In decades of reading, it can be surprising on looking back just what one has left unread. The question about what may be the minimum of varied texts are required to be considered Well Read or just A Fan of a given genre is a good launch point for a discussion about the pleasures of words. It is often assumed that for anyone to be regarded as a serious fan, certain stories are a must. So when it turns out that such lists include titles you never read, the impulse may be to remedy that.
One does so at one’s peril, though. There are books I did read in my teens and twenties that I enjoyed immensely that now, upon rereading, do not hold up very well. For a variety of reasons. Stung often enough, one may avoid even first readings of books from that period. Time is a factor; there are new books to read, when exactly am I supposed to fit these older ones in? Taste is another thing—we change and, if the least self-aware, we know at the outset that this is not the sort of thing we enjoy anymore. And then there are those books we didn’t read in the first place because even then they were “not our thing.”
Surprises occur, though, and lessons can be learned regardless.
A case in point is Dragonflight by Anne McCaffery.
I enjoyed a number of her novels back in the day. The Ship Who Sang, Restoree, Decision At Doona, The Crystal Singer. But her big one, the one that her reputation subsequently built on, the Pern series…never read them. A significant part of why has to do with the central character(s) of the series: dragons.
Everyone has a default filter. We need something to steer us. My filters are based substantially on fantasy tropes. Elves, fairies, princes, trolls…dragons. While I know (intellectually) that there are worthy examples (some of which I’ve read and enjoyed: Tolkein, obviously, but also Neveryona by Delany and Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant) by and large their presence signals a particular kind of narrative for which I have little interest. I saw those gorgeous Michael Whelan covers and veered off.
Until now. I have just finished Dragonflight…and did not hate it.
Despite years of being told that these stories are, in fact, science fiction, that central motif kept me at bay. Overwhelming in fantasy, dragons are to one degree or another tied to the supernatural—or perhaps I should say paranatural. They are in almost all ways impossible creatures. They exist in literature as symbols, certainly, but all attempts to rationalize them as somehow evolutionary possibilities run afoul of all manner of biological—not to mention engineering—problems. One has to stretch credulity too far. The colorfully named Komodo Dragons of Indonesia notably lack one mythic feature of classic dragons—they have no wings and cannot fly. Also, no fire, so that’s two.
(I will readily admit that a similar argument can be made for the likelihood of starships, but frankly they serve a different function in most SF. But they represent something else in narrative. More about that in another forthcoming post.)
That said, McCaffery posited a SFnal justification for her dragons and the basic narrative is science fiction. Lost colony, orbital mechanics presenting a world-threatening problem, humans gamely utilizing the resources at hand to meet said problem. As far as it goes, these are science fiction. The dragons are a native lifeform and she goes to some length describing how they do what they do, even positing a “natural” explanation for their ability to project fire.
The story of the first novel, Dragonflight, is straightforward. Because of the eccentricities of the orbits in this system, a considerable lag has occurred since the last time the Red Star (the rogue planet) has come close enough to Pern to trigger the transfer of an invasive parasitic species, the Threads. The purpose of the dragons is to fly to meet the Threads and burn them out of the sky before they can make landfall and wreak havoc on the ecosystem. The threat has faded into legend, the weyrs in which the dragons breed and are raised by their human partners have diminished, the planet is not ready, and popular support has fallen. Most people see no reason for them anymore, believing the threat has ended. This is perfectly plausible. People tend not to want to pay for preventive measures. Once a threat has ended and couple of generations emerge who have no experience with it, we tend not want to be bothered with maintaining the systems that ended the threat.
Into this we have the Hero, a lord of the weyr who sees it as his duty to restore the weyrs to prominence because he recognizes the coming threat. But he has to find a female counterpart to join telepathically with the queen dragon about to be born. A suitable woman must be found. And she is, though she is completely unaware of her destiny. F’lar, the young “prince”, must convince Lessa, the weyrwoman, to accept her destiny and join with him to resurrect the power of the weyrs to defend Pern.
This is no longer science fiction other than in the now overridden premise. This is a fantasy plot, the characters are fantasy archetypes, the purposes they serve…
It seems that the introduction of certain elements perforce bend narratives into a course that, despite the intentions advanced by author and reader, result in a fantasy narrative. This is a Lost Royal plot, steeped in Destiny (with the capital D) and a virtually unspoken acceptance of a hierarchical social structure which, despite millennia of human presence on Pern, has advanced no further than late feudalism. Except for setting, nothing in this narrative is other than fantasy. Even the somewhat hyperbolic language, the declamatory approach to certain characterizations, the essential denial of plausible biology much less physics is characteristic of fantasy.
