Pern Appreciation Month: Dragonquest

It’s not often that you read a sequel that feels as though it was written by a different author. I first experienced this with Terry Brooks’s The Elfstones Of Shannara, the sequel to The Sword Of Shannara, a novel that owes a rather large creative debt to The Lord Of The Rings. Elfstones is a much better book – it remains my favourite out of everything that Brooks has written – and it has a much more intense, visceral feel to it than its predecessor, along with a setting that feels much more of its own creation.

Dragonquest is another such book. While I really enjoyed Dragonflight, the sequel was a completely different beast. The formality of language was gone, replaced with a more relaxed tone; there was a much wider range of viewpoint characters, and a plot that dealt with more Byzantine concerns than simply “saving the world.” It’s also a far more optimistic novel, dealing as it does with a nascent technological renaissance on Pern, giving a nice bookend to the downtrodden decadence of Dragonflight.

It starts seven years after that first book, with Masterharper Robinton giving a brief summary of its events while ostensibly writing a musical piece celebrating it.

This is despite the book having a prologue that gives a brief history of the planet, the voracious, parasitic Thread that threatens it, and a summary of Dragonflight.

The action of that first chapter then quickly goes from the summary to an announcement that Thread has fallen out of its established pattern. We then move to the viewpoint of F’nor, rider of brown Canth, and brother to F’lar, the leader of Benden Weyr (the second-oldest and currently most favourably-viewed weyr).

F’nor is running an errand for Manora, the headwoman of Benden weyr (like the chief housekeeper but for five hundred dragons, their riders and everyone who lives there). In the process of this errand he meets with two “Oldtimers” (dragon riders who came forward in time with Lessa in Dragonflight). He greets them politely but acknowledges to himself that there have been some issues with the oldtimers and their, well, “old-fashioned” attitudes since they came forward in time. It seems that they have become used to being regarded as heroes and saviours and have begun exploiting the general populace of Pern for their wants and desires.

F’nor interferes in an instance of this and gets himself stabbed for his trouble. The story continues from there…

I love this book: I warn you that from this point on I cannot be relied on to be overly critical of it or this entire series. I really liked Dragonflight; but this is where I became a proper fan.

It’s due to a number of reasons, which I will get to, but I need to address a problematic issue right here from the get-go.

It’s about consent.

I mentioned in the first of this series that when dragons mate on Pern they broadcast their thoughts to anyone with the telepathic sensitivity to feel them, and humans quite often cannot help but respond. This can result in riders being caught up in sexual events beyond their ability to give their consent for. This is discussed and explored all across the series and given the weight it properly deserves – it’s treated with a lot more thought than a lot of other writers who have used telepathy in their books have done, to be honest.

But it still frequently negates what we in the modern world consider to be “informed consent.”

And, worse, it sometimes borders on portraying sexual assault.

F’nor, as the most prominent example in this book, takes what we would consider to be advantage of Brekke, a Queen rider in the newly-established Southern Weyr (in the lush, tropical  and sparsely populated Southern Continent). He does this while recovering from his knife wound. His reasoning is that he cares for Brekke, and she for him.

However, the scene reads like something from one of the popular romances that were also selling thousands of copies at the same time that Dragonquest was published. It doesn’t make it right, but it makes it, at least, culturally understandable: it was an accepted cliché in romance novels at the time, and this was a romantic subplot. It hasn’t aged well, just like them, but 55 years later it’s still in print and most of them aren’t.

Look, I’m not excusing it, just trying to give it some sort of applicable equivalence, although it really doesn’t stand out any more than some of the “bad-boy” cliches that abound in modern genre fiction. And when you compare it to what male writers were producing at the same time…

Anyway, there’s a hell of a lot more going on here beyond a questionable romance between two made-up people.

Because we also meet Jaxom, the young lord of Ruatha, to whom Lessa ceded control when she went to Benden to Impress Ramoth. Jaxom has been in the care of Lytol, a former dragonrider, since his birth and he sometimes feels that he will never live up to his impossibly high standards. Jaxom Impresses a dragon in this novel, which puts his entire future at risk. He also discovers – with Felessan, Lessa and F’lar’s son – a hidden cache of historical and technological resources which could transform Pern’s knowledge of their history and place in space.

Then there’s the fire lizards, cute miniature dragons which, our heroes realise, are what their immense mounts were bred from centuries ago. F’nor – because he really is the main character of this book – Impresses a queen lizard at the moment of her birth and launches a new craze that sweeps across Pern.

(And on Earth, too: I don’t think there’s been a single person who read this book that didn’t want a fire lizard as a pet. And that will only get reinforced in the next two novels.)

Pern itself undergoes the beginning of a technological and social transformation in this book and the energy just fizzes off the page. There’s an urgency and hunger to the story as the cast all realise that life is about to become a lot more interesting for them. Really, though, there’s just so much going on in this novel that it’s astounding that it is set in the same stagnant society we read about in Dragonflight.

Interestingly, the version of Dragonquest we know today was Anne McCaffrey’s second attempt at it: she famously burned the first version after advice from her editor. Despite loving this iteration of it, I’d be delighted to read the original, just to get a feel for what could have been.

But I just don’t think we would have had such a broad novel: we meet so many characters and travel to so many places, and we also get a proper statement of the theme of the entire series from F’lar:

“I’ve always said that you solve one problem and five more appear from between.”

(Between is the freezing void that the dragons and their riders travel through when they teleport from one place to another)

This entire novel revolves around the consequences of Lessa’s heroic journey through time in Dragonflight to bring the Oldtimers forward. Led by T’ron (named T’ton in Dragonflight but changed for some reason here) they are happy to escape the tedium of the Interval between Passes of the Thread-bearing Red Star by helping out their future counterparts, but they bring with them attitudes unsuited to the independent men and women who have experienced four hundred years of relative peace and quiet.

This problem is resolved and solved by novel’s end, and a modicum of order has been restored but at the cost of several lives and the understanding that Thread is an issue that will be with them for many years to come but change could happen at any time…

Coming Up Next: “The Smallest Dragon Boy”