Dragonflight - Introduction

[kalinara]

So for my first review for this community, I decided on Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey. I have fond memories of reading Dragonflight when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. I also remember trying to read this book a few years back and finding that it wasn't quite what I remembered.

So it seemed like a good place to start.

For some context: Dragonflight is the first published book in the very popular Dragonriders of Pern series. It was written by Anne McCaffrey in 1968, and like many of her books, it's an expansion/compilation of a couple of her previously published short stories. The first of the short stories, "Weyr Search", actually made McCaffrey the first female winner of a Hugo award for fiction. The second, "Dragonrider", made her the first female winner of a Nebula award for fiction.

I can see how, for its time, Dragonflight probably was a very groundbreaking novel. But I'm not reviewing this book based on how fair it was for its time. I'm reviewing this book from the perspective of an adult in 2018. Basically, does Dragonflight pass the test of time, for me?

We'll find out.


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So Dragonflight starts with a Map and an Introduction, so it seems appropriate to round out this post by talking about them.

The Map

I love maps in fantasy books. I think they're great. I've never been a very visual person, and when you give me a long list of places and distances, I find it very easy to get lost. It's much easier for me when I get to flip to the front of the book and see where things are.

The Pern map in my copy of Dragonflight is okay. It's reasonably legible. It has dark boundary lines, the hills, rivers and lakes are all pretty distinct. The font is legible. It's not very detailed though. We get to see the names of the various holds, but that's about it. There really isn't anything about major towns or settlements (assuming Pern has them). There is a symbol to show where the weyrs are, but in my copy, it's not all that easy to distinguish.

It does let me appreciate exactly how far the characters travel when the dragons "go Between" though. So it pretty much serves its purpose.

The one thing the map really doesn't have is a scale. The entire continent of Pern seems rather small for me, if we're assuming that Pern is the same approximate size of Earth. There are only a few noticeable islands and no other (visible) land masses.

Introduction

I have to admit, I find the beginning of the introduction a little pretentious:

When is a legend, legend? Why is a myth, a myth? How old and disused must a fact be for it to be relegated to the category: "Fairy tale"? And why do certain facts remain incontrovertible, while others lose their validity to assume a shabby, unstable character?"

And that has to do with the price of tea in China how?

But Ms. McCaffrey proceeds onward with more relevant information. Specifically, the science fiction backstory of Pern. Pern is, per the introduction, a planet in the Rukbat system in the Sagittarian sector. It was colonized by humans ("as they did every habitable planet they came to") who later lost contact with the main human society.

One line that pops out at me as a modern reader of science fiction is: When men first settled on Rukbat's third world, and named it Pern, they had taken little notice of the stranger-planet, swinging around its primary in a wildly erratic elliptical orbit.

That seems like a really bizarre oversight to me. We're supposed to believe these people are sophisticated enough to colonize planets but they don't pay attention to the other bodies in the star system? We know that bodies in space can have a gravitational effect on one another. We know, for example, how the moon affects our tides. But these people somehow don't notice that there's a planet that gets so close to Pern every 200 years that life forms can fucking FALL OFF OF IT?!

I realize that this book was published a year before the moon landing, and that our knowledge of space has improved a lot since then. But I feel like the characters in Star Trek, circa 1964, would have realized this could be a bit of a problem.

The introduction doesn't tell us a lot about these life forms, only that they drop "through Pern's skies like silver thread." And apparently the colonists had been busy trying to deal with this "menace" when they lost contact with Earth.

So they're bad, though we're not sure how yet.

We're told that, as generations pass, the human colonists forgot their origin story entirely but "with the ingenuity of their forgotten Terran forebears" they somehow managed to develop an indigenous species into dragons. Which can fly, breathe fire, and teleport.

Honestly, it might be worth a little cultural amnesia if we get dragons out of the deal.

There's a tiny inconsistency here though. We're told that the dragons are so named because of the "Earth legend that they resembled." Which seems strange when the prior paragraph implies that humans only created dragons AFTER they forgot their origins.

( I think this gets retconned/clarified by a prequel book. IIRC, it ends up being that the original colonists are the ones who actually genetically engineer the dragons. So at that time they would have remembered Earth. Not a big deal, but I like to nitpick.)

The introduction concludes by telling us that "once relieved of imminent danger, Pern settled into a more comfortable way of life. The descendants of heroes fell into disfavor, as the legends fell into disrepute."

So, as introductions go, it's not bad. It's a good summation of what we should know going into the novel (originally from Earth, Thread, Dragons), that the characters may not know or remember. I wish she'd have gotten rid of the pretentious "what is a myth" ponderings though. I don't need you to spoonfeed me the theme of your novel, Ms. McCaffrey. I'm happy to figure it out for myself.

So that's my introduction post and the introduction of the novel. Next time, I'll get to start the actual story. :-)
 

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