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Tequila Mockingbird: Hello!
Lleu: 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: I’m Tequila Mockingbird.
Lleu: And I’m Lleu, and I love dolphins. Not in real life, but Pern dolphins.
Tequila Mockingbird: You’ve got to clarify, ’cause they’re little jerks in real life, aren’t they?
Lleu: Real dolphins are horrible; Pern dolphins are delightful.
Tequila Mockingbird: I think real dolphins are horrible in a way that makes them delightful, because I enjoy a little horror in my delight. And today we are reading “The Dolphins’ Bell,” which is about which takes place entirely during Dragonsdawn. That’s right: yet another lovely, lovely interquel.
Lleu: Before we get to the plot summary, we want to flag that we will be once again discussing racism and Orientalism in this story, as we did in Dragonsdawn, and in particular the text’s use of an offensive term for laborers from Asia.
Tequila Mockingbird: “The Dolphins’ Bell” focuses specifically on the Crossing between the Southern and Northern continents and on the slapdash flotilla that they cobble together to try and get their supplies very urgently away from Landing and the pyroclastic flow that is about to come out of Mount Garben, and then, in a slightly more leisurely fashion, which we’ll discuss, from Monaco Bay and Paradise River Hold across to the newly newly founded Fort Hold. We are mostly following Jim Tillek, who is a, I would say, minor character in Dragonsdawn. He’s there.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: He’s not super important. We definitely know in Dragonsdawn that this is happening: we see the dolphins start towing all the ships out into the bay as they’re leaving Landing.
Lleu: But it also happens in the course of one paragraph.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, it’s not really engaged with because, of course, Dragonsdawn is focusing on the other thing that is happening, which is the dragons, first the tragic death of Marco and Duluth going between accidentally and then the dragons triumphantly making their first successful and intentional jumps between and eventually showing up to fight Thread in Fort Hold, which we do hear about at the very end of this short story. And here we are very closely following the fleet, so we see both the logistical struggles of trying to get a bunch of often very inexperienced sailors and dubiously seaworthy craft safely through some pretty choppy waters, and we also get to hang out with the dolphineers for an extended period of time for the first time, which is really fun, because they were named in Dragonsdawn, but that’s kind of it. I don’t even know if we get the names of any specific dolphins in Dragonsdawn, just that they are there.
Lleu: I don’t think we do; I think just that they’re…also on Pern.
Tequila Mockingbird: But here we get to spend an extended amount of time with Teresa and with Dart, as well as, of course, Dart’s human partner, who is Jim Tillek’s romantic partner by the end of the story, although not at the beginning, Theo.
Lleu: Yeah. This story is fun! I said before we started recording, I would put this about on par with “The Smallest Dragonboy” —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah!
Lleu: — in the sense that it is perfectly inoffensive. I liked this one better ’cause it’s for adults and just a fun little romp.
Tequila Mockingbird: I think it solidly comes to the top of the short stories list for me, because it has dolphins, who are great, and also the logistics of transport of a large amount of cargo in a crisis situation, which is just incredible. I love logistical challenges and I love crisis response stories. That’s part of what I like about Dragonsdawn so much; I was obsessed with Hatchet when I was in fourth grade. And this is right up there.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: I wanted more of that, frankly. I was like, “Tell me about the logistics of the dolphins rescuing the sunken cargo and getting injured because they have to squeeze into tight spaces and because the shipwrecks are moving around. Give me more of that. Don’t cut away from that. Don’t give me that in a flashback. No, no, no.” But she’s withholding…
Lleu: Yeah, if I were going to offer a criticism of this story, it is: I think the story should not be from Jim Tillek’s perspective; I think it should be from Theo’s perspective or another dolphineer’s.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: ’Cause certainly Tillek has worked with dolphins, and they know him, but he’s not a dolphineer. He doesn’t go out, clinging to his dolphin’s dorsal fin, zooming around the ocean, which is the whole point of being a dolphineer. He’s just on land. He likes boats.
Tequila Mockingbird: No, no, no, he’s not on land — that’s the whole point. He’s on the boat.
