What do you think about the Pern books?

Cafe Society
41

Settlers in a space-ship come to a planet only to find that the environment is more hostile than they’d thought–they genetically engineer local life forms to help them survive the hostile environment, but due to a catastrophe soon lose much of their tech. 3000(?) years later, their descendants start rediscovering the lost tech and start relearning sciences (chemistry, engineering, etc). How in the world is that not science fiction?

To be fair, she set the time-travel thing up WAY early in the first book–Lessa accidentally time-travels on one of her first attempts to teleport. And that “riddle song” was introduced early too. It may be too easy of a fix, but it’s not an ass-pull.

Not to defend the later books, but the time-travel thing becomes a huge plot point in later books–it was a magic fix, granted, but she tried to deal with the can of worms it opened, which I liked. Characters regularly travel through time in later books with no concern for causality, people start using it casually to be in two places at once, there’s a mini time-war (very small, but still there) and so forth.

42

I have read one Pern novel - Dragonflight - and I seem to recall reading a short story or two; I found them mediocre and dull.

43

The Pern books have a dear place in my heart, and I’m disappointed that there won’t be a resolution to the hanging plot threads at the end of “The Skies of Pern.” Todd’s stuff is definitely different, and I’m still making my way through those, just started one of the collaborations on Audible.

The time-travel element in Dragonflight, bringing the Weyrs forward, made me think hard the last time I read through it. From an absolute viewpoint in time, it’s really a bad idea, mostly because of the unintended consequences that set up the main conflict of Dragonquest: You have all these burnt-out dragonriders out of touch with current Holder and Crafter society, and Holders who didn’t really believe Thread would come back because five sixths of the riders vanished with no explanation. But from Lessa’s point of view, having figured out the Question song, she had basically three courses she could try to pursue:

a) Do nothing. Slight chance this would collapse the timeline and bring about another future where the riders never went forward. Slight chance that the riders would find their way forward anyhow. Big chance that the riders would try to go forward on their own and die in the attempt.

b) Go back to pitch the idea and guide the Weyrs forward in time, as she did.

c) Go back and try to convince them NOT to go forward in time. I don’t really like her chances with the convincing, after she appears from the future and puts the idea in their heads. :wink:
And I like that the big solution from Dragonquest (exiling the malcontent Oldtimers to the south) also sets up the big conflict for White Dragon.

44

Mah Fravrit Berks. Sehkshii.

45

The first books (Dragonflight, Dragonquest, The White Dragon) were quite good. They held up even on later re-reads. The Harper Hall books were also decent, though aimed at a different audience. I thought the latter added greatly to the reality of Pern — considering we see mostly the “nobility” in the first books — since these were far more focused on the underclasses; albeit mostly a privileged section of the underclass along with some details about drudges, engineers, and farmers.

I don’t recall her shying away from the sexuality. That was meant to be a feature, as far as I can tell. Remember that at the time she was competing with fantasy like the Gor and Conan stories, with burly manly men raping their way across continents, enslaving the prettiest women, and generally being males behaving quite badly.

Her books, on the other hand, had women in charge of the weyr, with the men being partly incidental to the power structure. She’s quite explicit about Lessa’s ambition and manipulativeness. Lessa exploits her own sexuality and the promise of power the rider of the bronze (or brown) who successfully mates with the queen gold will gain. There are major female characters who aren’t stupid simpering girls, which was probably pretty damn progressive at the time.

She also mentions several times that the orgies from mating flights lead to indiscriminate fucking: male-male, male-female, female-female, big pile o’ humping bodies, whatevs. Again, in the late-60s early-70s mostly adult-oriented market, this was a selling point. The dragon mating = whole lot of fucking thing didn’t get toned down until at least the Harper Hall series, and if I remember right Menolly had some serious bleedover from her fire lizards when they mated.

Thread itself is an environmental menace. It’s not evil, it just is. It’s mindless, but dangerous. There’s no magic, unless you dismiss the very circumscribed psionics as magic.

