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language: English
country: USA
year: 1994
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Dragonriders of Pern, #12
dates read: 12.8.13-13.8.13, 26.3.25-30.3.25
Anne McCaffrey’s The Dolphins of Pern was, apart from Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, the Pern book I revisited most as a child — I used to just cycle through the audiobook repeatedly, and it shows when listening to the cassettes, where the sound is in some places a bit erratic. but I’m committed to the ’90s audiobook rather than the new version, which is the only one available digitally.
it’s been a long time since I revisited it while actually paying attention, and I’m delighted to say that even now I genuinely think it’s one of the best books in the series.
The Dolphins of Pern is primarily the story of two boys / young men, Readis and T’lion. Readis is the son of Jayge and Aramina, two of the protagonists of The Renegades of Pern, who are now well established in their Hold on the Southern Continent. T’lion is a bronze rider from Eastern Weyr who at the beginning of the book is too young to fight Thread and so finds himself mainly on transportation duty. the two of them in different ways become involved with Pern’s dolphins, who were genetically engineered to be able to produce human speech and also apparently to be lightly telepathic. humans have somehow forgotten this over the past 2,500 years — the novel’s one glaring flaw, I would say, is that it explicitly raises the question of how this was forgotten but never attempts to answer it, although I also don’t know what answer McCaffrey could have presented that could possibly have been convincing. anyway, the dolphins are delightful — one of the highlights of the book is the dolphin-narrated passages where we get tantalizing glimpses of dolphin culture, dolphin intelligence, and dolphins’ perceptions of humans from the outside.
anyway, the novel follows Readis and T’lion as they interact with dolphins — and attempt to convince other people that they should value dolphins not only for their utility to humans, as tools, but as intelligent beings in their own right, with their own history and culture. this is particularly challenging for Readis, whose mother (and to a lesser extent father) is opposed to his interaction with dolphins. his parents regard the dolphins as a distraction from his primary obligation to learn to be the Holder of Paradise River, and this is ultimately framed in stark terms, as “treachery”, among other things. ultimately, Readis runs away: this is yet another book reworking the plot of Dragonsong.
what makes this book the most successful of the Dragonsong reworkings is that, unlike Dragondrums or The Masterharper of Pern, it also understands and foregrounds the violence of the family. in some ways I actually think it does a better job of this than Dragonsong, for all that the violence Readis faces is less spectacular, because Dragonsong’s focus on misogyny kind of ends up implying that if not for the misogyny family would be fine, whereas Dolphins is very clear that actually the status of children as subordinate to and de facto property of their parents is inherently a violation.
this is further emphasized by a shockingly perceptive — considering the eugenics and ableism that have run through the series — attention to disability: one of Readis’s legs is fucked up because of an infection when he was a child, meaning that he walks with a limp (and in fact sometimes uses a runner-beast, perhaps a pony, to cover longer distances outside), although he remains a strong swimmer. because Readis is “high-functioning”, mostly people ignore his disability — except when they (read: his parents) want to exert control over him, in which case suddenly they draw attention to it to leverage it against him, something the narration explicitly acknowledges as deeply fucked up. Readis’s final vindication is profoundly narratively satisfying (the more so because it also involves the first female character in the whole series to hold significant political power in her own right rather than just as partner to a man).
T’lion falls into the background more as the novel goes on, but I do love him and his dragon Gadareth, who gets maybe the second-most characterization in the series after Ruth; the only other real competition is Canth. T’lion’s relationship with Readis is a big part of the emotional core of this novel for me, and while it’s not explicitly gay, they definitely have a vibe, and they very much are going to live together afterwards. this novel also has what is as far as I can remember the first on-page kiss between two male characters, the Healer Persellan and the dolphin Boojie, who he’s been treating. when Boojie “stands up” and touches his nose to Persellan’s lips to express his gratitude for Persellan’s treatment, Persellan — who had been dubious about treating dolphins — immediately turns around and is like, “wow, I wish my human patients responded like that! I’ll definitely work with dolphins more”. between this and the gay Healer in Moreta I think we can confirm Healers as the gayest Craft.
what really makes this book stand out to me now, though, is that it does many of the things All the Weyrs of Pern doesn’t, namely, actually dig into the experience of the radical social, political, and technological transformation of Pernese society on the ground, as well as in the sea. the dolphins are obviously foregrounded as part of this: they neatly bridge “old” (since they came with the original colonists) and “new” (since it’s the youth, Readis and T’lion, who are most interested in reestablishing relationships with them). but it isn’t just the dolphins: we see the education system, we see the influence of new technologies on the rhythms of everyday life, and — excitingly — we see some massive political transformations. All the Weyrs of Pern is, frankly, kind of bad, but in retrospect maybe it was worth it in order to get this book out of it. with the Plan complete, people are finally free to really look towards the future.
moods: adventurous, dark, hopeful, lighthearted