Lleu: Sorry, yes, he’s just on his boat. His ship, excuse me. My bad.
Tequila Mockingbird: He would be so offended.
Lleu: And it leads him to make some very silly conclusions at the end when Paul Benden is narrating the first successful dragon-fought Threadfall, and he’s like, “Yeah, then afterwards they landed and they immediately demanded numbweed and medical supplies for their dragons before they would even come talk to me!” And Tillek is like, “Haha, yes, that’s exactly how I feel about my boat and how Theo feels about her dolphin! I understand how the dragon riders feel about their dragons.” And I’m like, that’s a little bit insulting, I think, frankly.
Tequila Mockingbird: Hey, now — he really loves that ship.
Lleu: I get that you love your boat, but…mm…
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s a ship; it’s a ship, Lleu. You’re going to get kicked off of the ship if you talk like that.
Lleu: That’s fine. I’ll just find a dolphin. They’ll come rescue me. It’ll be great.
Tequila Mockingbird: And I do suspect that she put Jim Tillek as the point of view character just ’cause he was a character we’ve heard of.
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: Of all these characters, I think he and Ezra Keroon —
Lleu: Who’s only barely there.
Tequila Mockingbird: — are really the only ones who are named characters in Dragonsdawn.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: They’re not big characters, but we know that there are dolphineers, but we don’t really have any names, and I don’t think any of the sailors or even smallholders that we meet here are previously known characters.
Lleu: I didn’t recognize any of the names, anyway, yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. We get some references, I guess, to like Ju Adjai Benden, and obviously Paul Benden makes a cameo appearance, but —
Lleu: Yeah, well, and Ongola is on the radio, and —
Tequila Mockingbird: Right.
Lleu: — Joel Lilienkamp is on the radio, but…
Tequila Mockingbird: Mostly this is just a story about some dolphins and some boats. Ships. Both, both. The rafts get to be boats, and so do the canoes and kayaks.
Lleu: Well, I don’t know, I —
Tequila Mockingbird: It does make sense, but I do love this image of, “Yes, we definitely need a 15-year-old in a kayak to tow this out into the sea. That is the only possible way to solve this problem that we’ve known about for years.”
Lleu: You know how it is in the space future.
Tequila Mockingbird: And I get that they didn’t know how quickly the volcano was going to go, that this is catching them off guard — that’s sort of the point. But I do feel like I do feel like it feels a lot more hasty and a lot more like an emergency, in some ways, than the Crossing felt in Dragonsdawn, maybe just because there it is a finale to the panic of Thread or the crisis of Thread and here it’s the only crisis?
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And even, frankly, Thread becomes a much less serious crisis in this, in a very interesting and weird way.
Lleu: Yeah, which we should talk about, ’cause there’s some strange stuff going on there.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: Especially re the conclusion and some continuity things.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: Especially because in Dragonsdawn, everyone who makes the Crossing goes by air.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: So none of this matters to them, but seeing it from Tillek’s perspective or anyone else’s perspective, in the fake good version of Pern in my head, makes it much more real, and this is the first time that they’ve really, truly had to confront the fact that they don’t have all of the technology that they are used to having, even at Landing.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: This is the first time that everything in the colony, fundamentally, is dependent on pre-industrial technology.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: Which is interesting!
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think this story does have a successful and engaging balance of that, too, because we get this sci-fi technology on the medical stuff — like, they have the “gelicast” and a “hypo-spray,” which I noticed and was like, “What?” Star Trek shows up. But at the same time, they are very much ships under sail.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: The larger ones have engines, but they’e trying to conserve power, and we did actually get into a discussion before we started recording about why they are sending so much stuff via ship instead of via air, because we do know that they made sled crossings from the Southern to the Northern Continent, and even in the story Jim Tillek is like, “Why aren’t they taking more stuff by air? This is annoying. We have all this stuff.” And I think it’s because they’re really low on power packs. A repeated issue at the end of Dragonsdawn is them saying, “Hey, we just don’t have the power for all of these sleds.” That’s why they’re initially planning to hunker down and not fight Thread during this short story in the new Fort Hold. They’re just like, “We can’t afford that power consumption rate.”