Aside from threadfall, there were other obvious SF elements built into Pern from the beginning. You start out thinking it’s a standard Fantasy world, but early on she introduces the eyestones, which are obviously stone orbital-mechanics calculators like Stonehenge probably was (at least in part). Then there’s calculating threadfall using the log tables of the ancients, which reads like an application of the gravitational influence of Pern, the Red Star, and Pern’s moons to figure out where the stuff will be de-orbiting. She has them re-engineering flame throwers, optics, and metallurgy, and introduces scraps of writings that refer to spaceships and fliers. She even has linguistic twists to present futuristic elements with the feeling that they occurred very far in the past for these people, after their technology and society fell to a level this world could support.

I think it’s actually semi-hard SF that she explores the idea of going between so thoroughly. If you can travel in space instantaneously, then of course you can travel in time. Frankly, any story that posits warp/jump/hyper drive to solve space travel and doesn’t also at least offer a limp-wristed wave to distract you from the other end of the Lorentz equations is counting on you to either be ignorant of the space-time connection, or to not give a flying rodent’s ass about it. She makes sure that time travel isn’t without cost and so does have very definite limitations, which keeps it from being too much of a plot crutch.

She also deals right from the beginning with logistics and economics. Benden Weyr is right on the edge of a peasant rebellion when threadfall happens again, because the interregnum has been so long that nearly everyone thinks it won’t happen again. Even the dragonriders more than half believe it, so many of them have become decadent and exploitive. Having enough supplies, riders, and dragons and getting everything and everyone to and from places is shown as a constant challenge even with the dragons having instantaneous travel and almost unlimited lifting power.

The later 80s and 90s books do dissolve into My Pretty Dragon silliness eventually, but the first 3, and to some extent the Harper books, I think are better than decent SF with a strong F flavor.

46

I don’t know if I dare reread them - I loved them as a middle schooler, but even then I realized the later ones sucked balls.

I did rather like that the time travel had consequences - my memory is iffy but I do recall that once you brought back enough old skool dragonriders to fill up the weyrs they were, you know, hard to deal with. Which they should be.

47

Not really. Oh, faster-than-light travel must necessarily allow time travel, and truly “instantaneous” travel isn’t well-defined, but you can still have “teleportation” that’s somewhat slower than light and thus avoids these issues, but which is still close enough to “instantaneous” for all narrative purposes.

And the magic is not at all incidental to the stories. The dragons are magical, and are the central conceit that the stories are built upon.

48

Nah, they’re a Sufficiently Advanced Technology. :smiley:

49

In the second book, there is a knife fight at Fort Hold involving two dragonriders who are “special friends”; F’nor gets involved. There are few other background references to “special friends” weyrmates scattered through the other books. I seem to recall the green riders being portrayed as particularly high-strung and dramatic. Homosexual characters or relationships never move beyond the periphery, though.

From what I understand there was a bit of a dustup over the Pern MUSH way back in the day, over McCaffery’s views on riders’ sexuality. IIRC, she insisted that green riders were only passive homosexuals, brown riders essentially bisexual but always the active partner, … and I think the blues were homosexual and always the active partner, too. It, uh, didn’t go over very well with some of the fanbase.

50

How about Niven’s jump booths/discs? They’re teleportation, too. Are they magical? Is Known Space a fantasy setting? Is radio magical? No? Then why is having the radio in your head necessarily magic?

Is the problem that, in this case, the machines that provide teleportation and communication are organic? If they had fighter ships that could make short-range hyperspace jumps and transceiver implants in their heads that picked up and relayed subvocalized communications and commands, would it be science fiction then?

51

They’re not “magical” as such. When the SF genre was created, “wild talents” as they were called (psi stuff: esp, teleportation, telekinesis) were all considered legit areas of science fiction (constant references to “Dr Rhine’s work at Duke University” were cited.)

