Nerilka is one of the daughters of Lord Tolocamp of Fort Weyr. During the events of Moreta: Dragonlady Of Pern, Tolocamp dishonoured himself by leaving his family to die of plague at Ruatha while he returned to Fort to make sure that measures were taken to protect his hold. On his arrival back at Fort, though, he promptly installed his mistress and her family in the quarters formerly belonging to his wife and daughters.
Nerilka avoided going to the Gather as she was being punished. As such she is a unique spectator and chronicler of what happens next…
While I loved Moreta, it did sometimes feel that we were being kept distant from what was happening on the rest of Pern. This was largely because, like any science fiction novel about a plague, we are focused largely on the efforts of those who are trying to cure it, and we most often only get glimpses or vignettes about what is happening to the rest of the known world. With Nerilka spiting her father by actively seeking out ways to help those who are being left to die, we get some redress of this situation.
This is a fairly short volume (134 pages of the book that it shares pages with: “The Coelura” (an unrelated SF novella)) but it is quite superb and confronting for all that.
The plague that afflicts Pern in this time is meant to parallel the Black Death that decimated Europe in the Fourteenth Century, but McCaffrey very clearly drew on sources describing the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. The sections of the novel featuring people isolating themselves, as well as the camps of those suspected of being afflicted feel particularly confronting. There’s a real fear and rage being expressed by characters in this book and it works as a wonderful companion piece to Moreta.
I also want to discuss something else: this short novel was the first one published after The Atlas Of Pern was released. This was an atlas created by Karen Wynn Fonstad, a cartographer who created a collection of maps of the locations used in the books and story (as it was then). These were compiled into a beautiful resource book that was a boon to fans and definitely an asset to McCaffrey when writing the later books and stories in the series. Fonstad had previously created an atlas for The Lord Of The Rings and went on to create several other acclaimed atlases of imaginary places before her death in 2005.
I was familiar with source books prior to this having already owned several devoted to different movies and television shows, but this was one of the first book series that i encountered that had one that went deeper than summarising the stories and giving some profiles of the characters and a bit of history. It was first published in 1984, with Anne McCaffrey referring to it in her introduction as a “Pernography.” She wasn’t too far off the mark, frankly, because I pored over the maps and diagrams in it when I finally acquired a copy with a degree of fanaticism that you might expect from… well…
Anyway, the reason I mention the Atlas is because of a few scenes in this story in which Nerilka goes into quite a bit of detail of the routes she takes when travelling through Fort Hold and, to a lesser extent, Ruatha. It’s the sort of detail that it’s possible to track onto a map, should you happen to have one handy.
Ahem…
The Atlas Of Pern was not the first large-scale project that was presented to the readers of the series: that honour belongs to Mayfair Games and their 1983 Dragonriders Of Pern board game. But it was not the last, either, and we will get to those in their own time.
But I still have to talk about the dragon in the room…
Before this celebration of the series began I hadn’t read this book since 2016. The effects of our own pandemic have definitely flavoured my reread of it this time. For the most part, it stands up extremely well. There’s the whole idea of keeping people who have been exposed or are believed to have been exposed to the virus separate from everyone else and the moral dilemma that causes; there’s the repulsion at people who are needlessly hoarding necessary resources like food and medicines; and the veneer of respect given to those who look after the afflicted without offering any material support to back it up or to genuinely help them. It’s either prophetic on Anne McCaffrey’s part, or just the wearily predictable range of behaviour from humanity as recorded in our history books.
Some day, though, I hope that an enterprising publisher welds these two books together to give us the entirety of the story in one volume and in narrative order.
Coming Up Next: “The Girl Who Heard Dragons”