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And a sailing ship is, uh, as wind-powered as you get. There’s no energy expension.
Lleu: Yeah. There’s a handful of references to them using fuel, but it kind of sounds like that might be engine fuel and not —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: — power pack fuel.
Tequila Mockingbird: I think that the boats are combustion engines, rather than power packs for the sleds.
Lleu: Yeah, that was my impression, also. I also should amend: pre-industrial technology except that the boats are all made of —
Tequila Mockingbird: Plastic.
Lleu: — inorganic plastic.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: Or plexiglass, etc.
Tequila Mockingbird: Except for the deck of the Southern Cross, which is teak that he had specially imported as his personal baggage allowance. So, when they do encounter the edge of Threadfall, and they all have to go over the side, the dragonets — the fire lizards — do show up and fight Thread above them, and while Jim is treading water, he’s like, “Oh, thank goodness the fire lizards are here, ’cause we’re all safe, but the deck! The teak wood would have been ruined!”
Lleu: I totally glossed over that.
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, it’s also while he’s busy being like, “Wow, it’s so sexy to be treading water in the middle of Threadfall next to Theo.
Lleu: A lot of things about this story come down to Jim Tillek being like, “Wow, this is kind of sexy” at very weird moments.
Tequila Mockingbird: The evacuation of Dunkirk is actually so sexy when you think about it. Peak flirtation.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: But on the topic of them treading water by the side of the boats, it’s so odd that their solution to Threadfall on boats is just, “Yeah, hop over the side. We have these hats that are plastic, so this Thread can’t eat them. It slides right off of them. And then we’re fine. This is chill. This is cool.” And even setting aside the hats, which we will get into. It’s just…are they doing this in the Ninth Pass? ’Cause it would be very McCaffrey to just be like, “Yeah, they’ve been doing that all along and we weren’t on a fishing boat, so I didn’t bother to tell you about it.”
Lleu: I don’t think they can be because they’re not using plastic.
Tequila Mockingbird: But what happened to these plastic hats? Did they degrade?
Lleu: The problem is not the hats; it’s the ships, right? If your ship is made of wood.
Tequila Mockingbird: Ah; it doesn’t do you any good, okay.
Lleu: Thread will eat through that. Yeah. You’d be treading water next to —
Tequila Mockingbird: Nothing.
Lleu: A bunch of waterlogged nothing. Yeah. So that doesn’t bother me. What does bother me about the end of this story is that they’re getting to Fort Hold and they’re talking about the harbor facility that’s there, or the cave, essentially, facility that’s there, and basically there’s not going to be enough room for Jim Tillek’s ship, and they’re like, “But there’s a big cave on Ista where you can put it!” But here’s the thing: all of their ships are made of plastic, except for the deck of the Southern Cross, Jim Tillek’s ship. They can just leave it loading out there. Nothing’s going to happen to it. Literally doesn’t matter.
Tequila Mockingbird: No, no, that’s not good for ships in general. I think it’s, like, that the wind would fuck with the sails and all of that. It’s not Thread. At least that’s the impression that I got. ’Cause people do that anyway, right? They drydock boats in the winter, and there is no, as far as I know, Threadfall in Nantucket.
Lleu: I don’t think they’re drydocking…I guess it depends on how big the boats are. ’Cause it seemed to me like they’re implying boats that are really big, whereas two people can apparently handle the Southern Cross adequately by themselves.
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, he says two people and Dart, so I don’t think it’s actually a two-person ship; I think it’s a five-person ship and they can make it work.
Lleu: Hm. Maybe.
Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause they have a dolphin to like tow them and shit if they need to.
Lleu: In any case —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: — I think my point stands. They’re — the — it’s — the way it’s presented, it sounds like the concern is Thread.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yes.
Lleu: And the concern should not be Thread. If the concern is weather, then maybe, but also…go to Ista.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah… It’s possible that the concern is that you need to have somewhere that you can safely get onto the ship and get off of the ship if Threadfall strikes suddenly or something like that — you need to be able to get into the cavern and get all the people and the fish under cover quickly?
