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 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 Kimodo Dragons of Indonesia notably lack one mythic feature of classic dragons—they have no wings and cannot fly. Also, no fire.
(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 the 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 Wars insofar as the tropes conflict and end up with fantasy in SF garb. Or perhaps in this instance, the opposite.