Reading between the lines at the time, I deduced that “Search dragons” basically had reliable gaydar.
Is FTL a valid possibility or woo? If it’s woo, sf as a field is doomed. DOOOOOOMMMMMMED! 
Anyway as Fenris noted, psionics historically has always fallen into the sf side of the bin. If you disallow that, you start disallowing some of what is considered classic sf.
I generally will allow it as sci-fi if there’s a genuine attempt at a ‘scientific’ explanation. If it’s just, "and there were telepaths but it was totally sci-fi, no really!’ then it gets shelved with the rest of the unicorns.
You’ve just excluded about 90% of Heinlein from Science Fiction. Think about the incredible “Jerry was a Man” by Heinlein–the genetic engineering in that was only a step or two below the Pern colonist’s genetically engineering the fire-lizards to be bigger and much smarter.
Foundation is, by your standard, fantasy (medieval society-check, ftl, check, mentalism, check, psionic powers, check)-if you don’t allow Pern to fall to medieval levels, you can’t allow the Foundation to do the same. Also, the Asimov robot series is fantasy by your definition–there was at least one telepathic robot (“Liar!”).
Lois McMaster Bujold is out (somewhat medieval society, at least one or two (I can’t remember if there was a sister or not) people with telepathy and teleportation (the ships teleport through wormholes, there’s not FTL)
Stephen Baxter–the “hardest” SF writer alive allows time travel (and has end notes explaining the current physics theories to allow it), FTL, etc…
Clarke? IIRC had genetically engineered dolphins and (in Rama had engineered monkey-butler type critters)…so Rama is fantasy.
That means Brin’s Uplift series is fantasy if major genetic engineering is out.
Look you can feel free to define science fiction any way you want–there’s no one defintion that everyone agrees upon…but I find your definition to be so narrow as to exclude way too high a percent of books.
How long has it been since you’ve read the series?? The point of the books are A) rediscovering old/lost tech–they build telescopes after finding one of the original colonist’s ones and it totally changes chunks of their society. They reinvent flame throwers. They start rediscovering chemistry and metallurgy–and it utterly warps their society as they’re pushed from a roughly 14th century existence to a late 1700s one–in a single generation.
The dragons are a plot device–except for the theft of one dragon egg and the fact that they’re used for fast transportation, dragons play little-to-no part in the main story…they’re omni-present, but they don’t do anything or play any active role (beyond transportation) in most of the books.
Somewhat. She did make some statements in interviews on the subject, and also managed to offend quite a lot of people in the process, and not in a good way. Let’s just say her views, like Pern, were fairly medieval. If you google her name in conjunction with the words ‘tent peg statement’, you’ll find the story in various places and probably also a copy of the main interview in question.
I think the whole “Is it fantasy or science fiction” thing is sort of irrelevant, and that a lot of the distinction between fantasy and science fiction is a categorical one created so that booksellers would know where to stack their books.
Look at Jack Vance’s “The Dying Earth”, for instance. The entire book is about wizards and witches fighting for power, and the last story in the book has a young man with magic boots go into a lost city where he has to save a girl from being sacrificed to a demon. Then, the boy and the girl get into a spaceship to try to find other planets with people on them, for, you see, the whole thing took place in the Future.
I think that a series like the Pern series is an edge case, and while I’d describe it as more science fiction than fantasy, I think there are good arguments for the other side too, and that, ultimately, it’s not really that important a question, because there’s not much difference between “science fiction” and “fantasy”.
Re Bujold:
Vorkosigan Series - More or less pure SF. Ships transit wormholes via engineering and physics, not teleportation. Only telepathy is because the Haut found a woman with a trace of it and bred artificially for it to be present in 2 people, one who died and the other scarpered off and is now living on Athos, in a society of all men who reproduce via IVF and cloning. The medieval planet was because the first 50 000 peopl eon the planet were there to terraform, and the wormhole closed, isolating them on a planet that is barely survivable so they ended up losing tech back to late medieval/early renaissance.
Chalion/5 Gods Series - Fantasy, the dieties mentioned are real, they can affect the people and turn them into ‘saints’ and give them some paranormal abilities [one person can tell when people are lying, another woman is just really good at midwivery and so forth]
Lakewalker Series - Fantasy, set way in the future on “not earth” where the ‘nobles’ who had been breeding themselves for psionic abilities more or less had a huge war that destroyed their culture and left lesser nobles [who became nomads called Lakewalkers who have some very minor psionic abilities] and Farmers, who have no psionics to speak of and pretty much are just like medieval humans. There is a ‘monster’ that is spawned almost randomly and the lakewalkers are bound to destroy them, but many farmers do not believe the ‘blight boggles’ exist because the lakewalkers have gradually killed off the malices moving from south to north with the farmers moving into the cleared lands.
One Off - The Spirit Ring - a sort of juvenile fantasy based vaguely on Agricolas de re metalica, Benvenuto Cellini and some folk stories. Widower with daughter work in metal making jewelry, statues and stuff like nefs[really fancy salt cellars] with enchantments on them. Evil invader, adventure ensues. Good instead of the Twilight and Hunger Games garbage for the tweens.
