Pern Appreciation Month: Dragonflight

Dragonflight first appeared as two short stories: “Weyr Search” and “Dragonrider”. These were originally published in Analog magazine in October 1967 and in the December – January 1967-68 issues. Together they make up parts 1, 3 and 4 of Dragonflight. Part 2 of the novel (named “Dragonflight” in the book) was submitted to John W. Campbell, the editor of Analog, but he wanted to see the dragons fighting Thread, so Anne went off and wrote the second half of the book, combining all four sections to make up the novel.

It’s the story of Lessa and F’lar and how they manage to put the Dragonriders of Pern back at the top of the social pyramid of their beleaguered planet.

Lessa begins the story as a drudge, a servant in Ruatha, one of the oldest “holds” on Pern. However, she is actually the last member of her family, the rest of whom have been slain by Fax, who has spent the last decade or so consolidating himself as a major ruler having taken over seven holds through inheritance, marriage or simple conquest. Lessa has been hiding and biding her time, waiting for a suitable moment to reveal herself and take back what is hers.

Meanwhile, F’lar is on Search. There is a Queen dragon egg waiting to hatch on the grounds of Benden Weyr and he is looking for a suitable candidate to partner – or “impress” as they call it – the dragon when it hatches. But first he has to deal with Fax, then convince Lessa that being a dragonrider is worth sacrificing her dreams of revenge for…

As a book, Dragonflight is a long way from being the best in the series. It has to introduce a fantastical setting and the characters that live in it. McCaffrey wisely does this by starting small: Lessa’s chapters in this book tell us about the society of Pern, while F’lar’s tell us about the upcoming peril and plot.

She also gives us the the portrait of a society in decline, where there is no real point to existence.

(We learn in later books that this is a common occurrence during “Intervals”, the period between the Passes of the wandering planet known as the Red Star.)

However, F’lar is finding this Interval particularly frustrating because it has been going for longer than normal – 400 years instead of the usual 200 – and for some reason, there are far fewer dragons than there used to be – where there were six weyrs (bases where the dragons and their riders live) at the end of the last Pass, there is now only one and it has been allowed to degrade over time so that there are only a little over two hundred dragons and riders left. Furthermore, the general population who support the weyrs through tithes of food and supplies, are beginning to rebel due to the long Interval.

F’lar sees signs of this rebellion as he Searches and it angers him even more because he is also sure that the next Pass of the Red Star is due to begin…

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll know that I don’t like to give away spoilers for stories, so I’m going to leave my recap of the plot there. Suffice it to say that Lessa does choose dragons over castles and she and F’lar do find a way to save Pern before the next Pass begins.

So let’s take a look at the book.

We’ll deal with the flaws in the writing first. The tone and pacing between the sections sometimes feels a little uneven. This is a problem that you sometimes find in “fix-up” novels, ie novels written by placing a collection of linked short stories together. The problem with Dragonflight is that each of the sections has its own beginning, middle and ending which can throw off a reader coming to it as a novel, rather than as three linked stories.

Secondly, the dialog often feels a little strained. McCaffrey is writing about a degenerated culture and the dialog often comes across as florid or stagy. In an early scene, as an example, F’lar and his brother F’nor are speaking with Lytol (male dragonriders have apostrophised names that they adopt once they have impressed their dragons. For whatever reason, this convention doesn’t apply to women who impress dragons). Lytol’s first line is

“You would be F’lar… and you F’nor. You both have the look of your sire.”

Dialogue like this feels forced and unnatural. It’s used across the first part of the book to give the reader information, so it’s a necessary expository shortcut, especially when there is so much information to be passed along.

Fortunately, this is really only a problem with the first section (which also won the Hugo Award for the year it was published, if you feel like complaining to anyone).

And it’s really only a problem with the dialogue: the settings are described beautifully and powerfully, immersing you into the milieu of Pern completely.

We are also plunged straight into the possibilities of this setting. We learn early on that Lessa has some sort of telepathic ability: she has used it to avoid detection in Ruatha before, and it becomes a crucial part of her story, since she develops a strong telepathic bond with her queen dragon, Ramoth. Which leads to another complaint about the book: Lessa becomes famous throughout the books because of her rare ability to speak with all dragons. However, McCaffrey just dumps that information in a scene at the start of the second section rather than it being a discovery that Lessa makes along with the reader that this is a rare talent.

