When Thread is in the air...

There’s always been a lot that’s problematical about Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels, the gender politics being one of the more prominent issues for me, and the quality of a number of her later books was, well, starting to get a little thin in my opinion, but nonetheless I’ve continued to buy and read each new Pern novel, including the ones that she has co-authored with her son Todd, and now the ones that he is writing on his own. Call it habit, call it nostalgia, but there it is.

Dragon’s Fire, Todd McCaffrey & Anne McCaffrey

This is a continuation of the story begun in Dragon’s Kin. These novels, set near the end of the Second Interval, seem to have been written at least in part for the purpose of giving origin and back stories to some elements of life on Pern that have become fully integrated in the society by the time of F’lar, Lessa and Master Robinton. Dragon’s Kin looked at the discovery of the unique abilities of watch-whers, and the life of miners on Pern – who learn to use watch-whers to sniff out gas pockets and locate trapped miners. Portions of Dragon’s Fire overlap the events of Dragon’s Kin from a different perspective, as the book continues with the exploration of life in the mining camps of Pern, and deals largely with the difficulties of mining the explosive firestone used by Dragonriders in fighting thread at this period in the history of Pern – in fact, it is during the events of this book that the shift is made to the less-volatile mineral used in the time if F’lar. The book also looks at some of the consequences of the Pernese custom of shunning – making outcaste and exlie – criminals and other “undesirables.”

Due to the youth of the key characters, it would appear that the series was intended as young adult reading. That’s fine – most of the Pern books feature young characters – but something about these two books just failed to grab me. I found the plots somewhat disjointed and perhaps unnecessarily complicated, and to be perfectly honest, I find it difficult to remember exactly what happened in the books, and to whom.


Dragonsblood, Todd McCaffery

Curiously enough, Todd McCaffrey’s foray into writing a Pern book without his mother’s collaboration was a far more enjoyable affair for me. It certainly helps that he appears to lack his mother’s difficulty in following the decisions she made about the sexuality of dragons and dragonriders to their logical conclusion – that the vast majority of male dragonriders, by necessity if not inclination, engage regularly in sex with other men and probably form strong emotional ties to those men. After all, male dragons come in three colours – bronze, brown and blue – and the female dragons in two colours – gold and green. For most of the history of Pern, women have only been gold dragon riders - and gold dragons are very few indeed - while men have been riding green dragons as well as all the other colours of dragons. And it is canon that the bond between dragon and rider means that when two dragons mate, so do their riders - and that these bonds can be intensely emotional as well as sexual. It’s always been there in the text, and sometimes even mentioned, but Todd McCaffrey actually seems comfortable enough with the concept to discuss it directly as part of who his characters are and what they do, and that’s a welcome change.

Set just prior to the beginning of the Third Turn (just a few years after the trilogy the McCaffreys are co-writing), Dragonsblood draws on some familiar tropes in the Pern universe – plague and how to deal with it in the absence of medical technology, finding lost records from the Landing, using the dragon’s time-travelling abilities to make possible something that otherwise could not be done – but it’s a pleasant if not particularly challenging read. And it gives us more information on the dragons, the fire-lizards and the whers.

I’m looking forward with some curiosity to Todd McCaffrey's next solo Pern offering.