Lleu: Hm.
Tequila Mockingbird: So if you have a bunch of boats just there, that doesn’t work. Maybe we could physically fit it, but then you’d be clogging the harbor and we need to be able to get in and out fast and not be worrying about that kind of stuff. I don’t know really anything about boats that you can’t learn from reading science fiction novels in which spaceships are pretending to be boats. I haven’t even read all of the Master and Commander books, so I don’t know, but I have this vague sense that you don’t just leave boats at anchor for years at a time by themselves, that that’s just not good for boats.
Lleu: I also think that that is true.
Tequila Mockingbird: So it does feel like maybe the reason she made that choice was that she had already written “Rescue Run,” and so she knew that she had to contrive some reason for Jim Tillek’s boat and a couple of other boats to be in the caverns at Ista for three or four years at a time without being touched.
Lleu: Well, yah, that’s probably true, but my point is, they wouldn’t have to leave a boat for years on end.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yes.
Lleu: If they put one of the other boats that’s entirely plastic out, then it’s a non-issue. People can go fishing in that and come back and be perfectly safe.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. Well, they do say that Thread like damages the decks, though, even though they’re plastic, right? ’Cause there are thread scores on the decks of the ship.
Lleu: Mm. Maybe.
Tequila Mockingbird: That is a “Rescue Run” detail. I think they say, like, “Hey, it couldn’t get it ’cause it was plastic, but it’s scratched up and beat up.”
Lleu: I don’t know. I’m not satisfied, but I accept that Anne McCaffrey thought it was a good enough explanation.
Tequila Mockingbird: Or that it was the explanation that she could fit into this 60-page short story without bogging it down entirely with this concept.
Lleu: Yes. But I feel like that’s a her problem. She built that trap herself and walked right into it, so I have very little sympathy.
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s true. She did build that trap herself.
Lleu: So the other continuity thing, besides the question of whether Stev Kimmer is telling the truth about seeing a boat and what timeline that implies, was: there’s a weird reference early on, someone’s being like, “Ugh, I can’t believe we’re abandoning the Southern Continent,” and Benden says, “No, no, no, we’re not abandoning the Southern Continent. We’re moving most people north, but the Ierne Island settlement is still going to be operational, and Tarvi is still going to be running the mines.” And I was like, wait a minute, hold on. I thought Tarvi was building Fort Hold? I thought that was the whole point, that Tarvi was building Fort Hold.
Tequila Mockingbird: And Tarvi is definitely building Fort Hold. That is for sure. But when I went back and looked at Dragonsdawn, he’s building Fort Hold I think in the eighth year after, and the actual Crossing is the ninth year. So I think, if we want to try and make this work within the logic of the story, right, instead of saying, “Oops, she just made a mistake.”
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: We have to posit that Tarvi went north with the first team, with Ozzie, and was doing a lot of stone-cutting work, got the basics set up, and then came back down to Southern to help with evacuation or to keep mining —
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: — and then is back by the point that they’re making the Crossing. And to be fair, again, they kind of don’t know exactly when the Crossing is going to be. So they’re working on Fort Hold in a steady but not panicked way, and then suddenly it’s a last-minute scramble of, “Oh shit, no, Garben’s going up now.” It says:
Tequila Mockingbird: “Drake wants to continue; so do the Gallianis, the Lorogides; and the Seminole, Key Largo, and Ierne Island groups. Tarvi’s keeping the mines and the smelters going.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Now, we do know — and we’ll get there — from “The Ford of Red Hanrahan” that the Logorides and the Gallianis eventually are forced to move north, and they are very unhappy about that, and it seems like it happened not immediately, but pretty quickly. But that does also, to me, shed further question on the “Rescue Run”: is Stev Kimmer lying? Does he really think that everyone else has died, or is he just bullshitting them? Because I feel like if people were hanging out on the Southern Continent for a year or so after he claims there was that one last message from Paul Benden about, “Oh, we’re hunkering down,” then that’s a little dubious.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: But on the other hand, he did say, I think, “Oh, I had a few more messages from the settlers out West and Drake, and then that faded out too.” So it’s possible that just no one bothered to tell him that they were leaving, because (a) he’s an asshole and (b) they didn’t maybe know. But I feel like they would have told Honshu, ’cause they know Honshu’s still there, and they know that the Fusaiyuki kids are still there.
