Pern Appreciation Month: Moreta: Dragonlady Of Pern

Moreta is a name that has already been dropped several times in this series. We know that she was a famous dragonlady from the past, and in Dragonsinger: Harper Of Pern, we are treated to an impromptu performance of the opera/ballad based around her life and death.

We also know that she dies at the end of her story.

The challenge for Anne McCaffrey was to create a story that was exciting and thrilling and moving even if you know what was coming.

She managed it.

Let’s take a look at the book first though.

It starts about 8 years prior to the end of the Sixth Pass (a Pass being the time when the Red Star drops its omnivorous parasites known as Thread across the surface of Pern). Moreta and Orlith, the current Weyrwoman and Queen Dragon of Fort Weyr are headed for a Gather (a fair). Orlith is close to clutching (laying some eggs) so Moreta is looking forward to the last outing they will both enjoy for some time.

At the Gather, at Ruatha Hold, she meets the current Lord Holder, Alessan. There is an instant attraction between them, cemented by their mutual interest in runners (racing horses, as they call them on Pern) and their love of dancing. However, there is another guest at the gather: a “viral influence” as it is later called, that has snuck onto the Northern Continent of Pern via a bedraggled feline, which was in turn brought ashore by some sailors who found it in the embargoed Southern Continent…

A plague ensues that travels across Pern quite quickly, aided by the dragonriders who have been teleporting infected people to all points of the compass. It becomes a race against time for Capiam, Masterhealer, and his team of healers to devise a cure and for the dragonriders, led by Moreta, to distribute the vaccine that can hold off the symptoms.

It’s honestly one of the best novels in the entire series. The characters and settings are vividly portrayed and the world of Pern, populated by folks who can see an end to the peril they have lived through for over forty years and can’t wait for it, is repainted through the lens of a thousand years less of history.

You get the sense from reading this novel that there’s been a fair amount of information that has been retained by the population from their technological past – Capiam and his team are able to improvise centrifuges and syringes from notes left behind by their predecessors – and there are hints from other characters that society isn’t as backward as we saw it when we first came to Pern nearly a thousand years into their future in Dragonflight.

It’s a nice piece of worldbuilding for readers willing to make the effort and compare and contrast the two eras we have been privy to thus far. Readers who haven’t, of course, will just get the impression of a vibrant society facing a deadly plague, with similar effects to that of the Black Death, at a similar point in our own history.

And the time has, of course, bred heroes fit for it.

When we first meet Moreta, she’s getting ready for the gather. She’s trying on different outfits, giving us an impression of a high society maven getting ready for another social event. Then she and Orlith take off and land at Ruatha:

Orlith overshot the heights, clearly headed down over the roadway crowded with the stalls of the Gather and a milling throng of folk gaily dressed for the occasion. Suddenly Moreta realised that Orlith meant to land in the empty dancing square… Orlith landed with neat precision in the dance square, her broad pinions vaned high to avoid excessive backwinds. The banners on the lamp standards flapped vigorously, but little dust rose from the square already swept to hard ground.

(Don’t forget that Orlith is days away from laying a clutch of eggs at this point.)

This scene reinforces the idea that the dragonriders are as well-trained and as bold as any air force pilots of the time that McCaffrey first visualised them.

It also highlights just how badass our heroine and her dragon are.

The story is filled with scenes like this: cinematic moments that only add to the momentum of the story and build the characters higher in our estimations of them. We also get one of the best Threadfall scenes in the entire series, as well as the aftermath that highlights just how mysterious and encompassing the bond between dragon and rider is.

There’s also the scenes involving the plague, which I originally thought were based around accounts from the Black Death, but which could just as easily have come from McCaffrey’s own relatives talking about the Spanish Flu outbreak just a few years before she was born. Moreta, being a dragonrider, is frequently distant from the plague due to her status but it affects people she cares about and she does see at firsthand the chaos it is causing.

There is, of course, a more recent event that I could draw some parallels to with the plague but I’m going to save that for Nerilka’s Story, which goes deeper into the effects of it.

Because I need to talk about K’lon and A’murry, who are two really important characters to me.

But first some background…

I grew up in Tasmania, the island state in the south-east of Australia. It’s a beautiful place, though prone to economic depression and long-term conservatism. For the purpose of my discussion here, it’s enough to know that in 1997 Tasmania became the last state of Australia to decriminalise homosexuality. I grew up in an atmosphere that was hostile to queer culture, representation, and people. K’lon and A’murry are riders of blue and green dragons. These riders are coded throughout the entirety of the Pern books as being gay, largely because of the telepathic relationship between dragon and rider that I discussed all the way back in Dragonflight.

Anne McCaffrey has copped a lot of flak over the years for the way she portrayed gay people in her novels, from people saying that it’s offensive, harmful, inaccurate and dated. I have to point out that when I first read this book in 1984 (I was 14), I hadn’t seen much about LGBT+ folks in any media. You had to order “those sorts” of books in before the 1980s. When queer people were shown on television or in a book, they were stereotyped and ridiculous and were frequently there just to highlight a “problem” or an “issue” that the author or producers wanted to “explore”, or to show that the main character was empathetic and saw people for what they were worth.

To read about two gay characters who were in a relationship and cared about each other, and who weren’t treated in any way differently to the heterosexual relationships around them was a real eye-opener for me.

So this is an important book in the series for me. Not just because of the story, but because of what it made me think about and realise in regard to a bunch of folks around me.

But it also features that ending.

Up until now, McCaffrey hadn’t killed off a major character before, in any of her books and stories, not just on Pern.

According to interviews, she was in tears when she wrote the scene in which Moreta dies, partly because she had become so attached to her, but also because she had recently had to put down her beloved horse, Mr Ed, who had been with her for ten years. However, she received news on the same day that her first grandchild had been born, which inspired her to add a scene at the end of the novel which gave a glimmer of hope and optimism for the future of Pern.

It’s not the last story that features Moreta, however… Nearly twenty years later, McCaffrey would revisit the character in the final story in the series credited solely to her.

I have mixed feelings about that for other reasons, but we’ll deal with them when we get there.

For now, I just want to think about Moreta: Dragonlady Of Pern, a book written with a confidence brought about by being the first SF/Fantasy author to have a New York Times bestseller. Because, for me, this book feels different to the ones that came before it: there’s a confidence in the storytelling that remains there for the remainder of the series, a certainty in the prose that marks a new stage in McCaffrey’s journey as a writer.

Coming Up Next: “Nerilka’s Story”