During the events of Dragonsdawn, a group of terrified colonists launched an emergency beacon. This was after the horrendous loss of life occurred in the first Threadfall and before the first generation of dragons had hatched.
Some 49 years later, a ship – the Federation of Sentient Planets vessel Amherst – happens to be patrolling that area of space and has decided to investigate…
This is a sequel to Dragonsdawn and it features almost nobody from that book except for the rather slimy Stev Kimmer who was a minor antagonist in it.
Kimmer is a great example of the sort of villain that Anne McCaffrey writes best: he doesn’t have any great plans of conquest, or vengeance he is committed to undertaking; he’s just an arsehole and a bully. Most of the villains in the Pern books are written like this: they seek power but they have no clue how to manage it if and when they get it. Kimmer is all of this, but with one more characteristic: despair. He is left, the away team from the Amherst discovers, with a small group of family members to terrorise, while – he believes – the rest of the colonists have been killed.
What Kimmer doesn’t realise is that they are “merely” cut off from the rest of the colony who have made a crossing to the Northern Continent, leaving him and his family – whom they believe to be dead – behind.
This story was published in two venues in 1991: the first was the August issue of Analog magazine. The second – in the same month – was by Wildside Press as a novella. It appeared in a collection of short stories on 1993 called The Chronicles Of Pern: First Fall (Three of the five stories published in that Anne-thol- sorry, anthology – appeared somewhere else first, so they will have their own entries in Pern Appreciation Month – so when we get to that anthology, there will only be two stories left to talk about).
It’s rather great, honestly: it’s best described a slow burning Science Fiction gothic. Kimmer rules the roost of his stolen home as though he’s Heathcliff making everyone miserable in Wuthering Heights, while his extended tribe despise him but still treat him with fear and respect because of their lifelong abuse by him.
And the ending of the story is a delight, although I frequently wonder if McCaffrey ever watched the Blakes 7 episode Orbit…
At any rate, while I do enjoy this tale a lot, it does highlight the issues facing a modern science fiction writer: do we stick with what is believable, modern tech or go with some kind of extrapolation to make a story more realistic?
Because in the world of the FSP we have ships that can detect power sources from orbit. The crew of the Amherst – including Ross Benden, nephew of Admiral Paul Benden, co-founder of the colony – go to an emergency beacon that is still broadcasting and discover Kimmer and his family. However, it’s revealed in a few books time that Fort still have functioning computers at this point in their history.
That makes for less dramatic irony in the story, though – for all the technological might of the Amherst, its crew are only investigating a distress signal… and somewhat reluctantly at that. Why would they bother doing a quick scan to detect any signs of electrical power or human life?
But that doesn’t take anything away from just how much fun this is: we can cheer along with the heroes of this story even if we know that they are missing out on something amazing.
I have just one last question before we finish this entry: would the Amherst’s expedition and findings put Pern under some sort of interdiction to prevent further exploration… and if it did, just how long would it be before some other explorers or thrillseekers decided to poke their heads in and see what’s happening on this forbidden planet…?
Coming Up Next: All The Weyrs Of Pern.
