Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #10: “The Survey: P.E.R.N.(c)” (1993)

Tequila Mockingbird: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but the only one by us.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I’m Tequila Mockingbird. And technically, in this, maybe we should say Dragonriders of P.E.R.N. series.

Lleu: Technically, we should say Dragonriders of P.E.R.N.^c. So, today we are talking about the first short story in The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall, which in The Chronicles of Pern was published as “The Survey: P.E.R.N.^c. It was published separately around the same time in a magazine — I forget which one at the moment — and there it was titled “The P.E.R.N. Survey.” I don’t know why she changed it between the two, but she did. “The P.E.RN. Survey,” or “The Survey: P.E.R.N.^c,” is about the original survey team who investigated Pern and determined that it was suitable for human colonization. There are four of them; there used to be more of them, but several of them have died in tragic accidents on previous planets that they’ve been surveying. You might think that you could figure out from orbit whether a planet was going to be extremely deadly and kill you immediately when you tried to be on it, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. So, the four remaining team members have arrived in the Rukbat system and are looking at the planets and they say, “Hm, yeah, the third planet seems promising.” Because of time, the fact that someone is injured, and the layout of the solar system, they’re only going to have a couple of days — ten days total, of which only eight are actually on the planet’s surface — to survey this unnamed third planet in the Rukbat system, and one member of the survey team has to stay behind because his leg is recovering from an injury. The result of this is that they are badly short-staffed and the three people who are going down to the planet are all doing double duty, so everyone is performing both their specialty and also the specialty of one of the people who is either dead or incapacitated at the moment, the implication being that this was not an ideal survey, possibly. We’ll talk about it later.

Lleu: And then the rest of the story is, they go down to the planet, and they look at stuff, and they’re like, “Huh, there’s these weird circles where nothing’s growing. That’s funny. Don’t know what that’s about.” And, “Oh, look — there’s these mycelia, and they glow when they’re exposed to oxygen. Cool. Oh, look at these pretty, flying reptilians. That’s fun. So nice.” And, “Oh, wow, this tree bark makes a really tasty beverage that’s sort of like a mix between coffee and hot chocolate with a little bit of a spicy aftertaste.” And then they go back to the ship, and they say, “This planet is a Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible, superscript C for ‘suitable for colonization.’” The end.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s truly 15 pages long. It’s a very short short story.

Lleu: And, frankly, this could have been an email — this could have been a printed epistolary survey report, more to the point.

Tequila Mockingbird: It would have been so cool to get it as a survey report, both in the sense that she wouldn’t have to have sort of awkwardly tried to shoehorn a bit of a plot into it — question mark? —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and that you could have layered in the “Oh, wait a second — I’m seeing the same initials by the botanist and by the chemist.” We could have done more of the investigative work as readers of figuring out, “Oh, wait a second. Something has gone horribly wrong. This isn’t what was supposed to happen, dot dot dot…”

Lleu: And it would have made all of the “Ooh, I guess those are glow worms” —

Lleu: — a little bit less like, “Oh, I guess those are glow worms…” and a little bit like, “Oh, they're talking about glow worms!” And avoided the, I thought frankly cheesy — by the end of it, it’s like, “Oh, the whole survey team’s really sad to be leaving Pern…” We get it. It’s the specialest planet in the universe. Great. Okay.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because someday Irish people are going to live on it, and therefore…

Lleu: Because someday Irish people are going to live there, yeah. Also, just as a side note, I apologize to our listeners if you hear my cat screaming in the background. He’s locked out of the room at the moment, and he’s so sad.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, you can sort of tell that she had written a few things into Dragonsdawn that she then had to go back and underline heavily in this. Dragonsdawn tells us that they discovered klah, the beverage — that’s from the survey team. Dragonsdawn gives us the fact that they called the the avians “wherries,” so she has to awkwardly include that little chunk here.

Tequila Mockingbird: It also tells us that Shavva bint Faroud, who is, in fact, our narrator, is Avril Bitra’s great-great-great-etc.-grandmother and brought back a ruby, which she should have included here, but instead she claims it’s a diamond. So put a pin in that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And she does, in Dragonsdawn, indicate that it was in some way a sloppy survey or a little bit less than it should have been, because Ted Tubberman is complaining that there isn’t any real botany work done, or it was sort of slipshod.

