(no subject)

[skygiants]

I have a stack of library books and used bookstore buys looking at me accusingly but instead I have been lured into doing a massive McCaffrey read. I know. I don't respect my choices either.

My other problem is that once I am embarked on a Text I have a hard time stopping it, so when all the library offered me in ebook was an omnibus of Dragonflight - Dragonquest - The White Dragon I was always going to be reading all three. And, you know, it did start out quite well! Rereading Dragonflight a very funny experience because it's like

Dragonflight: and here's where Lessa washes her hair
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: I LOVE LESSA I LOVE IT WHEN SHE GETS TO WASH HER HAIR 🥹
Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: who's F'lar

But actually with very few actual memories and a lot of informed knowledge from the twenty years since the last time I read these books I truly expected F'lar and the central romance plot in general to be ... worse? Like yes it's 1968 and yes there's the dubcon dragonsex of it all and yes F'lar's whole mission in life is to convince the world that you Cannot stop feeding the military-industrial complex even after four hundred years of peace or you Will be eaten by mindless alien hordes [On Which More Later]. But the thing that the dubcon dragonsex actually does, narratively speaking, is it fully displaces the emphasis of the romance away from 'when are they going to have sex' to 'when are these two assholes who trust themselves very much going to learn to trust each other.' They're having sex all through it; the dragons have taken care of that, so the sex is no longer the point. The partnership and the problem-solving is the point, and it is fun to watch them solve problems and increasingly know which problems they can rely on the other to solve. Which I think is interesting and purposeful and honestly pretty bold, for 1968! I'd like to see more romances do that now! Also the problem-solving is satisfying, and haunted mission back in time plot that I had completely forgotten is quite effectively creepy. I ended Dragonflight like 'you know what, as Of Its Time as it is, in many ways this book actually does really work. Maybe ... Pern is good?

Then on to Dragonquest and The White Dragon and it turns out Pern unfortunately is not good, although both of these books are real would-be-good-if-they-were-good situations.

Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
me: Dragonquest what do you think about this
Dragonquest: what haunted mission

No, Dragonflight is kind of a mess of a book but what I do think is interesting about it, thematically speaking -- to come back to the military-industrial complex of it all -- is that the end of Dragonflight is a lot of people going 'to be manly and heroic is to fight forever on a cool dragon, we've reached peacetime and it's dull so we're going forward in time so we can continue fighting forever on a cool dragon' and the beginning of Dragonquest is like 'actually I have reconsidered my thinking about this and it turns out fighting forever is perhaps bad for you, psychologically? maybe instead of heroic forever war we can look at some alternate pursuits that are also heroic and manly but less lethal and traumatizing. Like space exploration! Did anyone watch the Moon Landing? Wasn't that pretty cool?' (genarti when I was talking with her about this also pointed out that at the time Dragonquest came out we were also several more years into Vietnam.) Obviously McCaffrey is all in on the Pioneer Spirit and the wistful terra nullius of it all but I appreciate that she's actively revising her thoughts on the military and its relationship to the populace it theoretically protects as she's writing it, and it's interesting to see the evolution. Really really funny to see F'lar go from the 'SEND TITHES LIKE YOU DID IN THE DAYS OF YORE' guy to the 'I'm your progressive candidate for Weyrleader and I think this military appropriationism has gotten a bit out of hand' guy. I love the end of the book where it's like 'well we've actually solved the problem of Thread but unfortunately our solution is not cool and sexy, so we need a dragonrider to do something that is cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless to get everyone else to buy into it.'

(E who dragged me into this: plausible reading that the grubs are a feminised solution. we must put our hands into mother earth and urgh it's all moist and gooey
me: i love that you went there because my first thought is that the solution is lower class. the humblest tillers of the land
E, determined: thread is being absorbed by a planetary vagina dentata which also has life-generating properties)

Anyway, F'nor does some spaceflight, in a cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless way, which is making up I suppose for the other cool and sexy thing that F'nor absolutely does not get to do which is challenge dragon biological essentialism. F'nor/Brekke is not a particularly successful or interesting romance plot but nonetheless I truly was on the edge of my seat for this -- I remembered that Brekke's mating flight ends in Tragedy but I thought F'nor might at least like succeed a little bit in proving that it's hypothetically possible for a brown dragon to mate with a queen? But no! he doesn't even get to try! Having raised the question of 'what does dragon gender really mean and how much does it bind us' Anne cannot bring herself to answer it. Have you instead considered that spaceflight is cool and sexy.