Lleu: Is Stev Kimmer listening?
Tequila Mockingbird: Right. They might have said, “Hey, guys, we’re leaving!”
Lleu: But if no one was paying attention to the message, if his communication system was turned off…
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah…
Lleu: If he thinks that everyone has abandoned the colony and gone north, it does not seem implausible to me that he would just be like, “Okay, well. We’re done.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And then he doesn’t really bother to look for anybody until Ito’s dying.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And then he’s suddenly like, “Oh, god, they’re all gone! I guess they all died. Shit.”
Lleu: It feels to me — he is telling the truth that he thinks everyone died, but I think the reason that he thinks everyone died is because it’s convenient for him to think that everyone died, and it’s not that he went out of his way to be like, “Is anyone out there? Can anyone hear me?”
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: But he’s just like, “Oh, okay, well, guess they’re all gone.” And then a couple years later, looked around at Landing and there was no one there, and he was like, “Well, I guess they really did all leave.” And then fifty years later, he looked around and didn’t see anyone and was like, “Okay, well, that’s it. Too bad.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And then presumably once the rescue party shows up, he’s not going to deeply interrogate whether he was right. He’s just like, “No, no, no, get me the fuck off of this planet. Let’s go.”
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: I think I see that.
Lleu: That’s my read of this. Drake Bonneau is just so unpleasant; I kind of hope he died in his little cave Hold by Drake’s Lake. Good riddance.
Tequila Mockingbird: But his wife seemed perfectly pleasant. She has bad taste in men, but so do many people.
Lleu: Hm. That’s true. Anyway, speaking of Tarvi, but not really of Tarvi — he’s just a useful transition point — we’ve got to talk about the racism and the Orientalism again.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. Yes, indeed. I think we see it in a couple of places. We get the same gentle background radiation of Orientalism in the the way that an East Asian female character is shy and retiring and doesn’t want to speak up for her accomplishments. We also get, in Jim Tillek’s random 20th-century flirtatious history anecdotes he includes the evacuation of Dunkirk.
Lleu: Yeah; of course.
Tequila Mockingbird: And he includes the boat people, and he’s like, “I don’t remember why they were — what was going on with that, but they were Asian, I think.” You don’t remember any of the context behind why people were evacuating in unseaworthy craft?
Lleu: And yet you remember the Dunkirk crossing.
Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, huh. So are you interested in maritime history, are you into maritime history about white people?
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: To be fair, he remembers they were war victims.
Lleu: But he can’t remember any of the details about the political situation, despite apparently having some familiarity —
Tequila Mockingbird: “I don’t remember the historical-political situation at the time. It was before Earth was really united by outwardbound goals.”
Lleu: Yeah, so Cold War — never heard of it. Dunkirk — we know all about that, and it’s sexy.
Tequila Mockingbird: Also, the Heyerdahl expedition. He definitely remembers that. Which is the Scandinavian dude basically trying to recreate Polynesian craft and sailing around.
Lleu: Yes, I believe he was Norwegian.
Tequila Mockingbird: So he remembers, again, the Norwegian guy —
Lleu: Also the Norwegian guy with pseudo-scientific ideas successfully proved that Polynesian voyaging craft were seaworthy for long journeys, but…
Tequila Mockingbird: You could have also remembered about the Polynesian people. You don’t need to remember the white guy doing Polynesian cosplay; you could just have remembered about the Polynesians.
Lleu: Especially because so we know that one of the locations on the Southern Continent the settlers have named “Maori Lake.” There’s also, in their list of craft that are showing up to help with the evacuation, a reference to “even the big ceremonial canoe” — okay, is that a waka? Are we talking double-hulled voyaging canoes? Is that what’s going on here?