Lleu: Yeah, and now we know why. It’s because Shava is not a trained botanist but is required to do the botany, because she knows some about it, because she’s a biologist, which is obviously completely different from a botanist.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, ’cause the botanist, whose name is Flora, is dead. Come on, McCaffrey.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, no, ’cause it’s all Flora’s fault. And I’m sort of intrigued — my guess is that she killed off a bunch of the survey team members for a couple of different reasons. One, she establishes that there were only three people on the planet in Dragonsdawn, because they’re saying, “Oh, we should name, like, these three mountains after the three original survey team,” or whatever. And then, I guess, she got here and she was like, “Shit, how are three people actually supposed to do an entire planetary survey? Oh, wow.” Two, she’s established that it’s supposed to be a little bit slipshod or that there was some issue with the survey. But I think primarily she wanted to try and give it something approaching a plot; she wanted some kind of problem that would loom over this survey team, and so killing off half of the survey team before the story starts, I guess, was her answer to that?

Lleu: Yeah. Which is weird. It also raises the question — in Dragonsdawn, they complain about the survey team, but having read this story, I’m like, “Well, it’s actually not their fault. They truly did the best they could under the circumstances. They didn’t have a lot of time. They were missing half of their team. Be glad you got a survey at all, frankly.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But also, even if the other half of the team had been there, even if Flora was not dead-slash-culpable-question mark — we’ll get to there — would she have been able to deduce Thread? Because it’s pretty clear that there were some weird dots where things had died on the ground, and…the Thread wasn’t there. And I think we as readers who know what Thread is are supposed to assume that Thread landed, destroyed a bunch of organic life, and then ate itself to death, got to the final stage of its life form, ate everything in reach, wuestion mark? I think it is interesting to ask whether we’re supposed to assume that all organic life on Pern was destroyed and then reseeded itself, ’cause I don’t think that’s plausible.

Lleu: I definitely don’t think so. I think, given the way that Thread’s life cycle is described in Dragonsdawn, in “Rescue Run,” and also in the Ninth Pass books, to me, the suggestion is that even if a Thread burrow is truly infested, it’s not going to last that long, because it just eats itself out too fast, right?

Lleu: I’m imagining that they’re seeing these weird dots, and the weird dots are —

Lleu: Yeah, they’re burrows, but it’s not like the weird dots are miles wide.

Lleu: So even if Thread is falling regularly, first of all, we know Thread doesn’t fall as heavily on the Southern Continent, and also it doesn’t fall in every single place.

Lleu: There’s always going to be stuff that escapes Thread’s depredations.

Tequila Mockingbird: And they do point out that the strong wind patterns would allow plants to reseed pretty quickly and things like that, which is interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: We get this interesting tidbit where Flora Neveshan, the xenobotanist, is responsible for the death of herself and Sevvie, and then we get the implication that if Castor, who was an experienced climber, had been there, they would have lived And that…

Lleu: That he would have prevented — they died in a landslide, to be clear

Lleu: I don’t know; it kind of sounded like the implication was that he was going to prevent the landslide, which can’t be right.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also Shavva’s like, “Oh, I want to make sure that we’ve packed correctly, because it was Flora's negligence that got her killed.” So what could you pack that would save you from a landslide? Was Flora supposed to be packing like crampons and climbing belays and she didn’t, so they climbed without it and then died in a landslide? Was Flora supposed to be packing medical equipment? If so, why? She wasn’t the team medic; Sevvie was the team medic. So what was Flora’s job here, and why did you give that job to the botanist is my question? ’Cause they’re also the most recent, so maybe the zoologist, chemist, or the second pilot and archaeologist were originally supposed to have those responsibilities? Or, frankly, maybe it was originally Castor’s job and then his leg was broken so he couldn’t come down, and so Flora picked it up. That’s probably the most likely.

Tequila Mockingbird: She doesn’t really have enough time to do it well, and she does it a little too much if she’s not going to bother to do it, you know?

