Anne Inez McCaffrey was born on April 1, 1926. She was the first woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Science Fiction and was one of the first SF writers to appear on the New York Times bestseller list. She was also a trained opera singer and music and the performing arts feature prominently in many of her books.
For the centenary of her birth, I’d like to take a closer look at my favourite series by her: The Dragonriders Of Pern.
So let’s look at the background of the series first…
Rukbat is a star in the Sagittarius sector (it’s scientific name is “Alpha Sagittarii”). In the future history of the Dragonriders novels, it was settled in the 26th Century by colonists searching for a less complicated life than they had (we’ll learn more of this by the time we reach Dragonsdawn).
Courtesy of a survey done some two centuries earlier they have chosen Pern, the third planet out from Rukbat. However, a few years after they settled, the colony was attacked by parasitic spores launched from a wandering planetoid that gets drawn into Pern’s orbit every 250 years or so. It has created a pattern of about two hundred years of normality followed by about fifty years of chaos and potential destruction. The spores, named Thread by the colonists, eat organic matter until they die. The initial casualties among the colonists were horrific and threatened to destroy their settlement before they had begun to establish themselves. Because their technology was taking a beating to protect themselves from Thread, the colonists genetically engineered a local flying lizard to several times its original size to act as an “air force” to protect them. The lizards – or “dragons” as they become known – can also breathe fire when they eat a local mineral and enjoy a telepathic bond with their riders. They also have the ability to teleport from one location to another.
There are five types of dragon, by the way: male dragons are blue, brown and bronze. Female dragons are green and gold (the initial letters also codify them as boys and girls). The gold dragons are regarded as queens, while the bronze dragons are considered to be the most intelligent of the breed (usually by their riders).
Pern also boasts a pseudo-feudal society with lords and Masters of various crafts which all functions in a fairly decent mid-twentieth-century kind of way in order to prevent stultification or problems – unless the plot demands it, which it does with less regularity than you might think.
It all sounds like the most terrible kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, but it’s presented seriously because we are plonked down into the story quite late in the history of the planet so we learn details as the characters do across the books. We become invested in the setting before we realise just how insane the setup of it is. However, I would also ask you to describe the set-up and background of your own favourite series without it, too, sounding completely bonkers.
What saves Pern is that it is a lot of fun. The characters and their dilemmas are presented seriously and, typically, the solutions to those dilemmas are frequently the cause of the next generation of problems.
This soap-operatic approach is part of the appeal of the series – telepathic dragons notwithstanding, of course! – and sets Pern apart from a lot of other Science Fiction. The concerns of the dragonriders seem to be surprisingly small beer when compared to the problems faced by other heroes in the genre: all they want to do is protect their world from a mindless parasite and keep their society as fair as possible. These are really low stakes in Science Fiction, which is (again) part of the appeal of the series.
Right. That’s enough waffling from me about why I like the books; let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of what makes them so good.
Our first stop is going to be Dragonflight, the novel that started the ball rolling all the way back in 1967. Come back and see what the fuss is about tomorrow…
