigidly capitalist.
–Cliffy
I read the original trilogy about the same time that ** Jess ** did, and also a teen I was in the habit of turning my mother onto sci/fi fantasy. Everything from Tolkien to Asimov.
She’s a pretty smart cookie, as I totally missed the same sex implications amongst the dragon riders but she got it right away. I’ll never forget when Mom asked me, “what do you think happens when a brown and a green (or was it blue it’s been too long) dragon mate?”
One of those unforgetable moments