Like it or not, psi has always been considered SF, not Fantasy, despite the fact that it probably should be fantasy. If you’re going to just lump psi stuff as fantasy, you’re gonna have to move the Foundation series by Asimov, a bunch of Heinlein’s books (including Time for the Stars, Blish’s The Stars My Destination, most of Niven’s Known Space (telepathic Kzin, remember? Also Gil the ARM) and so on to “fantasy”, in which case the term SF is left for pretty much Robert Forward, Hal Clement and Stephen Baxter and maybe one or two others.

52

Bester’s (not Blish’s) “Stars My Destination” (and his “Demolished Man” as well).

By the way, Heinlein’s “Future History” has psi as well - the Howard family, in addition to being long-lived, had a subpopulation of (otherwise handicapped) telepaths.

53

The mating flight orgy always brings to mind the Sietch Tau orgy from Dune - why, I have no idea, couldn’t imagine a more different series of SF books.

Having said that - I loved “The Smallest Dragonboy” short story as a very young SF reader (Did I completely imagine an animated short of this?) and I liked the first Weir trilogy, especially The White Dragon. Then they started digging up spaceships and I lost all interest.

54

It looks like whether you consider it SF or F depends on whether you consider psychic abilities a valid possibility or woo.

I’ve always put it in the fuzzy area between - you have a certain amount of scientific background (that has been lost over time), but then again you have dragons, and a distinctly medieval flavored milieu.

I must have read the series at least a half dozen times, probably more. It is probably my favorite set of books that aren’t specifically romances to read. Romance is certainly woven through the stories, but isn’t the only thing happening either.

I’m rather amused that the people who are saying that McCaffrey is anti-homosexual. She created a world where some people bond with dragons, and some of the dragons who are female (the greens) mostly impressing men. And where dragon sex results in sex between the riders. This is all off-screen though - both the green-rider flights and the gold-rider flights. What Ms. McCaffrey doesn’t do is make out any of this as negative - it simply is. In fact, there’s a distinct tone that the weyr culture is superior in its acceptance of a wide variety of personal decisions.

Does anyone else here read the Harper Hall trilogy between the 2nd & 3rd books? I find that order makes the most sense.

55

Even though the author gives a science fictional background, it certainly READS more like a fantasy than a science fiction. If you cut out the science fiction elements, most of the story (and here I’m using “story” to mean all of the novels and short stories set in this world) would still be the same. If you cut out the fantasy elements, there’d be no Pern left, really.

56

Very interesting–thanks. I read the first two books when I was about twelve, I think, and any language referring to gay sex would certainly have passed right over my head.

57

I suspect she was about as open about it as she could be at the time and still get published, which means most references are vague, like a group of riders heading for a green rider’s quarters during the green’s mating flight. I first read the books at about the same age as you, and the implications seemed pretty clear to me. I did wonder about the relative proportions of the rider population, since the greens and blues were the most numerous, but I concluded that the riders had been forced to develop rather different notions of sexuality from the mainstream.

58

It’s making use of the trappings of science fiction, to tell a fantasy story. It’s not even as much sf as Star Wars. The dragons are clearly a fantasy vehicle. The world is filled with magic, time-travel, mentalism, and the like.

You can’t just shove a space ship into, say, Lord of the Rings (like the ship that the elves sent Erendil on?) and claim it makes it a science fiction story. That’s all that McCaffrey did.

59

He pushes the envelope awfully hard, what with his inclusion of psionics, Teela Brown’s “luck,” and the like. The Known Space universe is overly crowded with “wonders.” If it isn’t a fantasy background, per se, it is certainly heavily contrived.

(The same is true for the Star Trek universe. At this point, if you take all of the events set within it as “true,” that universe is much more “mystical” than scientific.)

Obviously, a big part of the problem is the use of a single world for multiple dramatic tales and yarns.

Is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars (Barsoom) science fiction or fantasy? A big dose of both!

60

Oddly enough, I didn’t find ‘Dragonquest’ (or realize that it was there in the series) until after I’d read the Harper Hall trilogy and The White Dragon.

That was kinduv confusing. :smiley: