Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, Anne McCaffrey

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language: English
country: USA
year: 1983
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Dragonriders of Pern, #7
dates read: 17.9.21-23.9.21, 15.8.24-19.8.24

The epidemic—no, one had to state its true proportions, pandemic—had marked everyone, including those lucky enough not to have contracted it.

it is with some regret that I must say that Anne McCaffrey’s Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, the first of the prequel novels set before Dragonflight (in this case about a thousand years before), is actually a very good book. if you have read other Pern books but haven’t read Moreta, I think it’s worth picking up. (probably not worth it if you haven’t read the series, though; I don’t think it would work standalone, despite its extensive setting introduction.)

the book is a novelization of a story told within Dragonsinger and alluded to in Dragonflight: the story of Moreta, a long-ago dragonrider who helped fight a horrific plague that spread across the planet, killing in some places whole Holds (humans and livestock both) and in others as much as 90% of the population. Moreta, the Weyrwoman at Fort Weyr, works with an array of supporting characters — most notably the Masterhealer, Capiam — first to treat the plague (and to ensure that the Weyrs are still able to do their duty to protect Pern) and then to vaccinate the world’s population en masse in order to prevent a second waves of this future flu variant.

reading it after a real-world pandemic respiratory illness shows that in many ways McCaffrey really did her homework and thought through possible responses, the logistical challenges of planetary distribution, and similar. what she did not imagine was the politicization of vaccination campaigns — while one Weyr does refuse to participate, this is not an anti-vaccination campaign but rather, essentially, a dispute over Weyr sovereignty. the book is also, frankly, a devastating look at what it might have looked like to live in a world where vaccine development isn’t “protected” by intellectual property law, such that rapid mass vaccination is possible (though obviously in reality it was further complicated by the difficulty of identifying a vaccine, whereas the novel relies on convalescent antiserum as the sole inoculation). imagine.

this is also, delightfully — though marred still by some low-level homophobia in the narration — the first of the two Pern books that I feel justified tagging as “lgbtq”, because in addition to having some short passages from the perspective of K’lon, a blue rider in a long-term relationship with a (male) green rider at another weyr, it is also unexpectly both committed to showing relationships between men (A’dan and F’duril, Berchar — our first explicitly queer non-dragonrider — and S’gor, and others) and critical of Hold homophobia (in the form of Sh’gall, who is Holdbred and criticized by Moreta’s POV for his homophobia). in particular, K’lon gets to be the perspective character for one of the most powerful scenes in the book. this is a breath of fresh air after the mess that is Dragonquest and The White Dragon; unfortunately it’s also possibly the high point in the series on this front, for all that P’tero is a more consistent perspective character in Red Star Rising/Dragonseye.

taking this in conjunction with its plot and the fact that it was published in 1983, while I think the 1919 flu pandemic was probably McCaffrey’s primary inspiration, I have to wonder to what extent the early development of AIDS informed the novel’s development. McCaffrey was close enough to Samuel R. Delany that Neveryóna (also published in 1983) is dedicated to her, and by this time Delany was working on Flight from Nevèrÿon, which became the first book published by a major publisher in the US to directly address AIDS. the mechanisms of the “viral influence” in Moreta are those of the flu, rather than those of HIV transmission and seroconversion, but I wonder, still, with the rapid and seemingly inexplicable onset and the fact that the first patient we’re introduced to is K’lon, a gay man. at the very least, I think this would have been an intense read as a gay man in 1983.

in keeping with the series’s overall interest in social change, one of the novel’s central concerns is the loss of knowledge, in this case as a result of the devastating impact of the pandemic, which eliminates wide swathes of population across the planet, breaking chains of oral transmission — as just one relatively minor example, of genealogies of runnerbeasts extending back to humans’ arrival on Pern. it’s also a really striking look at life during a “normal” Pass — without the constant planetary political crises of the Ninth Pass, the setting of the main series — in Holds, Crafts, and especially Weyrs. the glimpses of Moreta’s day-to-day life at Fort Weyr, questions of logistics, Threadfall management (including a detailed description of formations during a Fall), healing, and other mundane duties. Moreta is a striking contrast to later Weyrwomen, including Lessa: she and the other queen riders in the book are in many ways female equivalents of bronze riders — amiable, strong-willed, sociable dog-women with giant psychic lizard-cats, just as bronze riders are amiable, strong-willed, sociable dog-men with giant psychic lizard-cats. it really drives home the contrast between Moreta (and Leri and all the other queen riders) and the lives of Hold women like Tolocamp’s neglected wife, Alessan’s mother and sister, and even Desdra.

my only real complaints are that I think the final tragedy is a bit exaggerated in a way that it didn’t need to be and which cheapens it a bit (though I still teared up reading it) and the persistence of intermittent bits of homophobia even from Moreta’s perspective (e.g., the description of Sh’gall as “[f]ully male”). these are small things in the context of a gripping, engagingly written, and very moving book.

moods: dark, emotional, sad, tense


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