Lleu: Yeah. Either this story needed to be a four-page survey report document, or it probably needed to be about 20 pages longer and actually do character development and show us more of the series of disastrous surveys that they’ve had leading up to this one that have them finally being like, “Thank God we have a planet that seems nice. Maybe. But the last one of those also killed people, so…”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Are we supposed to ultimately feel like they were overhasty In saying, “Yes, Pern should be colonized”? Because I think there is sort of an implication of that, that they might have been too excited because “Oh, at least it’s not that bad,” or overly eager, I guess, to confirm it.

Lleu: That does kind of seem to be the conclusion, that we’re like that we’re supposed to feel like they were too enamored of the planet, but also it seems like she wants the reader to also be enamored of the planet. So it’s hard for me to blame them when the narrative is signaling that this is the appropriate reaction to have.

Tequila Mockingbird: And again, I just, I think I keep coming back to: even if they had all eight people, you’re there for a week.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah! Even if you do a pretty solid survey, you could have been there for a year and you still wouldn’t have known about Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it reminds me of maybe her bad habit of sort of trying to overemphasize her tragedies, where she can’t just be like, “It was really sad Moreta died.” She has to be, “There was a way she could have been saved, but she wasn’t saved.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Oh, but they tried, but”— okay! It could have just been a sloppy survey. Oh, wow.

Lleu: Right — either show us the survey actually being sloppy: they’re lazy and bad at their jobs. Also, it changes the way I think about Avril in Dragonsdawn, right?

Lleu: And in some ways that’s good, because the way Avril presents this in Dragonsdawn is like, “Yes, my great-grandmother was on the survey team, and she made Plans.” No, that’s not what happened at all. They brought back some diamonds as souvenirs. Something has gone awry in the transmission process between Shavva and Avril. So that’s actually an improvement, because it means that it’s not just —

Lleu: But the result is that there’s just nothing. There’s no tension here. There’s no…story here. A bunch of people go to a place, and it’s nice, and then they leave.

Tequila Mockingbird:I think we had some interesting world-building tidbits, but circling back to, yeah, but you could do that just as effectively in something like an epistolary document. And there are some incredibly good short stories, and I think it’s a great structure for a short story. Have you read “Stet”?[1]

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, my god. It’s incredible. And it’s just a page of editing, with the editorial comments back and forth between the author and the copyeditor. And it’s heartbreaking and brutal and just starts out subtle and then hits you in the face with a brick. And it’s great. And you can do stuff like that. “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” is another really cool, weird epistolary short story.[2] That one’s all forum posts.

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, I’m specifically a fan of that kind of stuff, but it’s out there, and it’s cool, and…

Tequila Mockingbird: So in terms of world-building, anecdata, weird little world-building stuff, you want to talk about the timeline —

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s a little hard to figure out, because what Avril actually says in Dragonsdawn is, “my great-grandmother at seven removes.” So that’s nine generations back. But we’re also told in Dragonsdawn that the other systems near Pern were interdicted a century before.

Tequila Mockingbird: Unless you are having a lot of children pretty young, it usually takes more than a century to get nine generations.

Lleu: That’s, like, barely possible if everyone is having children at 12 years old. And I was going to say, you know what? Maybe the Pern colony is not weird for everyone having lots of babies constantly. Maybe that’s normal. But, even on Pern, they’re not having babies at 12 years old.

Lleu: So… Yeah, no, I think she just messed up the timeline on this. But I think it makes other things in the story more interesting if nine generations’ remove is accurate.

Lleu: Because that would put it 300-ish years before Dragonsdawn, which is a very interesting timeline because it means it was at the tail end of the previous Interval.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. Which does make sense with the fact that we’re seeing these —

Lleu: Yeah, and also has implications for other things — in particular the Nathi War.

Lleu: When they go to settle Pern, it’s right after there’s just been this devastating galaxy-wide war. 300 years ago, probably, there was not a Nathi War going on. I don’t think we got the sense in Dragonsdawn that it had been dragging on for centuries.

