All the plagues of Pern

[bibliogramma]

Dragon Harper, Anne McCaffrey and Todd McCaffery.

Anne McCaffery and her son Todd McCaffrey have collaborated on another Pern novel, continuing the story of aspiring harper Kindan, who has already been involved in bringing the special abilities of watchwhers to the attention of those who need them and giving the weyrs of Pern access to a much safer form of firestone for the dragons to use in fighting thread.

Now Kindan is up against something he can’t solve, but can only fight to survive – a deadly planet-wide influenza epidemic, which the authors have based on the historical Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918.

It’s a light and undemanding read, and is probably of interest primarily to those who just can’t kick the Pern habit, like me. It covers well-trodden ground – we’ve seen a lot of plague among both dragons and humans in the Pern books over the years. Not that it’s unrealistic for a people to experience multiple plagues over the course of several thousand years, but if you’re going to create a series of books about what’s most interesting in the long history of a lost human colony, a detailed exploration of one plague is probably enough (OK, two if you want to have both human and dragon plagues, but that’s the limit unless you put some clear and strong differences into the stories). I hope that if either or both McCafferys continue to write about Pern, they’ll explore more new ground, rather than going back to some of the same plots over and over again.