Which is not to say this isn’t a cracking good yarn. The imagery, the tensions, the hints at worlds beyond the thin veil around Pern, all is deployed with a deft hand at adventure plotting. Once one gets used to the idea that this is a fantasy narrative, it moves very well. One cheers for the young dragon lord in his quest to do right by his world whether it wants him to or not. Lessa is in many ways a compelling character, a survivor, tough and resilient, a take-no-crap independent-minded woman making her place in a world that already decided what she should be. There is a great deal that is fun and enjoyable here.
But that fantasy aesthetic…
McCaffery’s other novels strike a different chord in their use of language. Here she indulged the tropes of classic fantasy while trying earnestly to create a science fictional rational for playing with telepathic dragons. The collision of expectations is dissonant.
And, unfortunately, those tropes roped her characters into some unfortunate stereotypes. If one has an actual destiny, then agency frankly goes right out the window. You’re going to be what the universe insists you be. That is the nature of destiny. You can’t walk away. Lessa is tempted, but she yields to the forces of…
There may have been other ways to depict this trajectory that did not rely on casting the characters into inviolate archetypes. Archetypes with only a few tools at their disposal. It may be such choices are constrained by environment, social and ecological, but the fact that everyone ends up pretty much being what they’re expected to be, including bedmates (whether they wanted to be or not, we honestly can’t say, but Lessa simply yields to it) gives us the larger share of explaining it all. Lessa and F’lar do not fall in love, they collide and certain “elements” within them become commingled so that they are compelled to be with each other. A denial of agency for both of them.
Of course a certain amount of context plays a part. At the time this was written, etc etc. One wonders how it would be done today. What kind of interactions might Lessa and F’lar have now, rather than playing into predertimined “destined” roles.
But it is that language, the tactics of narrative choice, that ultimately cast this into the fantasy camp, despite the initial attempt to claim it as science fiction. It simply doesn’t read as science fiction. We have to remind ourselves that this isn’t some pre-Medieval retread of St. George, and that’s down to the choice of prose style. I did not read these when they came out because Dragons. Dragons indicates a particular kind of worldview, a mindset, which I have come more and more to view with distaste.
And yet…and yet…some writers can distract us from examining the premises too closely and drag us along despite ourselves.
I remember that the original story, “Weyr Search”, appeared in Analog, of all places. It was a different literary environment then. It may well be that before the explosion of fantasy (or a certain kind) it was possible to accept the intent of the author despite the contradictory presentation. In 1970, this may well have been readable as science fiction. It’s an interesting question. But the art has progressed and evolved and, at east for me, these stories are akin to Star Warsinsofar as the tropes conflict and end up with fantasy in SF garb. Or perhaps in this instance, the opposite.
5 Responses
It’s my understanding that in the later novels (many of which were prequels I believe, and many were YA) she more or less abandoned the “This is science fiction” pretext.
I think Campbell enjoyed publishing fantasy with a science fictional rationale — at around the same time he was featuring Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories.
I’ve read the early books in the series multiple times, the middle books at least once, and some of the last books. The last books were mostly prequels set a couple of centuries after the Founding. Some of those, and the YA trilogy set concurrent with Dragonquest and the White Dragon, were the only ones I would consider primarily fantasy in feeling. It’s not as much evident in Dragonflight, but starting with Dragonquest there’s efforts to rediscover/recover technology and scientific knowledge, and backlash by people fearing the “new” technology like the telegraph and telescope. In the White Dragon they find the landing craft that brought their ancestors to Pern, buried under feet of ash from a volcanic eruption. In subsequent books they awaken the ship AI, start to recover more knowledge, and face more backlash. They work with the AI to develop a plan to nudge the Red Star enough out of its orbit so there will be no future Threadfall, using dragons to teleport the orbiting colony ships engines (warp/hyperspace/matter-antimatter, I forgot) to the Red Star and triggering calculatedly placed explosions.
Dragonsdawn is the first book chronologically and deals with the colonization of the plant, and the discovery of Threadfall (a hasty survey decades prior ignored the Red Star and missed evidence of past Threadfall), and the genetic engineering of dragons from the native fire lizards, and the move from the lush tropical, but geological unstable and volcanically active southern continent, to the more stable northern continent with multiple cave systems to shelter from Threadfall in. Subsequent novels deal the gradual loss of technology, both from having to turn all resources to surviving Threadfall, and multiple waves of plagues which decimate the population. There’s some retconning that this is the cause of the medieval society and lowered status of women, since women faced societal pressure to give up careers and instead turn out lots of babies to rebuild the population after each plague.