Lleu: And that would also then explain, potentially, one of the weird discrepancies between this and Dragonsdawn and “Rescue Run,” which is about the value of precious stones. So they go to Ista, and they find a bunch of gemstones, and they’re like, “Huh, these are a fun little souvenir.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “The team kept several as souvenirs. They were not particularly valuable otherwise, for the galaxy had produced many gemstones more exotic than these, though diamonds remained useful in technology for their durability and strength.”[3]

Lleu: Yeah. But there’s no indication that diamonds are going to be a hot commodity. If, in the intervening time, you’ve had a devastating galaxy-wide war that has destroyed a lot of your technological infrastructure, it makes sense that suddenly diamonds might be valuable again, because you need them to replace all of the technology that was just destroyed in a devastating galaxy-wide war.

Lleu: I don’t know that she necessarily put that much thought into it. I think maybe she just didn’t think that hard about it here, but maybe she did.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also possible that Avril’s “at seven removes” is meant to be approximating, that that’s maybe not quite as literal.

Tequila Mockingbird: So you can, I think, put it really anywhere in between, I don’t know, 400 years prior to — or even more, if you think about the fact that humans apparently live very long by the time you get to Dragonsdawn —

Tequila Mockingbird: — to about a century before Dragonsdawn. And I don’t really think there’s a lot of clues in here —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that are sufficient to pin it down more specifically.

Lleu: Frankly, this is less perplexing than Jaxom’s age, so who can complain? The other timeline-related thing I wanted to talk about is connected to one of the things that they find on the planet. So, the…

Tequila Mockingbird: It sort of seems to be the “looking at it all in context”?

Tequila Mockingbird: Or comparing all the different specialties together to understand ecosystems at large.

Lleu: — but called something fancy and different, and in particular, he’s been perplexed by the lack of large fauna on Pern, other than wherries and tunnel snakes or sand snakes — until they do find some fossils. And what we’re told is:

Lleu: “They did discover interesting fossil remains, a good fifty thousand years dead and gone, in an extensive tar pit; one specimen was intact enough to expose the ground-down dental machinery for grazing, suggesting that these fossils could have been the ruminants Liu wished to see.”[4]

Lleu: So I’m interested in the possibility that Pern had native large animals, something that we do not see later on. And I was thinking, as I was puzzling over this, about the beginning of the preface to all of the Ninth Pass books, which specifically describes the Red Star as a rogue planet that Rukbat has “captured and held in recent millennia.” And I’m wondering now if the reason there are no large animals on Pern is because they all were killed off by Thread a couple thousand years ago.

Lleu: If “recent millennia” means 2,000 years ago, or 3,000 years ago, long enough for the ecosystem to have resettled into some new form.

Lleu: And also long enough that the only thing you’re going to be finding of them is fossils because everything else has been eaten up by Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because they have 50,000-year-old fossils, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that these animals went extinct 50,000 years ago.

Tequila Mockingbird: It just means they have no records of them more recently than that.

Lleu: Yeah. Obviously they don’t have an extended period on the planet; they don’t have time to look —

Lleu: And later on in Pern’s history that’s not what anyone is looking for. But that would explain the absence of large animals and the dominance, now, of these reptilian forms of life that are much smaller and that all have at least some of these telepathic, telekinetic abilities.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm, and presumably, yeah, being smaller, faster, and possibly telepathic or teleportation-enha-, you know, gives them an edge when it comes to Thread, in the same way that like the wherries presumably survived by flying away from where there is Thread to where there isn’t Thread because there’s never Thread everywhere at the same time.

Lleu: Exactly what I was about to say: the one large animal that remains can fly, so the fact that there are no large ground-dwelling animals, either ruminants or any of the predators, ’cause they’re also looking for predators and are like, “It’s weird that there aren’t any except wherries.” But it just kind of seems like Pern doesn’t actually have that much native fauna. And what it has is mostly either fish or these reptilian things that can fly.

Tequila Mockingbird: Or the tunnel snakes that can go under rock, which is the other thing that stops Thread naturally.

Lleu: And so I feel like there's also an implication that tunnel snakes have some of some — not that they can go between, but that there’s something else going on with tunnel snakes. That’s the impression I have gotten.

Tequila Mockingbird: Todd McCaffrey, this is what you need to be writing about. Give us the secret tunnel snake saga.