Tequila Mockingbird: We also do get informed in the short list of “ethnic cultures” that have retained their cultural traditions, or whatever it is, she’s like, “Oh yeah, it’s Chinese, Japanese, Māori, and an Amazonian community.” And it’s like, okay.
Lleu: Amazon-Kapayan.
Tequila Mockingbird: So we know that there are Chinese and Japanese colonists; does this suggest that there are Māori colonists?
Lleu: And is this that there’re Amazonian Indigenous colonists?
Tequila Mockingbird: Which would be great, but she probably killed them all in the first Threadfall with the Tuareg. Let’s be real.
Lleu: Probably, yeah. I strongly suspect that the presence of Māori colonists is directly attributable to the fact that Mazer Rackham in Ender’s Game is half-Māori. I don’t know that you could prove this, necessarily, but it just seems —
Tequila Mockingbird: I’ll accept that into my belief system.
Lleu: — like it’s probably connected.
Tequila Mockingbird: And there are a couple of ways in which this does feel very early ’90s, and I think some of that is, in fact, the Orientalism. I do think that Dragonsdawn, as we discussed, is very much a product of 1988, and you see a lot of that similar Orientalism in Western media around the ’80s and the ’90s. We’ve kind of got this both spike of interest and you haven’t really hit the point yet where I feel like the broader conversation in sci-fi/fantasy is engaging with it — white authors aren’t really thinking about it yet. But you do have the cyberpunk obsession with a sloppy aesthetic version of Japan.
Lleu: Yeah. All of the presence of both Chinese and Japanese characters in this, to me, is extremely “Ah, yes; it’s 1988 to 1993 and we have discovered East Asian capitalism.”
Tequila Mockingbird: And the most prevalent piece of Orientalist racism in this is those conical hats that are designed to slide Thread right off of them and into the water, which are very intentionally taken from woven conical hat style that was popular all over, as far as I know, East and Southeast Asia. And McCaffrey just insists on using the term “coolie hats.” She puts it in little scare quotes, and she lampshades that, “Oh, yeah, that’s the historical term, and I don’t really remember it,” and then she just commits hard to that word and it would be so easy to just not do that.
Lleu: Yeah. Even if she had not grasped that it is in fact actively offensive, the whole way that it’s framed is just weirdly dismissive, and given the association of the term with unfree labor and especially indentured Indian and Chinese laborers in the British Empire, it just seems really tasteless.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: And even if the racism were not a problem, it also is just — why do they have this as a cultural reference in the first place? Because Anne McCaffrey had it as a cultural reference. But it doesn’t make any sense in-world, either. It’s just a bad choice.
Tequila Mockingbird: It feels very much like that same, “Ah, yes, I’m in the space future going to reminisce about history. Specifically about 20th-century American history, ’cause that’s the history that we’re all going to know in thousands of years in the future.” To your point, it’s sloppy. It just feels like, come on, you can do a little better than that.
Lleu: And you could do it less racistly. Maybe.
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, we can only hope. The other phrase that I was really just like, “Oh, dear,” was, when it’s first introduced, the actual line is:
Tequila Mockingbird: “And Ika came up with an ethnic solution to the problem of protecting the nearly five hundred passengers and crew from Threadfall [...]”
Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s like…I…
Lleu: Yeah. Oh, my god.
Tequila Mockingbird: Okay? You really had to make that decision. Okay… And then she calls it a “cone hat.” Great! Stick with that, Anne!
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: But she can’t. She simply can’t.
Lleu: Yeah. It’s the same thing that came up in Dragonsdawn, right — “ethnicity” and “culture” are “gone,” except when they’re convenient for her narratively, and coincidentally the times when they’re convenient for her narratively are: when she can be weird and racist about Asian people, and for Irish people specifically.
Tequila Mockingbird: Pretty much.
Lleu: Okay, we talked about Sexy Dunkirk. I don’t know that we’ve really talked enough about sexy Dunkirk.
Tequila Mockingbird: Episode notes: sexy Dunkirk.
Lleu: Jim Tillek very much does narrate the story of the Dunkirk crossing —
Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s their first conversation.
