To late to edit:
As for the sf vs. fantasy argument, I don’t require my sf be particularly hard. Given Pern volumes like Dragonsdawn ( which I think was the last one I read ), I’m fine going along with the McCaffrey’s and calling it sf. I feel the same way about Cherryh’s Morgaine Cycle as well ;).
The dragons are noble and kind, and they allow their pet humans the illusion that the humans have some say in the matter.
It seemed to me the rapey bit was supposed to be somewhat metaphorical, with dragon lust standing for raging teenage lust.
I thought the lesson was that a little bit of sex education could save a lot of stress later on.
As others have mentioned, it’s SF because:
Robert Heinlein’s wrote “Podkayne of Mars” as an attempt, based on publisher pressure, to write a “girl’s book” that was SF.
Try her “The Ship who Sang”. The heroine was born with such severe physical birth defects that her brain was plugged in to a robot body. Eventually she ended up as (or a part of) the central computer of a starship. Now, watch her fall in love <3.
I loved them as a young teen, and go back to them every now and then. Not great literature, but very good at what they do nevertheless. Especially the Menolly books have good, solid world-building. The smaller stage really lets that shine through.
And it makes me happy just to see this thread here 
I can be a Lit Crit Snit*, but I love the Pern books, especially the YA trilogy (Dragonsong, Dragon Drums, Dragonsinger, IIRC).
I just treat them like B+ level SF/Fantasy/Whatever, and enjoy hanging out on a different world for a while.
I guess I feel the same way about the Deryni books… oh, and I even liked the Animorph books (read all 54).
*
Did I just make that up? Or did I read it somewhere years ago?
I agree. Because they were for young adults, McCaffrey didn’t depend so much on her psycho-sexual preoccupations in constructing the plots of those particular books.
Much of the world of the Dragon books, as well as the aforementioned “The Ship Who Sang” and “Restoree,” seem constructed specifically to solve the problem “a Good Man Always Seeks Out Sex but a Good Woman Never Seeks Out Sex.”
McCaffrey wanted her heroines to have sex without being responsible for the sex taking place. Thus the dragon-assisted rape; the different treatment of male and female “brawns” in the Ship stories; the ‘kidnapped by aliens’ excuse for the “Restoree” heroine becoming the mistress (OMG!) of a Strong Man.
I realize that this analysis will seem outlandish to some. But if you have read the books, ask yourself about the incidence of Bad Women who like sex and Good Women who only put up with it (from their Strong, Sex-Loving Men). It’s clearly a preoccupation of McCaffrey’s. (As is the ‘no men are gay despite green dragons having tons of sex with other dragons, and green dragons having male riders’ thing.)
I’m not qualified to say whether he succeeded in writing a “girl’s book”, but he certainly did succeed at writing an SF book.
She mentions the gay green guys several times. There’s an entire subtext of dragonfaggin’.
In the first book? In the second, or third? (Admittedly, it’s some years since I read them.)
I seem to remember a minor mention in the first book. It’s been a very long time.
Something like “oh, yeah, sometimes it’s just the guys. It’s not their fault” kind of thing.
Maybe someone who’s read the books more recently than you or I will chime in with some specifics.
I do feel fairly safe in saying that the existence of homosexuality was not something McCaffrey was very comfortable with. I don’t think there were any gay characters actually taking part in the plots…in any of her books (or at least that’s my impression. Ha, Impression! :D)
The entire Pern series is a go-to for me when I’m sad or stressed by real world events. It’s not life-changing literature, but the books are a good easy read with reasonably interesting characters and plot lines, and satisfying other-world bits and pieces. Todd McC’s efforts are not as addicting as his mother’s, but I still like them well enough.
I specifically recall gay dragonriders being central characters in some of the later books.
One of the big problems is that the first book in the series, Dragonflight, presents a Pern that is quite different from what you see in later books.
I started with the Harper Hall trilogy when I was around 10, and then picked up Dragonquest and The White Dragon before I read Dragonflight. I prefer the Menolly/Piemur books, and others in the series that are less Weyr-centric.
Agreed, the first Pern novel, Lessa can practice magic - she blurs what she looks like so they do not really remember that she is also noble, and the daughter of the proper lord of the castle she is living in. The poor pregnant woman was her mother, and the baby being delivered is her half brother. [I don’t think discussing the plot of a novel better than 30 years old is spoiling, really] The ‘talent’ the dragon riders are searching for in females is that tidbit of magic, it is also what they search for in boys when there are eggs.
I really only prefer the Harper Hall trilogy, the weir ones are poorly written romances. The juveniles don’t have the stupid romance crud shoehorned in.
Lessa isn’t practicing magic, but is using some sort of mental/psionic power to alter people’s perceptions and to influence people’s wills. It reminds me of laran in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels, which are also science-fiction with a fantasy surface gloss. Anne pretty much dropped that idea by the next book, toning it down to say that Lessa’s gifts are limited to commanding/speaking to all dragons, which is supposed to be extraordinary, although Brekke and Aramina could do it, too.
Also, all of Lessa’s family and most of the staff at Ruatha Hold were massacred when Fax seized the place. Fax then brought in his own people to man the hold, so I doubt anyone there would have remembered her, especially dressed in rags and covered in dirt. The pregnant lady is Lady Gemma, the wife of Lord Fax the usurper, and they come from another hold entirely and are not related to Lessa at all.
Pretty much. She never really exerted all that much power to start with. She was essentially using something like projective empathy to make everyone feel lazy, distracted, and quarrelsome, and to encourage their worst impulses. In other words, she was disrupting morale, leading to more screwups than usual (further supported by direct sabotage on her part). I’ve always assumed she continued to use the same sort of influence at the weyr once she established herself there, only to more constructive ends. Of course, the riders, having some measure of the same ability themselves, maybe have been less subject to it.
As to the “blurring” aruvqan mentions, that’s neither magic nor psychic. The specific line refers to the way Lessa was gripping a woman’s arm–it was too graceful for the appearance she wanted to present, so she changed the way she was holding it. No magic, just acting.
The rule, of course, is that if the Sorceress Lessa has to use her magical power to change her face so she can go in to talk to the dragon, then that’s clearly a fantasy novel. If, however, the psychic Lessa has to use her her psionic power to changer face so that she can talk to the genetically altered fire breathing lizard, that’s science fiction.
We must be careful that we not confuse the two genres, which are completely distinct and non-overlapping.