Not sure what she is working in, haven’t chatted with her in a few weeks but the Vorkosigan series is mostly wrapped up unless she decides to write about one of the other characters in the universe. She is intending to do at least 2 more in the Chalion universe, but the Lakewalker and Spirit Ring universes are pretty much wrapped up.
I disagree. Hell, a lot of booksellers don’t know or care whether it’s SF or fantasy, and they’ll shelve horror in the same category, too.
To me, fantasy has a different flavor than science fiction. Part of this is how scientifically accurate a story is, and part is how dependent the story is upon magic/unexplainable elements. And whether an idea is magic or not depends in part on when the story was written. For a while, psionics and mental powers were considered to be within the realm of possibility, so stories written in that time with psionic elements were SF. Same as Niven’s famous story, written when they thought that Mercury only showed one face to the sun. Now, though, psionic powers are not considered real.
Most SF readers will accept FTL travel, with a good dose of handwavium, because otherwise we wouldn’t have the stories and situations that we have with FTL as a possibility.
I bet a lot of the divide is dependent on what order you read the books in; if you started with “Dragonflight” and worked your way forward, they’re going to seem pretty fantastic; until “The White Dragon” published some 10 years later, there’s not much mention of anything science-fictiony- it seems more fantasy-like.
Once you get past “The White Dragon”, it gets more and more heavily science-fiction focused though.
There might be something to that; I’ve only read the first three.
Oh, I know all about the tent peg. That, plus the Pern MUSH tales just make me think that McCaffery was from a different era. Although she was probably quite open-minded for her time, society has moved on since then. So, Pern now comes across as bemusingly quaint and ill-informed on such matters.
That’s not true; the sciency bits were present as far back as Dragonflight. The old records they find in Benden Weyr – including the machined metal disc – clearly allude to the higher technology of the original colonists. That’s where the “Arrhenius? Eureka! Mycorrhiza” bit that explains the Thread lifecycle (to the reader; the characters are mystified by it) comes from.
References to the Arrhenius equation to explain the setting are a pretty clear indication you’re not in a “fantasy” setting.
I read “Dragonflight” when I was 13, I think. I didn’t have a clue what the Arrhenius formula was then, and I had to look it up just now.
Regardless, it reads a lot more like a fantasy novel- you have fire breating dragons, telepathically linked dragonriders, psionics/telepathic characters, mystical/magical death from the skies, etc…
By your reckoning, you could count the first 3 Shannara books by Terry Brooks as science fiction, because they allude to ancients and have the occasional reference to our world.
I just loved them as a kid and still love them now. Especially the Dragon Song books which have a real sweetness to them. They’re fun fantasy and not much more. Menolly was and is one of my all time favorite characters. But they should have died with Ms. McCaffrey. I took one of her son’s books out of the library and could not finish it.
There was a prologue to “Dragonflight” all about the colonization ship, the genetic modification of the dragons, etc., too, wasn’t there?
Yeah, but it was published decades after “Dragonflight” which was the first book in the series published.
I think it was the introduction to the first book that did it for me: explicit reference to interstellar colonization, genetic engineering, etc.
The prequel book was odd in that there was no mention of the AI that ended up so critical later.
Hmm… I thought that it was something she hadn’t quite worked out at the time, but if that’s true, it must have been by a fairly slim margin. Dragonsdawn was the first prequel involving the original landing, (with no mention of AIVAS,) and it was published only a year before “Renegades of Pern”, which ends with the discovery of AIVAS, in a scene that makes quite clear how sophisticated and complex a machine it is.
I suppose it’s possible that writing the high-tech stuff from Dragonsdawn and then returning to the ‘Ninth Pass’ timeframe, she realized just how difficult it would be for those characters to learn on their own all the tech she wanted them to learn, and thus conceived of the AIVAS a little too late to introduce him into the plot of ‘Dragonsdawn’.
Ok, this is frustrating me (and I’m defending this series more than I like it. 
) so…here are the opening words of the prologue to Dragonflight, the very first Pern book published
This is clearly science fiction. If you skipped over this page and started with Lessa waking up on the floor of the scullery, yeah, I can see how you might think it’s fantasy-like, but if you read the 1 page intro* above, it can’t mistaken for anything other than a lost-colony story.
*Note, it’s one page out of about 400, so the quote is well within the “ok” limits for copyright
I started reading the Pern stories with “Weyr Search”, which was the first part of the first book, published in Analog. My grandfather had a subscription to that magazine, and allowed me to read it, whenever I wasn’t grounded from reading recreationally. The story was, as I recall, entirely fantasy. While there were legends of the glories of the past, these legends didn’t recall an era of high tech, simply that dragons and dragonriders were more revered and powerful in times long ago. In fact, I seem to recall my grandfather grumbling that it wasn’t really SF. He liked hard SF, with none of that New Wave nonsense in it.
I remember as a teen finding the orgy/rape stuff, as many above, frankly peronographic.