However this is overshadowed by her discovery of time travel: while being taught how to travel between, the freezing void that dragonriders travel through while teleporting, Lessa manages to send herself back in time. This is duplicated by F’lar and then becomes a crucial plot point in the climax of the book: Lessa deciding to travel back four hundred years and bring forward the five missing weyrs of dragons and their riders.

Whoops – spoiler! Sorry. But given that this is also a plot point that affects pretty much half of the series, it was sort of unavoidable.

Summarised like that it’s a completely bonkers plot, but everything builds up so logically and sensibly that you barely notice until afterwards when you have time to think about it.

What you do notice, though, are some ideas that are considered to be problematic these days.

However, I’m going to ask people to consider that these written at a time when our social mores were decidedly different to what they are today and also that this book is portraying a fragmented, fallen society.

The first is the hint of domestic abuse and cruelty between intimate partners. Fax’s wife Gemma is described as

a blue-gowned woman, her hair white-streaked, her face lined with disappointments and bitterness, her body swollen with pregnancy… From her attitude, F’lar deduced that she came no closer to Fax than was absolutely necessary.

Gemma is kept pregnant by Fax to prevent her escaping him and – it is suggested – in the hope that she might die in childbirth.

F’lar is disgusted by this treatment, which is partly why he finds it easy to challenge Fax later. However, he is far from innocent himself: Lessa mentions several times that he shakes her when he gets angry with her.

So F’lar really doesn’t come off well in the first half of this book, either. Although the fact that he does change and does come to consider Lessa’s feelings is a big plus compared to other romantic heroes of that day.

And when you add to that the whole telepathy thing, wherein dragons can broadcast their emotions when under stress, particularly the hormone-induced sexual excitement of mating, which often results in their riders being, er, overwhelmed as well. And when the leadership of a weyr depends upon which dragon mates with the senior queen… well, things can get quite squicky.

To her credit, McCaffrey handles these scenes thoughtfully, if not sensitively and, once the series heads deeper into the 1970s and the gender equality debates and laws we got in the real world, it becomes even less of an issue. It’s a great example of how an author can change their attitudes with the times. It’s also worth pointing out that McCaffrey obtained a divorce from her husband after Dragonflight was written and while Dragonquest (the second book) was in preparation.

And it’s definitely worth pointing out that the Pern books were also held up for a very long time as a positive example of “feminist science fiction.” And if you compare it to a lot of other fiction written at that time – especially the stuff that has survived to the modern day – it’s still a pretty positive portrayal for that time. It’s sobering to think just how far we have come in such a short span of time that something can go from being “progressive” to “problematic” during the author’s own career.

So what is it makes this launch to a series so wonderful? Because it feels that all I’ve done so far is whinge about it.

Well, it’s a lot of fun, for one thing. Once the story hits its stride, it never lets go. There’s always something happening, always a new problem arising from the successful solution to an old one, and the characters are a delight. McCaffrey was known for a long time as “the Barbara Cartland of the Spaceways” because her stories are just as much about the relationships between people as they are about the science-fictional elements. There is an element of soap opera to many of her plots, but that’s largely because it works beautifully that way. And while she will never be accused of “high literature”, McCaffrey’s books are incredibly readable because they are filled with people being people.

And, frankly, I love the setting.

Pern is one of the great worlds in speculative fiction. Dragonflight is a relatively slim novel but it contains a multitude of vistas. From the desolation that Ruatha has become, with its maze of dank tunnels and musty rooms, to the formerly glorious Benden Weyr with its heated baths and vast hatching ground right down to the brief description we get of the lush jungles of the Southern Continent, we are placed front and centre in the settings the characters live in. As an aside, when “Weyrsearch” was first published, Analog took the trouble to include a map of Pern in the text of the story: this was pretty much unheard of in contemporary SF magazine publishing and just reinforces how much potential even the notoriously cranky John W. Campbell saw in it.

So we are immersed in the decay of what Pernese society has become; when Lessa complains to Manora, the headwoman of Benden Weyr, about the quality of food they get, Manora can sympathise but it’s nothing she’s not heard before. The weyr is seen as an anachronism of days past, a parasite that could be done without. The whole novel just reeks of past glories and things having had much better days, foreshadowed exquisitely by the descriptions of Ruatha, which has been left to moulder through the sabotaging actions of Lessa, who now – with the help of F’lar and the rest of the dragonriders – has to clean up a whole planet.

Coming Up Next: Dragonquest