A couple things I didn’t mention in my previous post. While working on Project Red Star, it gets discovered that along with telepathy and teleportation, the dragons also possess telekinesis, which they’ve been using, without knowing it, to help themselves fly and to carry riders. While there may be little real difference in a scientific viewpoint between psi powers and magic, it was an attempt by McCaffery to give a more scientific explanation to dragons flying.
In Dragonsdawn (the first novel chronologically) McCaffery retcons in the founding Charter as the basis for Pern’s governing structure (such as it is), and the Charter gets mentioned occasionally going forwards. The Charter gives Stakeholders ABSOLUTE authority in their Stakeholds. Pern didn’t have enough resources to be commercially exploitable or have any large scale industrialization, so it was opened up to largely pastoral colonization, for people wanting to get away from civilization and homestead, for nomadic groups like the Irish Travelers to wander around freely, etc. So giving people total authority over their Stakeholds was an incentive for people to sign up to colonize the planet. And that is given as the reason why people like Fax are allowed to behave abominably and no one can really do anything about it. The assumption is that if people don’t like what’s going on in a Hold, they are free to move to another Hold more to their liking. Then the first Pass occurs, and people can’t survive without a stone or metal shelter during Threadfall, so their options become much more limited. If someone is a horrible person, but they have a well-built, secure Hold, and they’re able to manage the food supply and other resources, then people will be drawn to that Hold as a matter of survival, and that Hold will grow. So between that and the previously mentioned plagues killing off a good portion of the population every 200 – 500 years or so, what started out as a modern, egalitarian society gradually turned into a hierarchal, society stratified medieval style society. I still really hadn’t been totally sold on that idea, until 2016, then Covid, then the tech-bros doing their best to create their own nasty little libertarian kingdoms, and realized that not everyone is sold on democracy, and there are lots of terrible people doing their best to get richer and more powerful despite what they do to society and everyone else.
Thank you. Lots to chew on in your replies. My immediate response is two-fold: first, while I recognized the SFnal underpinnings McCaffery was laying down, my observations were about how the surface conceits seemed to affect her use of language. Secondly, all this sort of puts a spotlight on the difficulties of retcon. Just as in Star Wars, when Lucas tried to retcon a more SFnal justification for the Force, it didn’t land so well ands felt forced and awkward. But. Lots to talk about.
I see what you’re saying about tropes and language being more fantasy, and compared to the rest of the series, Dragonflight is an outlier. Subsequent books feature the Pernese trying to recover enough technology to deal with Thread, fight plagues, and alter the Red Star’s orbit enough to end Passes, and set up an educational system to prevent knowledge from being lost again. Granted, there’s plenty of political maneuvering among the Lords, and the White Dragon features Jaxom growing up and assuming his place as the Lord of Ruatha Hold, with some more questionable consent issues as no one has any problem with him entering into a sexual relationship with the (same age) daughter of one of his Holders, who he’s never going to marry, because he needs to marry some one of equivalent rank. He finds someone suitable, and no more thought is given to his previous lover. There’s also no interrogation about the system of Holders and Lord Holders. That is somewhat baked in, due to resource management during Passes. McCaffrey was going to write a book about Pern after the Last Pass, but died before she could, and I wonder how she was going to deal with Lord Holder system, if Pern was going to go back to how it was originally supposed to be, a Jeffersonian ideal of small homesteads. One of the real troubling issues is the drudges. Despite all the changes in society and women regaining status, there’s no movement to improve the lot of drudges. I don’t recall if it was in the books, supplementary material, or an interview with McCaffery, but the drudges are claimed to be that way because they have no ambition to improve their lot (sounds familiar). They’re content to do all the grunt work in exchange for food and shelter from Thread, and if they really wanted to, they could make something more of themselves. Absent from this consideration is, how are they supposed to? Education is by Teaching Ballads, a great deal of the population is probably illiterate. Advance learning is done in the Crafthalls, with Hold youngsters showing a talent for a particular Craft sponsored into a Crafthall. But who is going to accept a drudge? All land is controlled by the Lord Holder, and during the Passes there is tradeoff between what the dragons can protect, and what land is necessary for crops, livestock, and timber. McCaffrey stated that she created Pern to be free from religion and all the trouble it has caused. But Pern is also an argument for the flip side. In the deliberate absence of a central government, the absence of a government that has as one of its responsibilities the promotion of the public good, and the absence of any religious or ethical belief system that promotes the dignity and worth of each individual, what is left? People cast aside, deemed to be of no value. And that also sounds increasingly familiar.