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Loading... Red Star Rising (The Second Chronicles of Pern) (original 1996; edition 1997)by Anne McCaffrey
Work InformationDragonseye by Anne McCaffrey (1996)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. For two hundred years thread has not fallen, only the dragons and their riders are prepared for the second pass of the red planet that rains destruction on Pern. Spellbinding. Thread: deadly silver strands that fall from the sky like rain, devouring every organic thing in their path - animals, plants, and people alike. Who could believe that such a horrible thing could exist? After all, it's been 200 years since Thread supposedly fell on Pern. No one alive remembers that first onslaught. There's no sign of it anywhere in the world. Only the dragons, originally created to be a weapon against Thread, are still around to remind people that once before their population was decimated, their hopes and dreams and livelihoods almost destroyed forever. For two centuries the dragonriders have been practicing and training, passing down from generation to generation the Threadfighting techniques learned on the fly by their besieged ancestors. And most of the Lord Holders are prepared to protect their people, to provide sanctuary, to assemble groundcrews to search out and destroy any Thread that might be missed by the dragons soaring overhead. All but one. Even now the ominous signs are appearing: the violent winter storms and volcanic eruptions that are said to herald the approach of the Red Star and its lethal spawn. Impossibly, one stubborn Lord Holder, Chalkin of Bitra, refuses to believe - and that disbelief could spell disaster for all of Pern. So while the dragonriders desperately train to face an enemy they've never fought before, they and the other Lord Holders must find a way to deal with Chalkin and protect Bitra. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesDragonriders of Pern: Chronological Order ({2nd Pass ~250 AL} 4) Belongs to Publisher SeriesDragonriders of Pern: Publication Order (1st Interval - 2nd Pass) Pocket (5677) Distinctions
Thread: deadly silver strands that fall from the sky like rain, devouring every organic thing in their path - animals, plants, and people alike. Who could believe that such a horrible thing could exist? After all, it's been two hundred years since Thread supposedly fell on Pern. No one alive remembers that first onslaught. There's no sign of it anywhere in the world. Only the dragons, originally created to be a weapon against Thread, are still around to remind people that once before their population was decimated, their hopes and dreams and livelihoods almost destroyed forever. For two centuries the dragonriders have been practicing and training, passing down from generation to generation the Threadfighting techniques learned on the fly by their besieged ancestors. And most of the Lord Holders are prepared to protect their people, to provide sanctuary, to assemble groundcrews to search out and destroy any Thread that might be missed by the dragons soaring overhead. All but one. Even now the ominous signs are appearing: the violent winter storms and volcanic eruptions that are said to herald the approach of the Red Star and its lethal spawn. Impossibly, one stubborn Lord Holder, Chalkin of Bitra, refuses to believe - and that disbelief could spell disaster for all of Pern. So while the dragonriders desperately train to face an enemy they've never fought before, they and the other Lord Holders must find a way to deal with Chalkin and protect Bitra. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I found this element a bit hit or miss. One thing it wants to set up is the transition to the Crafthall/Harper system. On the one hand, having all the computers finally go down, meaning educators decide to transition to easily reproduced songs, discarding most pre-Landing history, makes sense. (It is pretty jarring to see the word "PCs" used in a Pern book, though!) On the other hand, there's a single College in this book. How does this become the various Crafthalls of later stories? Well, one character is just like, "What if we were a bunch of separate Crafthalls operating on an apprenctice/journeyman system?" As sort of frustrated me in Chronicles, things don't slowly evolve to be like they are later on; instead some character just decides it will be that way. Similarly, in the two hundred years since the last Fall, the feudal system we know from the later novels has totally implanted itself... but why? Why did everyone decide this was best to the point of writing it up in an official Charter? That said, I did appreciate the explanation as to why fire lizards, so common in the time of Dragonsdawn, were all but mythical by the time of Dragonsong.
Overall, I think the idea of this book was much better than the actual book. The conflict ought to be, I think anyway, that this is the first return the Thread has made to Pern; there haven't been thousands of years of Passes and Intervals for Pernese society to organize itself around. Yes, they know from the predictions made in Dragonsdawn that the Thread will return... but the scientific predictions of experts often don't receive wide acceptance in society, as we know fairly well by this point in the twenty-first century. So some won't believe the Thread is really coming back; why do all the hard work of preparing for it? How do you convince everyone else it is coming back?
The problem is that only one Lord Holder doesn't believe it's coming back, and he is an awful awful person. He's a gambler, he's stingy, he doesn't pay his debts, he charges high taxes, he tacitly condones rape, and he tortures his citizens. So obviously he's a bad person, and obviously the other characters are going to take care of him. I think it would have been much more interesting for a character much more reasonable to doubt the coming of Thread, and for removing him to be a politically more difficult undertaking. It seems to me that the tension of this book ought to be if Pern will be ready for the Second Pass... but there's never any tension, because barring one guy, everyone is ready from the novel's very beginning.
Like all McCaffrey novels, it reads fairly easily (I allotted five days to read it and ended up zipping through it in three) and it has its moments, but it goes on a bit, and it felt to me like she ran out of plot about a hundred pages from the end because suddenly the book shifts to focus on two characters we barely saw in the rest of the book. As is too often the case in her later books, it loses the "hardscrabble" feeling that made the early Pern books. The return of the Thread is a moment of triumph! But surely it ought to be a moment of grim resignation, surely everyone ought to have been hoping the predictions were wrong, because the return of the Thread means that Pern is doomed to this terrible cycle for all time.