kalinara: An image of the robot Jedidiah from the 1970s Tomorrow People TV Show (Default)
[personal profile] kalinara
I mentioned in my last post that Dragonflight contains two previously published short stories and quite a lot of additional content. As such, it's not really divided into chapters. That makes it a little tricky to pace out for review, but I'll do my best.

"Weyr Search" starts us off with a poem, or perhaps they're supposed to be song lyrics.

Drummer, beat, and piper, blow,
Harper, strike, and soldier go.
Free the flame and sear the grasses.
Till the dawning Red Star passes.


Each small section of the story will bring us more poetry or song lyrics, all relevant to the setting. I like this touch. It's atmospheric, and gives us an immediate sense of what common people know or remember about the setting.

I'm not going to comment on the quality, because I never had much of a head for rhyme or meter. So, there's that. It does make it very easy to track the point of view shifts, so I'm inclined to approve.  It also makes it a little easier to partition out my review (this post has both Lessa and Flar's first viewpoint sections.)

Meeting Our Protagonists )
kalinara: An image of the robot Jedidiah from the 1970s Tomorrow People TV Show (Default)
[personal profile] 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.

The Introduction of the Book )

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