Lleu: The first person to Impress a tunnel snake? No — I don't know. I feel like there's something at some point in one of the books that made me think tunnel snakes are more intelligent than expected.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah’ there are some points in Dragonsdawn where they’re like, “Wow, how did they get in here?” And sort of known thing by the time you get to the Ninth Pass is they’re shifty or they’ll figure out a way in unless you bar it with metal.

Tequila Mockingbird: I had not read that as more than just innate animal cunning.

Tequila Mockingbird: The tunnel snakes are secretly teleporting themselves through the rocks. That’s how they go so fast.

Lleu: Anyway, my new Pern theory is that large animal life and especially any pseudomammalian large animal life on Pern — and, in fact, probably a bunch of small animal life, ’cause otherwise I don’t think we got any mention of small animals, either. There’s the whersports, who are presumably also reptilian or are avian-ish — it’s kind of hard to know.

Lleu: And that’s kind of it. And otherwise it’s all of the sort of reptile things and some insects, and that’s it. And fish.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I might suggest that that argues that there weren’t actually mammals, that there were larger fauna, but they were reptilian.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I could believe an ecology that just doesn’t have a lot of mammals — see Aotearoa — more than I could believe that even the small mammals got completely wiped out you know

Lleu: I guess it depends how small they were, right? I’m thinking about the extinction of the dinosaurs, since one of the other things they talk about is —

Lleu: — meteor strikes wiping out life on another planet, which we will get to in a moment.

Lleu: Obviously we do still have reptiles, but the reptiles that we have are not actually that closely related to dinosaurs —

Lleu: — and derived from little ones, and then we have birds which look qualitatively different in many ways from dinosaurs, even if they’re obviously still their kind of closest living relatives. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that we could have lost if not all mammals, or pseudomammals, then at least a large swathe of mammals or pseudomammals.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, true. Okay. I like that better as a theory for why almost all mammals or all mammals might get wiped out, rather than just “they couldn’t run fast enough.”

Lleu: Or, for tunnel snakes, things that eat things that are on the beach, anyway.

Lleu: I think there’s a justification there for the possibility that Pern did have pseudomammals in the past and does not anymore, because Thread is a relatively recent occurrence, and they all went extinct —

Lleu: — either from being killed by Thread or from the destruction of their food sources, or both.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think that seems plausible. And after all, at least they didn’t live in a rainforest.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, look, gentle listener, if you have any idea what the fuck she’s on about, please let us know because we were both baffled.

Tequila Mockingbird: “At least this was a viable ecology, not a stalemated tropical-rain-forest dense ecology, with the various elements, so to speak, taking in each other’s washing.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s referring to the fact that there are coral reefs — question mark? — or the fact that there are different ecological biomes on the planet question mark.

Lleu: Yeah. What I would have taken from this, if it weren’t for the part where it seems like she’s talking about coral reefs, is that, okay, if you are hoping to colonize the planet a rainforest is not a good ecosystem for humans to have to intervene in. You want something that’s not going to require years of hard labor in order to clear a space for fields, you want something where there’s going to be room to build housing, all of these things. So it makes sense that, from that perspective, you could see rainforests as an undesirable —

Lleu: — landscape, as a non-viable landscape for colonization specifically in a Western settler mode. Unfortunately, the thing that this is being juxtaposed with is coral reefs, which seem like a much bigger problem if you're attempting to settle and build houses and have agriculture.

Tequila Mockingbird: But everyone loves to farm on the beautiful coral reefs, Lleu!

Tequila Mockingbird: The only thing that I can construct from it is what I was saying about variety of biomes that, “Oh, there’s polar ice caps and there’s coral reefs; it’s not all just one giant biome.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Which to me is very “the forest moon of Endor.” Are there any planets that are just all jungle?

Lleu: — all jungle, if you watch some of the now tragically non-canonical Ewok media.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t really know what's going on with that. I tried looking up some stuff about “transitory ecologies,” ’cause the next sentence is

Tequila Mockingbird: “Such transitory ecologies did reinforce Ben’s theory of a recent meteorite storm rather than an ice-age hiatus in evolution.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is them, again, trying to figure out, like, why are there no mammals? What’s going on here? But everything I was finding about “transitory ecology” was more about human impact on ecologies —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and the way that ecology does shift over decades, and that’s very fast for an ecosystem. But it — uh, I got nothing.

