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

A fab prequel to the most beloved Dragonriders of Pern series. I know that most folks are critical of this work, but I think that because of the way that it was written. I think that the writing made it new, fresh and raw (the ideal in a creation story).

This book was similar to the other McCaffrey books I've read in that it felt like it lost its way in the middle for a bit. I'd been looking forward to this book for a while, because I really wanted to see the science fiction aspects of colonizing a new planet and developing a genetically engineered dragon explored. While this book did that, I don't think it focused on the elements I wanted to -- there was little discussion of the mechanics of either of these things, and instead a big sub plot about a jewel thief which was irrelevant and annoying. Overall, this book was ok, but not fantastic.

http://www.stillhq.com/book/Anne_McCaffrey/Dragonsdawn.html

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).