Felessan is facing an Impression. As the only child of Benden Weyrleaders F’lar and Lessa, there is a certain expectation that he will “do well” and possibly impress a dragon, despite it being his first time as a candidate…
Honestly, this story is a piece of fluff. It goes with the resource book The Dragonlover’s Guide To Pern (1989) by Jody Lynn Nye with Anne McCaffrey.
I’m really not being dismissive of it because, as pieces of fluff go, this is a delight and is really enjoyable. But what it offers is a vignette in the life of F’lessan, and it gives us a little bit more insight into what it is like being a candidate for Impression.
As a story, though, well – we’ve been to this Impression before: it’s the one that Piemur attends in Dragondrums, where Mirrim also Impresses Path, her green dragon. But, this shouldn’t really be a surprise, because the last few books have all overlapped with another text in the series: Moreta and Nerilka tell the same story but from different perspectives, as do “The Girl Who Heard Dragons” and The Renegades Of Pern, although the latter tells more of the story than the former.
So getting a story that overlaps with another story isn’t really a surprise. And, frankly, it is often nice to see some of our favourite characters from the perspectives of other people, because it can give us more of an insight into how they behave. Although, the treatment of Mirrim in this story is, once again, highly contentious:
A girl impressing a green? Why she hadn’t even been standing on the sands.
(It gave me great joy to see the “redemption” of Mirrim beginning in a couple of books time and continue throughout the remainder of the series, where she is still presented as annoying and a stickler for details, but leading a life that softens her somewhat and makes you feel glad for her.)
So, given that this is a story that was written especially for a resource book, let’s take a look at this book and see what makes it so interesting.
The Dragonlover’s Guide To Pern was the third reference book about the world of Pern. Largely prepared by Nye, this is a pretty lavish book that details more detail than you might care to want to know about our favourite dragon planet.
It followed The Atlas Of Pern by Karen Wynn Fonstad and The People Of Pern an album of character portraits by Robin Wood with commentary by McCaffrey. Both of these books are excellent ornaments to the series and extremely useful as reference books in their own right – I have spoken elsewhere about how much I love the Atlas, and People is almost as good (I must stress that “not as good as the Atlas” does actually mean that it is very good indeed).
Of course, there had also been the 1983 Mayfair Games board game, The Dragonriders Of Pern. This was a popular seller, though sadly now out of print. I have never played it, nor do I own a copy, but it has been very fondly remembered by many players across the internet and the board, featuring a map of Pern, was of such good quality that Fonstad cites it as a resource in her bibliography of the Atlas (yes, I am that much of a nerd that I will read the bibliography of a reference book for a made-up place).
Anyway, Nye was an excellent choice to helm this project: she had already written two adventures in the “Crossroads” series of gamebooks set on Pern (and two set in Piers Anthony’s Xanth series) and she would go on to write many novels and stories set in other people’s universes, including several with McCaffrey. So her knowledge of the series was not in doubt, nor was her wisdom in selecting aspects of life on Pern that people would be interested in (there is a recipe for bubbly pies in here!).
She was so astute that she was commissioned to update the book in 1997 to include information from all the books and stories that had been published in the interim (this ran to an extra eighty or so pages).
So this is a lovely book, filled with detail.
It also features “The Impression” the only literary contribution from McCaffrey in the book. Seeing as it was a brand new story, it’s odd that it isn’t publicised anywhere on the cover or flyleaf, as these things sometimes were in these resource books.
Be that as it may, “The Impression” is still a delight, because even the lesser works in this series have their merits.
Felessan (or F’lessan as he becomes addressed as by stories end) has been a bit of a background detail in the previous books: he played a minor but important role in Dragonquest; and featured somewhat in The White Dragon, where he was portrayed as an intelligent and diligent rider, but also as a bit of a “jock”, or an intellectual lightweight, who could do the tasks required of him, but with little interest beyond their practical applications. Like Mirrim, he does grow a bit of depth as the future series plays out…
Coming Up Next: “Rescue Run”