Lleu: Yeah. As an aside, the fact that their theory also is that the extinction of large animals is recent — they just are attributing it to meteor storms — does, I feel like, support —

Lleu: — my hypothesis and my timeline the red star has only actually been in the Rukbat system for maybe a couple thousand years, 2,000 or 3,000.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. We do also get some tantalizing hints about the Red Star, the red, the Oort clouds. And they’re tantalizing in the literal sense, as in, “like Tantalus.” They never resolve.

Tequila Mockingbird: We are never given any kind of actual information about this. Why did you keep building it up if you were never actually going to have it lead anywhere?

Lleu: It’s so perplexing, because it could have been interesting if she’d done something with it, although it’s also difficult to see how she could have done something with it. But there’s a vague implication — one of the things they're puzzling over is, again, the Oort cloud, as a novelty that the Rukbat system has one. And they’re talking about a theory that Oort clouds are connected with some kind of space-borne virus, because the systems that have Oort clouds are often have a lot of dead worlds.

Tequila Mockingbird: And they talk about them specifically as being “stripped” worlds.

Tequila Mockingbird: They mention the quote “Hoyle-Wickramansingh theory,” which we also hear in Dragonsdawn when they’re trying to figure out what Thread is and does seem to be that Oort clouds might produce space viruses in some way. And they also say there’s data on every other “stripped” planet, and the planet where Laura and Sevvie died matches the data that they have on other stripped planets. And they’re like, “Well, maybe it’s meteorites; it’s been maybe bombarded by meteors, or maybe something else happened.” And it seems…possible — question mark? — that what they’re seeing is a planet where for some reason Thread was able to destroy all organic life on the planet, and Pern is maybe in some way either unique, because it is happening differently, or is more resistant. We do know that the grubs are bioengineered in some ways by Tubberman but are, I think, originally a native species on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: Or that perhaps Pern is at the very beginning of being stripped by Thread, and, if humans and dragons had never been on Pern, it would have eventually been completely destroyed, but it just takes longer than 2,000 or 3,000 years for that to happen.

Lleu: “‘Can’t prove the Oort cloud affected it in any way. Besides,’ Ben went on, ‘the planet was bombarded by meteors and meteorites, to judge by the craters and the craterites. Shattered the surface and boiled off a good deal of the major oceans. Just like Shaula Three. That system had an Oort cloud too.”[5]

Lleu: If we are intended to believe that Thread is intelligent and has an agency and is intentionally attempting to destroy all organic life on these planets, that sounds to me like Thread had access to meteorites to transport itself, and so was not just transporting Thread to these planets to consume all organic life, but also bombarding them with meteorites, and that the Rukbat system maybe doesn’t have that, so Thread can only get there by means of the Red Star.

Tequila Mockingbird: Interesting. I thought that that was I thought that that was implying that maybe that they were mistaking Threadscore for meteorite craters.

Lleu: Mm. I don’t think that can be the case, if only because they explicitly distinguish —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. But on the other hand, it could have something to do with the atmosphere, right, ’cause Thread enters the atmosphere of Pern much like a meteorite. It has that hard outer shell and then it melts, basically, and becomes the Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, if another planet didn’t have a similar atmosphere, or had a colder atmosphere, or question mark, question mark, question mark, it could be possible that Thread would land like a meteorite and create a crater, and then the inner life form would come out and devour, etc., etc. That could, in fact, be how Thread would prefer to enter a planet, intelligently or just how it would be optimal And that might also be the difference — maybe Thread is landing more vulnerably on Pern, instead of in its little shell, and thereby eating itself to death rather than destroying the entire planet.

Lleu: I just feel like that’s, mm, not necessarily contradicted, but at least complicated by the fact that apparently the only way Thread is getting to Pern is by means of the Red Star.

Lleu: If we’re supposed to accept, from this story, that Thread is, in fact, in all Oort clouds, or something like Thread is in all Oort clouds, and is intentionally, maliciously attempting to destroy all organic life throughout the system —

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think it has to be both. I think it could be that Thread is in other Oort clouds and also that Thread is just a natural phenomenon —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that, like a virus, eats in order to sustain its own life, but not for any malicious purpose.

