While I’m not the hugest fan of these remaining two stories, I’m really glad they exist. So let’s take a look at the pair of them before we start discussing the whys and wherefores of them…
“The Ford Of Red Hanrahan”
Fort Hold, the first of the settlements on Pern’s Northern Continent, is becoming overcrowded so Red Hanrahan, father of Sorka (one of the first queen dragon riders) has decided to extend the colony by setting a new Hold. There’s a sense of angst as the colonists are spreading themselves out again, as well as anticipation – for exactly the same reason. But there’s already a settlement at Boll down the coast and plans by Jim Tillek to build a seaport in the west. And there was a plague just a couple of years back that decimated Fort, so it would be good to expand further…
What we get here is the story of the beginning of Ruatha Hold, one of the most prestigious Holds on Pern…
It’s important to stress that this fills a gap in Pern’s history because it just doesn’t have the gravitas that other stories have had. I’ve mentioned before that Anne McCaffrey’s stories are a fantastic mix of the domestic and the epic. This is a domestic story that wants to be epic. But the challenges in it don’t really stand up to that label with close examination: there’s the “battle” that Red undergoes as he crosses a river during a storm but it’s over and done with in a few pages reasonably early in the story. It’s exciting but it serves only to highlight the point of the story: to explain where Ruatha gets its name from.
This is mostly a filler piece to expand the history of Pern. It’s dull but it does what it needs to: attach a sense of continuing history to Ruatha, as well as doing what McCaffrey arguably does best: highlighting the fates of the lesser characters and making them the heroes of their own stories.
“The Second Weyr”
A great story with very little drama, rather like a lot of positive things that have happened in our history.
So, twenty or so years into the First Pass, Fort has become dangerously overcrowded. There’s talk of a tragic mating flight the previous year that took the lives of three queen dragons, as well the sense of the lack of privacy or breathing room that there is in the weyr. There have been murmurs of discontent about it and many folks are wanting to expand into other suitable locations for dragons: there’s another dormant volcano on the other side of the continent that could be altered without too much trouble.
What we have here, though, is a pretty good story about how strongwilled Sean Connell, one of the first bronze riders and current Weyrleader, is when dealing with issues. He’s painted here as a bit of a martinet and tyrant but also as someone who takes great pains to be scrupulously fair. He’s basically F’lar but without a sense of humour or the propensity for getting into knife fights. Sean’s reasoning is to always go bigger – they want one new weyr? Well, damnit, they’re getting THREE! And possibly two more if the sites he’s selected work out all right…
We also meet Torene, another figure from Pernese history who has been mentioned a few times before. She has the ability to hear all dragons, which nobody else can do…
So what we get in these stories is a lot of pages being devoted to urban planning and infrastructure, which is not terribly exciting for a story but is a harsh fact of life for those of us who live in the real world. As a counterpoint, though, who remembers rolling their eyes at George Lucas when he posited that tariffs and trade blockades were a valid reason for going to war in The Phantom Menace?
But the real fun comes from Red, Torene and their contemporaries as they negotiate a future as a transitional generation having to start projects for their descendants to benefit from, which is something that we deal a lot with in the real world. It’s also interesting to see how many of the Pernese customs we know from the Ninth Pass were developed in these first generations out of necessity but which seem to have stuck for practical reasons.
It’s also cool that McCaffrey has created so many protagonists of different ages and backgrounds. Something else I love about these stories is how it deals with issues being faced in different ways by people who are not necessarily wrong, just at odds with what is the “right” way to solve a problem. It’s no wonder that the series appeals to so many people from so many age groups.
Coming Up Next: Dragonsong: The Next Generation, or The Dolphins Of Pern
