This read like a first draft (but not a particularly good one) in a writing seminar, full of telling instead of showing, wooden characters, and painful dialogue that oscillated between expository and histrionic. I picked it up for the "Dragonriders of Pern" premise of a far-future human colony as a fantasy setting, but the author just grafted this premise onto a system of magic that was neither well thought-out nor well-depicted, and did not have any scientific underpinnings other than some poorly-worded nods at evolution and natural selection playing a role in the way the magic changed...or something. I wanted to drop it entirely but it was all I had to read on a plane flight. Nevertheless I pretty much only read the first sentence of each paragraph for the last few chapters.