And The White Dragon is even more a book of 'having raised the question, Anne cannot bring herself to answer it.' Not much actually happens in The White Dragon, we're making a number of mountains out of molehills, but it's all whirling around the central anxiety point of 'if my soulbonded dragon falls out of standard dragon color/gender categories and moreover is definitely ace then what does that make me?' And the book's answer is '....a guy. A manly guy who successfully achieves all of his society's standards of masculinity. Do not worry about it.' Well, I wouldn't have been worrying about it, Anne, if you hadn't been telling me to worry about it, and then you gave me the most boring answer possible.

There is more to say about The White Dragon -- not least the way that every woman in the book seems to have gotten a hefty splash from the misogyny fountain -- but I am running out of time so we'll call it here. Am I done? No! I am now halfway through Dragonsdawn. More on that anon.

Comments

[ambyr]

Dragonsdawn is my favorite and I preserve its place in my heart by never touching it again.

[osprey_archer]

Oh NO Becca you have allowed yourself to be dragged back into Pern... you may never escape.

I didn't remember the space flight part of Dragonquest at all, but I did remember the bit where F'nor is like "perhaps my unusually large brown dragon can fly Brekke's queen!" and then... we simply did not go there... Missed opportunities. But also, surely Weyrpeople are constantly having dragon-induces sex with people they'd rather not have a relationship with. Surely Brekke and F'nor could make this work even if dragon gender IS in fact an Immutable Fact?

I remember The White Dragon being quite disappointing, although the main thing I remember is the part where Jaxom (having a crisis about his soulbond to an asexual white dragon) lands in a field and has sex with a peasant girl right then and there. Jaxom please. Jaxom you are in a FIELD out in the OPEN get a ROOM and also maybe some explicit consent.

Also please tell me you plan to read the Menolly books because the first two of those were my favorites, especially the first one where Menolly is living in the cave with her NINE fire lizards, successfully living off the land like it's My Side of the Mountain except instead of a single falcon she's got nine soulbonded fire lizards.

[flamebyrd]

Teen Me was so excited to read The White Dragon and waited anxiously for weeks for the inter library loan to come in and then… disappointment all the way. I don’t remember exactly why, just as I also don’t remember anything that happened in the book.

Dragonsdawn was My Favourite and I owned a copy and read it over and over (just like Dragonsong). And like Ambyr above, I haven’t gone near it in years.

Edit: I, too, bonded heavily with the hair washing scene in Dragonflight. Truly ahead of its time in oddly satisfying content.

[ursula]

Tween me also loved Dragonsdawn! It had a tween viewpoint character for like half the book and also science facts, watch me draw six-legged salamanders all over everything.

[jazzfish]

I am now halfway through Dragonsdawn

oh no

(Not so much for Dragonsdawn, which I like everyone else recall with some fondness[1], but for the implications for the impending Later Pern Books, about which the most frequent comment I've heard is "I liked her early work.")

[1] Although almost the only detail I remember from Dragonsdawn at this late date is one character's tendency to swear by saying "Jays!".

[mrissa]

SAME FRIEND SAME

[larryhammer]

To be fair, the first two Menolly books are objectively the best.

[thistleingrey]

I had the weird luck to read Dragonquest first, like, firstmost of any McCaffrey book, because it's the one that was always on the shelf at the smallish public library branch. As a result, F'lar in Dragonflight fell a little flat--but I do remember the positive story effects of "They're obviously having sex anyway but what does this mean for trust and interaction" for Lessa and F'lar. That felt pretty daring for the 1980s, too, sigh, and I wanted it for Moreta (as sort of Lessa, Take Three--I don't care about Kylara), and it didn't happen.

I liked Lytol a lot as (I hope I'm not about to offend anyone!) kind of an Uncle Iroh character.

[rmc28]

My First Pern book (my first SF book really) was Dragonsong, which my dad picked off the library SF shelves and said, hey you might like this.

Read it in one gulp that night, picked it up in the morning and started it again ... And so began my friendship with SF.

[pauraque]

In the genre of Dreamwidth posts about books that I am never going to read, Pern posts are my favorite.

[sovay]

But the thing that the dubcon dragonsex actually does, narratively speaking, is it fully displaces the emphasis of the romance away from 'when are they going to have sex' to 'when are these two assholes who trust themselves very much going to learn to trust each other.' They're having sex all through it; the dragons have taken care of that, so the sex is no longer the point.

That is genuinely neat to see as the romantic mainspring of a novel in 1968.

I have never even tried to watch the film version of John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle (1943) for a variety of reasons including Ronald Reagan, but the major one is that all the romantic action of the original stage play proceeds from a one-night stand which the characters are now trying to figure out their emotions about. It actively confuses me that there hasn't been a major revival in twenty-five years.

