Dragonflight (1968)

McCaffrey's Pern series enchanted me from the beginning. I loved the concept of a fantasy dragon based protection system for a space anomaly. Such a creative idea and, as the series goes on, the world of Pern becomes more real and lovable. ( )

Anne McCaffrey created a fantasy world so vivid that she has captivated an audience for generations. Anne is no longer with us, but her books still live on. Highly recommended.

On the beautiful planet Pern, colonized for centuries, Land Holders and Craftsmen have traditionally tithed food and supplies to the dragonweyrs to which they are bound. In times past, the mighty telepathic dragons and their riders were the only protection from the dreaded, life-threatening Thread.
But it has been over 400 years since the last Threadfall, and some people have come to doubt that the menace will ever strike again. But F'lar, rider of Pern's greatest bronze dragon, has no such illusions. The Red Star is near; Thread will fall soon. ( )

I still love this series, but boy this one gets a little less well aged every time. I think I definitely like reading chrono order instead of published order because of this. It gives you a few slightly more modernly written books to get you into the world before you have this one. Lots of important stuff happens here, but that (conservative variety of) 1968 mindset looks really long ago and far away from today.

It's interesting reading the slightly different preludes from older copies. Mostly a change in emphasis, but still interesting. ( )

Well it's a McCaffrey book I managed to get through, but that (and Mnementh's dry sense of humor) is about the best I can say about it. The characters are flat, the writing style dry, the introduction of time travel convoluted, the "romance" dreadful and problematic, the character decisions nonsensical, and the few named women mostly negative stereotypes. ( )

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Dick Hill. I can’t really pinpoint all the reasons why, but his narration didn’t work well for me. His non-dialogue narration was fine as far as I can remember; I think most of my issues were with the dialogue. He over-dramatized some of it, making the characters, even the ones we were supposed to like, sometimes sound psychotic and deranged to my ears. I think I wouldn’t have cared for the characters much anyway based on the text, but the narration really didn’t help in that regard.

Story
On the surface of it, this seems like something I should have liked. It seems questionable as to whether it’s fantasy or science fiction, but it reads very much like an epic fantasy story and I’m usually easy to please when it comes to epic fantasy. Somehow this one didn’t work for me, though. The story is set on a planet called Pern which occasionally comes into range of another planet that has deadly “Threads” that invade Pern and threaten all life. Dragons were created to help fight the thready threat, bonded with Riders. The problem is that the threat recurs so rarely, and it has now been about 400 years. People have begun to disbelieve the legends and are no longer prepared to face the threat if it comes again.

The story only moderately held my attention, despite having elements I feel like I should have liked, and I didn’t much care for the characters. Lessa was foolish, irresponsible, and annoying as hell. I wanted to like F’lar, but he was an ass. I might have overlooked the initial rape of Lessa when they were caught up in the dragons’ passion and didn’t have their heads on straight. But he kept doing it! And yet I got the impression that the reader was expected to respect his character. What the hell? And he shook her so much (not in a sexual context) that I guess her brains fell out, based on her behavior. Then Lessa apparently fell in love with him anyway. Rape ‘em and shake ‘em ‘til they love you, I guess. I also grew exasperated with all the time travel paradoxes. This paragraph may have more cuss words in it (all 3 of them) than I’ve used in my previous reviews for the year combined. This is indicative of much annoyance. :p

Some elements reminded me of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, so I couldn’t help comparing the two. I much preferred Temeraire, where I adored the characters and felt more invested in the story. It’s possible that I might have felt differently if I’d read them in the opposite order, and I may have done better with this in print than I did in audio. It’s also possible that I just wasn’t in the right mood for it.

I was going to give it 2.5 stars and round up to 3 on Goodreads, but somewhere in the middle of typing up my rant I decided to round down to 2 instead. I don’t think I’ve ever rated an epic fantasy-ish book this low before. I might consider giving it another try in print someday to see if I like it better that way, but not for quite a long time. ( )