Lleu: Hm. In any case, if we’re supposed to accept that Thread is in all Oort clouds, or at least that something like Thread is in all Oort clouds —

Lleu: — and is destroying all organic life, the question is, how does it get to where it’s trying to destroy organic life? And I think, if Thread could get there under its own power, it would do so.

Lleu: So it seems to me that there has to be another transmission method —

Lleu: — and I feel like it being meteors or meteorites would align with the evidence that we get in this story.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, because there is — and I think it’s supposed to land as dramatic irony — when they’re having this debate, they’re like, “Well, what we really need is to see a planet that is in the process of being stripped.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Shavva gave a bark of laughter. ‘Fat chance of that.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: So I think that is supposed to imply that these planets are being stripped by Thread, because otherwise it wouldn’t be ironic; otherwise it’s a meaningless conversation.

Tequila Mockingbird: And not like this whole short story isn’t meaningless, but…

Lleu: Yeah, so I think we are meant to read this as: Thread is in all Oort clouds, and Thread is using whatever mechanisms it can to get places. And I think in most contexts, the mechanism that it’s using is meteors, and here, for whatever reason, it doesn’t have access to that. Which also raises interesting questions about The Skies of Pern —

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm. We’ll get there. But it is frustrating, and I think it’s frustrating to me because it’s been teased before. They spend all of Dragonsdawn trying to send out probes and getting nothing back, and as we talked about in that episode, you could have told them and not the reader. You could have told the reader, but had that information be lost in between the initial colonization and the Ninth Pass. You could have had meaningful progress be made in a way that wouldn’t come to fruition until the Ninth Pass. There were a lot of different options. But she just tees it up and then doesn’t have it go anywhere. And this feels like, again, she’s teeing it up —

Tequila Mockingbird: Did she mean to write a book where she made it all make sense and then she couldn’t make that work?

Tequila Mockingbird: Was All the Weyrs of Pern supposed to be something different that gave us some other revelation about Thread? Because me, as a reader, I’m not actually that curious about why Thread is falling until you keep making me curious as the writer by implying that there’s some reason behind it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then if the answer is just, “Eh, it’s sheer dumb luck. It’s random,” I’m like, “Okay, well, that’s kind of what I thought before you spent two and a half books trying to convince me that there wasn’t.”

Lleu: Yeah. It’s especially weird because in this broader context, it’s like, okay, wait a minute. If thread comes from all Oort clouds, does that mean Oort clouds are artificial formations? Because then we’re right back to maybe Thread is a bioweapon. But it doesn’t go anywhere, because we don’t know anything about any of the other places where there are Oort clouds.

Tequila Mockingbird: Just a smidgen. We also do get some fun little world-building tidbits from the language that these surveyors use.

Lleu: I’m so mad about one of them. We do get, once again, the word “fardles,” which I thought was a horrible Ninth Pass innovation. But no, apparently it’s been transmitted for, let's say, 2,600 3,100 years, from the time of the first survey to the Ninth Pass, when people are saying “fardles.” I hate it so much. It’s some stupid profanity.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, here’s my theory. This is actually just a misspelling, and they’re all quoting Shakespeare. “For who would fardles bear?”

Tequila Mockingbird: “To grunt and sweat under a weary life”? So maybe it’s that sense of a traveler’s bundle from 16th-, 17th-century English that has been bastardized and stripped of context and is now a commonly used mild oath.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, how about this: we could start trying to make it a thing now.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, if you’re just going to shoot down all of my proposals. We also get the little — instead of “in my books” they say “in my tapes.” So books don’t exist in the space future.

Lleu: Yes: “Absence is as ominous as presence in my tapes.” Which I think is so funny. I have said before and will undoubtedly say again: the defining characteristic of science fiction is humans’ inability to imagine future information storage systems.

