I picked up a bunch of them at a yard sale and started reading. They’re light, easy reads but something just grates. Maybe it’s the weird sex/gender politics or the names like “F’nor” or the way the characters don’t seem very deep. And I kept waiting for the dragons to be revealed as more complicated, or at least to have an evil one; the dragon-human bond just felt kinda creepy at times. Are they just young-adult literature and I’m being too harsh?
You’re being too harsh.
The first trilogy is an excellent piece of imagination and world building; the second, Harper Hall trilogy, is a YA version of the first one. The books start to go downhill after that.
I would agree with RealityChuck at least as far as the first trilogy (which is all I’ve read), but bear in mind I did read them when I was a teen.
I remember the dragon/human bond (and found echoes of it in Avatar) and the impressive world-building, but not much detail besides. The trilogy is on my kindle wish list of classics I want to re-read at some point.
I don’t think you’re being too harsh, the sexual aspects of the dragon-human bond skeeved me out too, especially the way they’re used to facilitate ‘romantic rape’, which appears to bother precisely no-one. I only read the first trilogy, and didn’t think much of that.
The world doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the one-dimensional characters just spontaneously acquire whatever skills they need whenever needed, at which point, either the ability is never mentioned again or suddenly everyone can do it. None of the internal rules are consistent, and they’re only generally mentioned when they’re just about to be broken.
I didn’t read it until last year, rather than reading it as a teen- I suspect those who encountered it younger will probably think more of it, as I often think more of stuff I first read as a kid.
You’re being too harsh. I enjoy them - as you say, light easy reads but as RealityChuck says they change with time. It’s pretty hard to reconcile the situation and characters in the first two with the later ones (don’t even mention the ones written with or by Todd McCaffery).
You just have to accept them as they are, yes, the characters are totally unrealistic as well as being shallow, the sex side doesn’t make much sense (there ought to be a hell of a lot of gay dragonriders!), and the “goodness” of the dragons is annoying but they are still a fun read. I’m not sure why the naming convention (F’nor, F’lar, etc) bothers you any more than any other “exotic” names (Daenerys or Legolas anyone :dubious: ).
They’re like Jean Auel, only with dragons.
Menolly is an obvious Mary Sue.
I think what bugged me most about them was the pretext that they were supposedly science fiction rather than fantasy. OK, reptile-like alien creatures the humans call dragons, no problem. They’re intelligent and large enough to carry human riders, fine, that’s still on firm SF ground. They can fly… Um, maybe, but my suspension of disbelief is starting to take some strain. They can breathe fire, well, I suppose so… They’re telepathic and can teleport? No, sorry, that’s pure fantasy, not even resembling SF any more.
They were teen-age girl horse stories, with “horse” scratched out and “magic dragon” written in red crayon. Fun but don’t expect anything deep or serious.
You forgot about the time travel.
There are. They’re mentioned from time to time.
I loved the Pern books when I discovered and read them the first time. That was in junior high. I think that kind of sums them up. Anne MacCaffrey (or however you spell it) is pretty clearly a frustrated romance novelist.
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The original story appeared in Analog while John Campbell was editing. That makes its SF bona fides irreproachable.
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The dragons were clearly genetic engineered from fire lizards, which already could breathe fire. Their abilities were all part of their design. All the elements of it were definitely science fiction tropes.
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Pern is an alien planet colonized by humans; the thread was due to a quirk in its orbit.
The only way it’s fantasy in the same way that all science fiction (and all fiction, actually) is fantasy – describing things that did not happen.
McCaffrey did call some of her SF romance, but not Dragonriders.
And there is nothing wrong with romance in fiction; it happens in real life, too.
Wasn’t John Campbell’s definition of science fiction “that which is published by science fiction editors”? Yeah, by that definition, Pern is science fiction, but it’s not saying much to say that.
And I can buy genetic engineering for size, or intelligence, or even firebreathing… But how do you genetically engineer the ability to teleport?
It was already present in the fire-lizards.
Did they? I thought the going between was already present in the fire lizards. I might be misremembering.
My main problem with the first trilogy is the abominable dialog from the first two. It’s all, “I, Lessa? A daughter of the house of Ruatha dealing with a lowly dragonrider.” and such. Ugh. It’s as bad as John Byrne’s X-Men dialog where the characters don’t talk, the make speeches.
That said, I thought they were good books, though I found them in junior high by looking up ‘dragon’ in the card catalog. I liked The White Dragon best of the first six. Though I did find it interesting when the backstory was expanded it did go on a bit long.
I was extremely bothered by the rape scene in the first story, and how everyone seemed to expect the heroine to know things about dragons and dragonriders without actually telling her what was what…that she would be expected to have sex with the man whose dragon mated with hers, for instance.
The first few books were pretty good. The fans clamored for more, and McCaffery obliged. I really can’t blame her for that. For a while, she was cranking out dragon books as fast as she could. She’d hit the mother lode, and was mining it for all it was worth while she could, but the quality definitely suffered. And her son continued this.
It’s like Janet Evanovitch’s Numbers series. Keep reading the series until you are tired of the books, and then quit when you start hesitating when you pick up the next book. The author runs out of new things to say, and it shows.
I’ve had (cheerful) arguments about this with Todd McCaffrey (who is a real sweetheart of a guy, a gentleman through and through, and a joy to chat with.) He’s wrong: the books are fantasy, not science fiction.
Also, I really hated the time-travel “plot fix” in the first book. Using time travel to solve your problems is an obnoxious cheat. It belongs in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and not in a serious story.
(A serious exploration of the implications of time travel is entirely valid. Using it as a magical short-cut, and just bypassing all the plot complications, is stupid and insulting.)
I’ve often had that same reaction in other stories when time travel is used, but in this case I think it works, because it’s clear that the mystery and the dilemma were caused by time travel in the first place.
As for the overall series, I absolutely positively adored the first two trilogies, along with Moreta, when I was in junior high school, and they still occupy a fond place in my heart. They’re good fun books.
Filbert: What are some examples of
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Yeah, kinda. But I tell you what, those first two Menolly-themed YA novels were probably the best things McCaffrey produced in the Pern books. Imaginative, with some decent characterization. A step behind something like the Earthsea books, but IMHO better than a lot of SF/fantasy YA stuff.