Dragonsdawn

After Moreta set a precedent, McCaffrey continued to write prequels to her original Pern novels, jumping even further back, to the original settlement of Pern, in a pair of books: Dragonsdawn, which depicts the coming of the first colonists and the coming of the first Threadfall, and The Chronicles of Pern, a collection of short fiction set before, during, and after the First Pass. Prequels are a tricky business: fans like to complain about them, but fans must also consume them because people keep making them. I think there's a balance you have to get right. At its best, a prequel can take tantalizing hints of backstory and make them in a compelling story in its own right; at its worst, prequels join unnecessary dots and rely too much show more on familiar images and ideas.

Dragonsdawn thankfully skews toward the first pole. It doesn't totally line up with the hints we got in prologues to the earlier Pern novels, but it's an enjoyable story in its own right, so it doesn't matter. It's divided into three parts; the first is all about the colonization of Pern, giving us a cast of characters coming to this new world after a long journey, all eager to make a world of their own for various reasons. We get to see what the colony ought to have been like in great detail, and we know as readers what hints they cannot interpret correctly about the doom to come. The second section jumps ahead eight years, with the coming of the Thread, and the reactions of the colonists to this devastating threat.

I read a comment on Reddit recently that I really liked and summed up my feelings about Pern very well: "There's a hardscrabble vibe to Ms. McCaffery's early books that disappeared by the later ones." The first couple sections of Dragonsdawn recapture this vibe really effectively; these people have to work for what they are doing, they are not comfortable.

It's got some great twists and turns in it, particularly what happens when one character steals a shuttle and tries to get away from Pern; I also appreciated the clarification on the Red Star. In the original books, it seems scientifically risible: how could a planet launch organisms at another? how could the Red Star follow Pern in its orbit for fifty years but not the other two hundred? Dragonsdawn makes it clear that in fact the Red Star picks up organic matter in the Oort cloud and drags it into the inner solar system, and it passes right back out, but it takes fifty years for what it's dragged to all be used up. (Though this explanation makes other aspects of Thread a bit of a nonsense: why doesn't Threadfall happen at night? how does it happen with a regularity so predictable you can know where every Threadfall will happen fifty years in advance?)

There's also a real disconcerting shift here, in that though you know intellectually from the earlier books that the Pernese are descended from Earth humans, it's a much different thing to see them in spaceships, talking about the Federated Sentient Planets (apparently used in McCaffrey's other sf) and its space wars, and referencing facts about Earth history, geography, and culture. It's just not right! And that's what makes it work as a prequel: it's familiar enough to line up with the Pern you know, but different enough to be interesting.

I will say, though, that once the dragons come along, it gets less interesting, because it becomes more obvious how things are going to play out. Will the new dragon species breathe fire? Well, yes. Will they figure out how to go between? Well, yes. The last section becomes a sort of boring inevitability. show less

This book is part of the Pern Series. It is Science-Fantasy about the initial colonization of planet Pern and the genetic engineering of fire lizards as precursors to Pern’s dragons. The other books in the series are set millennia later, and this book flashes back to tell the origin story. Readers by this point will know that the planet is threatened by caustic Threadfall, and this book tells of the initial encounter. It contains elements of romance, adventure, horror, and science fiction. For me, the writing is only passable, and the characters are thinly developed. The world is well-drawn but there is much in the backstory that feels half-baked. My favorite parts were the quasi-scientific segments, including the zoological, show more botanical, and biological storylines. It feels dated in its representation of relationship dynamics, an issue I have noticed in another of her books. I may try another of the series, but I have a feeling that these books are not for me. show less

While I like the detail provided by giving us the story of the original colonization of Pern, I never really connected with any of the characters or felt overly concerned with what would happen to them. This I think is partially due to the essential nature of a prequel published after the fact - I knew the colonization was successful to some extent because I’ve read the other books and there are indeed humans and dragons on Pern, but it was also due to the time jumping that happened.

As always, McCaffrey’s world building is exquisite and I am left wanting to know more, but I don’t think I will ever revisit this book, and I’m not sure it was a necessary one. I may change my mind when I get around to First Fall, I may not. There show more are better Pern books, this one feels supplemental. show less

This one's interesting because it starts out as an origin story for Pern as straight-up science fiction, but it shifts toward the fantasy elements of the other books in the series and shows how a technologically super advanced society was forced to regress to the more manorial sort of society that emerges.

Great prose this isn't. The characters tend to be caricatures. These books have tended to be much more about "this happened and then that happened" than about relationships or characters or good writing. So they're neat as stories but not really all that satisfying as literature.

A reliable re-read.

I'm interested to note on some recent McCaffrey re-reads that she's quite good at presence of diversity - lots of characters from non-white backgrounds, mentions of gay characters, etc - but I'm not convinced she's all that great at following through on that initial promise (though being a straight white woman I'm not in the best place to judge most of that apart from the range of female characters, which is good in this book and much better than in the earlier ones in publication order).

Fans of the Pern series may enjoy this volume, but I found it rather tedious. The plot was not all that bad (filling in some back history), but the writing was very pedestrian and repetitive. Be aware that there is a romantic element (cozy style), and some violence.

One major plot point violated a real-life protocol: the Admiral and the Governor were both in the first landing party! They then dropped out of the story, which shifted mainly to two of the children and a few couples, but returned to the scene later.

STYLE:
To start with, the author introduced 15 names (people and dragons mostly) in the first 22 pages (many without linking referents); added 7 more in the next 2; and continued at a slightly reduced pace to reach 62 named show more characters by the end of Part I. I could not keep up with even the major characters, much less all the supporting cast and extras.

The names were aggressively multi-cultural, without the accompanying ethnic characteristics, but that might be more likely in an advanced age with much interconnecting of families.

However, the style was overly narrative (telling more than showing, and no scintillating dialogue); there were no interesting dramatic arcs (all very much predictable); and the prose was detail-heavy. I assess it at a middle-school reading level (from my day, not the present).

And the Fardling was inconsistent. show less

The beautiful planet Pern seemed a paradise to its new colonists—until unimaginable terror turned it into hell. Suddenly deadly spores were falling like silver threads from the sky, devouring everything—and everyone—on their path. It began to look as if the colony, cut off from Earth and lacking the resources to combat the menace, was doomed.

Then some of the colonists noticed that the small, dragonlike lizards that inhabited their new world were joining the fight against Thread, breathing fire on it and teleporting to safety. If only, they thought, the dragonets were big enough for a human to ride and intelligent enough to work as a team with a rider…

And so they set their most talented geneticist to work to create the show more creatures Pern so desperately needed—Dragons! show less