[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: USA
year: 1971
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Dragonriders of Pern, #2
dates read: 1.8.13-2.8.13, 19.6.18-20.6.18, 15.8.24-2.9.24
Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonquest, the second Pern book, is I think a better book than Dragonflight, though it doesn’t stand alone and also is bizarrely paced.
set 7-8 years after Dragonflight, it deals with the aftermath of the climax of the first book: it turns out that bringing several thousand “Oldtimer” dragonriders from four hundred years ago into the present has had consequences! who could have foreseen. the Oldtimers are, fundamentally, afraid of change and unable to imagine a world without Thread, a reality well within living memory for the current population, who have grown and changed in what, to the Oldtimers, feels like a span of a few days. this has created some tensions: the Oldtimers are used to being seen as heroes before whom all “commoners” should grovel, whereas in the present the relationships between Weyrs, Holds, and Crafts are on more equal footing.
this results in F’lar’s half-brother, F’nor, being stabbed in the shoulder by a hysterical gay man (an Oldtimer green rider), setting off a very slow chain of dramatic events that radically reorganize the political structure of Pern. I cannot emphasize enough how weird the pacing of this book is. there are approximately four Big Plot Events in this book, and three of them happen only in the last ~25% of the book. the first 75% of the book is spent on one of the Big Plot Events (the rediscovery of firelizards, which honestly isn’t even that big) and then, crucially, on character development, exploring the setting, and on interpersonal interactions that, when McCaffrey gets to the point, produce one of the most effective scenes in all of science fiction for me (the tragic mating flight).
it’s also the book that explicitly introduces gay people into the world-building, something McCaffrey seems to immediately regret. it’s very homophobic, but also it cannot let us forget about the gay people, because for some reason she made them central to Weyr life. her overarching theoretical concern through the series is obviously the process of social change, and certainly that’s very much in the foreground here through the conflict between Oldtimers and modern Pern. however, not far behind it is an almost obsessive interest in the management of sex and sexuality, some of which is clearly because she was interested in exploring romance tropes in a science fiction setting (all of the Brekke stuff in this book) but some of which (first and foremost the gay people whose presence is load-bearing for the world-building as a whole) is simply…incomprehensible. she absolutely did not have to set up T’reb (explicitly a gay man) as a prelude to Kylara (evil promiscuous woman, of course). but she did.
I would not recommend this book unless you plan to continue and read more of the series, which you should not. but if you do plan to continue and read more of the series, it is better than Dragonflight.
moods: adventurous, emotional, horny