Dragonflight

I remember reading this series as a kid and loving it, but now I am an adult and can see how misogynist this book is. The women, other than the Wheyrwoman, do not ride dragons. They cook and clean, when they are mentioned at all. More women are riding dragons at the end, but that changes almost nothing. It's still only Queens flying, and they are segregated to their own unit.

The patriarchal bullshit doesn't stop there. The main character, a woman, has a mental breakdown because she knows that she will be shaken and yelled at by her partner when she returns from a trip he forbade her to take. And he does shake her and yell at her. "Never disobey me again." It's played for laughs. Earlier in the story he is literally committing the equivalent of spousal rape. He calls it such, and only wishes that the main character would enjoy the sex.

The main plot is thin but acceptable. It feels like a deus ex machina, even though it isn't. The characters are flat, and there's no character development. Unless going from unwilling mate to willing mate counts as development (which you shouldn't, because it happened like a switch flipping).

Nostalgia and curiosity will drive me to read at least one of the sequels, but if I were picking this up fresh I wouldn't be willing to pick up the next one.

I devoured this entire series of books when I was a teenager in the 80s, but hadn't reread them for decades. This book was originally published in 1968 I believe. For its time it was hugely imaginative, had a strong heroine, and there was nothing else like it - telepathic dragons! What? I remember adoring the entire series and reading them over and over - I discovered I still remember large parts of the book even after all this time, in particular most of the songs/rhymes.

That said, it's definitely a bit dated to read now. There's internalized misogyny that may have been par for the course in 1968 but is definitely more obvious nowdays. The fast pace of the writing is breathtaking compared to the 900 page epics some authors are writing nowdays; the introduction to Dragonflight is approximately a page an a half. An author like Patrick Rothfuss would barely have introduced a character in that time. The reader fills in many details on their own, rather than the author spelling out everything - which isn't necessarily bad at all, and my teenage self certainly filled in those details with enthusiasm, but it's a different style than currently common.

Anyway, this is a seminal work of fantasy, and worth reading for many reasons, and still a very enjoyable book if you can gloss past the issues above. (Also worth noting that Terry Pratchett's very first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, is a very clear and deliberate parody of this book in one part.)

As a kid, I heard a lot about the Pern books, but somehow never got around to reading them.

I'm reading through them one by one as part of an omnibus edition, so I'm not sure how much of the foreward information was or is included if you read just Dragonflight on its own.

Pern is an awesome blend of science fiction and fantasy. A red star orbits in the same system as Pern, and when it comes close, these black threads fall to the planet leaching the life out of everything. So the Pernese genetically engineer dragons to fight the threads. Dragons that can tesseract through time and space.

Dragonflight centers around the last haven of dragonriders on Pern following a very long time passing since the last pass of the red star. People are starting to think that the danger that the dragons "protect" them from is just a legend. Even dragonriders are getting a little complacent with how they handle life in the weyr.

The threat returns, luckily just following the installation of new leadership among the dragonriders, and the group must come together to keep the threads from destroying a world that has forgotten the threat.

This is the first novel in a classic series, and various books in the series have own a bucketful of awards. This novel reads like a fantasy, and you think that is what it all is about until later in the series when it becomes a science fiction theme. Dragons in this case are winged beasts who can breathe fire and burn the "thread", a deadly enemy that periodically falls from the sky. Lessa, a young lady, has certain mental powers that she puts to work getting revenge on the people who invaded her family's domain, and tries to use those powers on the Dragonriders when they come around. This brings her to their attention, and she become a Dragonrider herself. While I like it a lot (and so do many others when you look at the awards McCaffrey earned), I would not recommend it to someone who does not enjoy fantasy. The science fiction aspects do not come out until later in the series.

I have this as part of the three-volume set The Dragonriders of Pern which includes the first three novels in the series.

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.