I don’t normally enjoy prequels. Too often you have authors trying to shoehorn a future onto a situation that feels forced. Sometimes a story just needs to have happened without it being explained too much. However, when you are dealing with an imagined history, sometimes you do need to fill some gaps.
Such a situation arises in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsdawn. We know from the introduction/prologues of nearly all the other books that the colonists suffered immense losses when the first parasitic Threads were cast onto Pern by the wandering Red Star. We know that they engineered the dragons of the title from a smaller lifeform native to the planet.
And we know that their culture degenerated into something less than it started out as over a period of time.
At the end of The White Dragon, we left our characters as they were beginning to unearth their history: they had discovered the original colony site; discovered that three satellites that orbited their planet (first mentioned in Dragonsong, for those wanting to know just how long this had been seeded) were, in fact, manmade objects; and they were realising just how astonishing a history they really had.
Ten years later, we finally got the story of how it happened.
And, like the reveal of Moreta in her own novel, it’s wonderful.
Dragonsdawn begins in space, as the colonists – led by Admiral Paul Benden and Governor Emily Boll – approach the planet known as Pern. Over six thousand colonists are aboard the three ships that make up their fleet.
The first part of the novel details how they land, set up the colony on the lush Southern Continent and begin to build a future for themselves. It’s hugely optimistic and joyful as they hope to leave behind their prejudices and conflicts to create a rural paradise for them to exist on.
We see them put together a charter of laws for their society to function, a way of establishing a low-maintenance legal and governmental system that survives through the next two-and-a-half millennia, despite being pushed to its limits at some points.
And we meet a range of characters with names that have immense significance to the future inhabitants of Pern. And I love how the name “Pern” is referenced as being an acronym, something that I think McCaffrey had a lot of fun devising several years into the future when she wrote a story about that initial survey.
These early chapters are so idyllic and hopeful that it almost hurts to read them when you know what is coming soon. And that foreboding is heightened even more when there is an earthquake at a celebration when they have transferred everybody down from the spaceships. They consider it to be an unfortunate coincidence, whereas long-term readers of the series know what an earthquake means in the leadup to a Pass, as the years of Threadfall will become known as.
The second part of the novel deals with the reaction to the crisis: it jumps ahead eight years and we get the impact and reaction to the first Threadfall. The horror is more visceral and tangible here than it is in nearly every other part of the series, because it’s completely new to our heroes. The third part of the novel deals with the solutions the colonists come up with in order to survive.
But there are some surprises for us as well: not the least of which is the establishment of dolphins in the seas of Pern. There has been no mention made of dolphins – or “shipfish” as they will be referred to in future books – but it fits that in McCaffrey’s future world we share a destiny with other sentient creatures on our planet.
Honestly, it also fits with the storyline of Pern that there would be mysteries for future inhabitants to solve – especially after several decades of them being landlocked at what will come to be known as Fort for the first pass and the limitations the disaster puts on them. So it makes some kind of sense that they might have lost contact with the dolphins in that time.
And when that disaster strikes, with its incredible losses, there is such a wealth of responses to it that it’s not completely unbelievable when, as they say in the classics, “the shit hits the fan.”
Which is when they apply their technological resources to solve the problem, they discover that they need something else because they just don’t have the materials to protect everyone.
This is where the fire lizards come in…
Since the colonists landed on Pern they had made friends with the little flying creatures, and marvelled as each of their skills, which (again) long-term readers are well aware of: mild telepathy, teleportation, the ability to ingest a local mineral and breathe fire. The colonists devise a way to genetically engineer these creatures into something larger which can act as a “natural air force” for the surviving colonists.
Fortunately, the colony has some genetic engineers who can do this…
I bloody love this book. When it was published in 1988, space colonies were having a bit of a moment: on-screen we’d had Aliens just two years before, featuring another doomed colony; while in print, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes had published The Legacy Of Heorot, featuring another doomed colony. Look, Science Fiction is filled with lost earth colonies, but McCaffrey was not joining the crowd: she was adding to lore she created herself twenty years before when Dragonflight was first serialised in Analog. She was not the first, but she was not a mere bandwagon jumper, either.
She was just filling in some gaps in her own fictional history.
And creating some new stories as well. The dolphins, for example, were more than just a rip-off/homage to David Brin’s Startide Rising – they would play an important part in many future storylines. In another twist, the casual mention of the computer system based at what the colonists prosaically refer to as “Landing” will play a major part in the entirety of the books set in what we have come to refer to as Pern’s present.
Dragonsdawn does what Dragondrums also set out to do: tell an engaging story that plugs a few gaps in the stories that came before it.
But on a much grander, far more epic scale than Piemur could ever have dreamt of.
Coming Up Next: The Renegades Of Pern
