Dragonflight (1968)

Fun, well-written, action-driven story, the first about friendly dragons and their unique bond with their riders. Good characters, too, although I found the women's role dated. Still, they come through as kick-ass, even if they have to defy males all along. ( )

short review: The gender roles in this book are especially grating because of the main characters' relationship. Most of the plot revolves around natural disaster response logistics. The general world set-up is interesting and so I want to read #9 in the series that has a collection of short stories about the planet and dragon origins. I am less interested in reading more about the protagonists of this story, but I will just because I'm going something interesting will happen.

longer review: I first read WeyrSearch as a teenager in the Dragon Lovers Treasury of the Fantastic. I immediately put the Pern series on my list, but never got to reading them. I read Crystal Singer and other books instead. Now, fifteen to twenty years later I've finally read the first book in this trilogy books that I've bought in super sale. I wish I'd read it when I was younger, I think I would have enjoyed it more.

I appreciate that the story is from the mid-late 1960s, so I think there are a lot of creative and successful elements combining science fiction and dragons with medieval type environments. I think the strong objectification and dismissal of women in the story is a product of the 60s and not of the medieval setting. Given that it's fantasy and fiction and the future, there is no reason to have fictional women treated this way. The male characters are always evaluating the women and arguing with them and thinking about their sexual relationships. It doesn't help the story and actually ends up being distracting. It's great that the women are allowed sexual agency, but they are still primarily valued for their bodies and rarely described as intelligent or brave or for other qualities.

At one particularly disturbing part of the book, this takes up maybe a page or two, the main character wonders if he raped the main female character. it's wholly unnecessary and highlights a very weird relationship between the two main characters that is motivated by the nature of the animalistic relationship of the paired dragons. It's not clear what the female character protagonist thinks of the encounter was we never get her perspective, but the male character definitely should have backed off or engaged in some kind of an adult conversation.

I think someone else's review of a different book in the series stated that Anne Mccaffery is obsessed with logistics and I think that the story did have a lot of logistics as well as some action. I personally don't care too much for action scenes and logistics can be interesting but I just found it written somewhat confusing or uninterestingly in this story.

Overall I like that the book didn't have a lot of very detailed descriptions. I find that those take me out of the story. I felt that the characters were sufficiently well-developed; I understood their motivations and their histories and they had personalities. I didn't like that the main female character was mostly defined by how she's "not like other women" but that's a product of the past 30 to 50 years and I'm glad that we as a society are starting to get to a new generation of how women can be defined. The dragons and the dragon lore were captivating and the highlight of the story. I liked that there wasn't a super villian to motivate the whole story. But I felt that it was too long towards the end. ( )

Rereading the Pern series as an adult, it's both surprisingly feminist and a little bit rapey. :/

But I like that Lessa isn't that relatable. I like that she's angry, that she's traumatized, that she makes mistakes -- that she's flawed. I like that her relationship with F'lar is complex, even if the ways it's complex seem unhealthy. I like that she's allowed -- both by the story and by the author -- to be a hero. Even if that's undermined in a lot of ways.

I don't even begin to understand Pern's weird gender issues, but in some ways the entire setting feels to me now like an allegory for the male-dominated SF world in which McCaffrey was writing. The dragonriders, hyper-masculine as they are, seem almost to be caricaturing traditional, Golden Age SF, and I find it very interesting that thus far (Dragonflight and the Harper Hall trilogy), McCaffrey's Strong Female Characters have all been invested in, to some extent, overthrowing those patriarchal traditions in order to make the place in the world where they belong, where they can follow their passions.

What's not so good is the way in which both Menolly and Lessa are set up as extraordinary, as "not like other women". But, hey, this book was written in 1968. ( )

After re-reading this in book form rather than listening, I increase my rating to 5 stars. Loved it! ( )

So the 5 decades haven't been entirely kind to this novel. The hyper male behavior of F'lar and all his shaking of our heroine Lessa was probably at least partially to place the book further away from the Mary Sue of Restoree and expand the readership among men. The plot is still good and the flow works and there are still amusing moments. However, the decline of crafts in the 400 years free of threadfall is entirely inexplicable and unexplained and that there was no population explosion when resources weren't eaten up supporting dragons and fighting is also just given. ( )