Lleu: So first of all, it’s very funny, the idea that they’re still using magnetic tapes in this distant space future. But also the fact that books are obsolete, so obviously everything will be about magnetic tapes. Very funny in retrospect, and also very funny considering this story was published in 1993. Email existed already. Usenet existed. The internet was the thing. Hello? On which note, the single funniest and also silliest thing in this whole story and possibly, as a result, my favorite thing in all of Pern now, is that while they are discussing their plans to go down and survey Pern, they’re like, “Oh, also we have to send off our other report.” And here’s what we get:

Lleu: “‘Shall I do the report?’ Shavva asked.[6]

Lleu: “‘I did it,’ Castor replied in a tone that ended discussion. He called up the program, and when the copy was ready, he rolled it up into a tube to be inserted in the homing capsule. It would reach their mothership some weeks before their projected return.”

Lleu: They’re submitting a fucking printed, hard-copy report, by homing beacon, of a planetary survey.

Tequila Mockingbird: How else would you get it back? I have a real fondness for ’80s, early ’90s sci-fi where they just they can’t conceive of the digital world quite yet. They’re like, “It’s not going to be punch cards anymore, but, gosh if I know what it is going to be.”

Lleu: Yeah. I’m thinking about Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton, which I actually think in some ways does a really prescient job of imagining future information transmission, insofar as it imagines that everyone will have access to terminals with access to all of stored information —

Lleu: — in their rooms and be able to interface with this at any time — except that the means by which you access information on the terminal in your room is…microfilm.

Lleu: That’s great. I love it. It’s got all of the necessary things except for the one crucial detail.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and I think often you end up with science fiction that gets the rough shape better than the specifics. You’ve got, “Oh, yeah, and we’re going to be able to have instantaneous like video communication,” except he doesn’t call it that, because the idea of that is not there. But the idea that I’m going to be able to see your face and be talking to you on the other side of the planet, they’re like, “Yeah, we’ll get there.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “We don’t know how, and it doesn’t really matter how, because we’re going to get the how wrong if we try and guess it now, because if we knew it now, we’d be making money instead of writing science fiction.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So we get the shape of, “Well, people will want to talk to each, and they’ll figure out a way.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I will actually, after one might even say, an entire podcast of ragging on McCaffrey — I do think that she has a fun, sly little joke in the first sentence of this short story, which gave me a little chuckle, which is that it opens with the line:

Tequila Mockingbird: “It’s the third planet we want in this pernicious system.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I like that. I like that little pun. It made me happy.

Lleu: That’s a good note to end on, a little positive note. I do have a recommendation this week, and it’s because I was thinking about the destruction of all of the large terrestrial life on Pern and the fact that there are no, for example, land-dwelling predators and how that coincidentally made the planet perfect for human colonization. And I was thinking about Pacific Rim and the idea that global warming effectively terraformed, or is in the process of terraforming, Earth for the Progenitors. So I think instead of reading “The Survey: P.E.R.N.^c” or “The P.E.R.N. Survey,” superscript C, you should watch Pacific Rim. It’s great.

Lleu: Classic movie — and we’re recording this on January 13th, which is the day after the day on which the apocalypse was canceled, so it’s a great time to revisit it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It! If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast.tumblr.com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes, along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast.neocities.org — N E O cities.

[1] By Sarah Gailey, published in Fireside Fiction.

[2] By Sarah Pinsker, published in Uncanny Magazine.

[3] The UK edition published by Bantam Press has slightly different text: “They kept several as souvenirs, for the galaxy had produced many more exotic gemstones than these, though diamonds remained useful in technology for their durability and strength.”

[4] Again, the UK text is slightly different: “They did discover interesting fossil remains in an an extensive tar pit, a good fifty thousand years dead and gone, but one specimen intact enough to expose the ground-down dental machinery for grazing: suggesting that they could be the ruminants Liu wished to see.”

[5] The UK edition has: “‘Can’t prove the Oort cloud affected it in any way. Besides,’ Ben went on dispassionately, ‘the planet was bombarded by meteors and meteorites to judge by the craters and the craterites. Shattered the surface and boiled off a good deal of the major oceans. Just like Shaula III. That system had an Oort cloud, too.’”

[6] The UK edition has “Shavva asked in an expressionless voice.”

Bonus Episode #10: “The Survey: P.E.R.N.c” (1993)

Bonus Episode #10: “The Survey: P.E.R.N.^c” (1993)