Anyway, F'nor does some spaceflight, in a cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless way

This is very nearly the only part I ever remember of Dragonquest. It was not F'nor's fault that even fire lizards couldn't tell him about spacesuits.

Having raised the question of 'what does dragon gender really mean and how much does it bind us' Anne cannot bring herself to answer it.

I truly consider myself to have fewer classically fannish instincts than everyone around me including my parents, but I was in elementary school when it seemed obvious to me that Weyr culture had to be queerer than the non-dragon-bonded alternatives and I remain on some level embittered that Word of God on that front turned out to be NOPE.

[sovay]

I liked Lytol a lot as (I hope I'm not about to offend anyone!) kind of an Uncle Iroh character.

Probably predictably, I love that comparison.

[sovay]

But also, surely Weyrpeople are constantly having dragon-induces sex with people they'd rather not have a relationship with.

One of the reasons I assumed monogamy would be irrelevant to a functioning Weyr! I sincerely cannot remember if the books even address this concept or if fandom just did.

[osprey_archer]

I mean, that would make sense, wouldn't it! However. That does not appear to be how most of our main characters feel about it.

[schneefink]

the dubcon dragonsex actually does, narratively speaking, is it fully displaces the emphasis of the romance away from 'when are they going to have sex' to 'when are these two assholes who trust themselves very much going to learn to trust each other.'
That does sound like a nice change and big plus tbf. And I also often find it very interesting if you can follow along how an author changed their perspectives while writing a series.

I didn't care very much about Pern until I happened to read this prequel AU series (canon-blind so I have no idea as to accuracy etc.) and then suddenly I had a lot more feelings.

[elanid]

Despite embarking on a lengthy Mercedes Lackey reread during the pandemic, it honestly had never occurred to me to dare rereading Pern! I have to admit that you are making the case at least for Dragonflight, in kind of a…I am always fascinated by things the genre past did better than we sometimes achieve today? Dangerous stuff!

(Also, though I haven’t thought of this in YEARS, I always loved Dragonflight best, in kind of a classic tween way where I read the Menolly books first and then…this new one is SO METAL AND GROWN UP, INCREDIBLE!!!)

[hrj]

My recollection (though I don't think I've re-read the books since my original reads in the '80s) is that there's a fair number of comments in the books along the lines of "Weyrfolk don't have the odd hangups around monogamy (and heterosexuality) that Holders have."

[cahn]

Huh, small!me never got around to reading The White Dragon... a narrow escape, I guess!

[movingfinger]

The White Dragon! I vividly remember the excitement around its release; it was much longer than previous Pern books, and obviously there was going to be way more cool stuff in it! And it was a hardcover! There were hardcover face-out displays and stacks of the book in every mall bookstore I went to, and the library even had it! The actual book was so... dull? I stopped reading Pern after that, I remember.

[musesfool]

I know I read all the Pern books as a tween/young teen and enjoyed most of them at the time, but I'm happy to not ever reread them (I feel the same about Mercedes Lackey), so thanks for taking that for the team, as it were.

[sholio]

Seconding (thirding, actually!) re: Lytol. He's actually the only thing I remember now about White Dragon except for some vague broad strokes of the premise. Teen!me latched onto him hard.

[anekdot]

hmm. really rotating what would have happened in the ao3 ecosystem if "pern dubcon dragonsex" had come out in the 2000s.

[cyphomandra]

I read a bunch of later Pern books two years back in a misguided fit of completionism, and when I finished Masterharper I indignantly went back and re-read the beginning of Dragonflight to prove that it was indeed still a much better book (she re-tells the same events in Masterharper but they're DIRE). I should go back and read the rest of it but what if I also get sucked into the Pern vortex?

McCaffrey wrote some great female characters - I'm oddly fond of Killashandra, whom while I would never want to spend much time with at parties (or, worse, share living accommodations with), is a still rare adult female who discovers she has super special powers as well as having meaningless sex with a variety of individuals with no authorial judgment. Sadly she also wrote many terrible male characters without seeming to always realise they were terrible, argh.

[oracne]

That part in "White Dragon" when Jaxom essentially exerts his droit du seigneur...yeah.

[sovay]

"Weyrfolk don't have the odd hangups around monogamy (and heterosexuality) that Holders have."

Somebody should tell the Weyrfolk.

[sovay]

He's actually the only thing I remember now about White Dragon except for some vague broad strokes of the premise.

My experience of trying to re-read The White Dragon has been "boy howdy is a lot of nothing happening HEY THERE'S A SCENE WITH LYTOL all right back to the nothing then."

[lizbee]

I have not read The White Dragon since I was a teen, but when I was a teen, it was my favourite Pern novel after Dragonsdawn. And now I fear I have to reread the whole series to figure out what Teen Liz missed.