Tequila Mockingbird: “There was a fleet like this once before…” — so that’s his opening move. That’s how he starts his flirtation —
Lleu: Is with the Dunkirk story.
Tequila Mockingbird: He’s like, “Hey, baby, have you ever heard of the Dunkirk evacuation?” And it works! That’s the problem. That’s really what’s so tragic about it.
Lleu: Okay, side note. The other thing about this is that he has this really detailed knowledge of Dunkirk, but his framing of it is that “the Germanics had three hundred thousand British troops pinned down on the sands of Dunkirk.” Who the fuck are the “Germanics,” Anne?
Tequila Mockingbird: The Visigoths have come to raid Rome, Lleu. And they’ve pinned them down at Dunkirk.
Lleu: Which suggests that, in fact, Jim Tillek’s grasp on history is quite bad. And he does eventually have a pad with the real story, and then Theo reads it and is like, “Your analogy was somewhat flawed.”
Tequila Mockingbird: I do think it’s fair if he’s a boat nerd that he knows the maritime stuff and not the context of it, but then he should know more about the boat stuff that isn’t white people boat stuff.
Lleu: Yes. The other thing that I will say about that scene is, I appreciate that Anne McCaffrey is one of the few science fiction writers who knows that a klick is a kilometer. Things that drive me absolutely bonkers reading a lot of military sci-fi is people will throw klicks around in ways, and…this distance does not make sense with the context or the timeframe that you’re providing for crossing it or the fact that you can see what’s going on at that distance — it just doesn’t work.
Tequila Mockingbird: Maybe the definition of a kilometer has changed in the space future. Have you thought about that?
Lleu: Maybe, yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: They should have to do a weights and measures table at the back of every sci-fi book.
Lleu: Truly — imagine. Speaking of relationships, we’ve got to talk about interspecies relationships and the dolphins.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yes.
Lleu: First of all, I just have to get this out of the way, not to be that guy, but Ben, who’s a dolphineer, and the dolphin Amadeus, or “Ammie,” at the beginning — they have a vibe. They just do.
Tequila Mockingbird: Now, now, no “rough stuff.”
Lleu: Yeah, literally. They get in the water to do things to get ready for the evacuation —
Lleu: “There was a sudden swirling of water around the dolphineers as the dolphins chose their favorite swimming partners. Despite the crush, Teresa emerged right by Jan Regan, Kibby by Efram; Ben got splashed by a well-aimed sweep of Amadeus’s right flipper.
Lleu: “‘Cut that out, Ammie. This is serious,’ Ben said.
Lleu: “‘No rough stuff?’ Amadeus asked, and clicked in surprise.
Lleu: “‘Not today,’ Ben said, and gave Ammie an affectionate scratch between the pectorals to take the sting out of the reprimand.”
Lleu: They’ve just got a vibe. And unfortunately, after the next two pages, they kind of disappear from the story. But it was a nice moment while it lasted. And that’s sort of…
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I think that’s my general read on the dolphineers. It’s nice while it lasts. They’re great.
Lleu: Yeah, and frankly, that they all kind of have a vibe with the dolphins.
Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, so explain your logic. Why is this a flirtier vibe than the dragons and the dragon riders? Or is it that there’s equality of flirty vibe?
Lleu: That’s exactly it: there’s equality of flirty vibe. Ammie is flirting with Ben, and Ben is acknowledging that this is flirting. Whereas, like, Ramoth and Lessa are not flirting. That’s not the kind of relationship that they have.
Tequila Mockingbird: They’re married.
Lleu: They’re married. And as soon as Ramoth impresses, they have been married for 50 years.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. But also you raise your dragon, too.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: So they are initially quite dependent upon you, and then they grow to a more mature equality with you emotionally. Dolphins choose an adult partner.
Lleu: Yeah; that’s really also what it is.
Tequila Mockingbird: And the dolphins are also picky, right?
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause when Theo gets injured, Dart is like, “I’m not working with Annie. Fuck that.” Until Theo gets better enough to be like, “Dart, please, we need to rescue cargo.” And Dart’s like, “Okay…”
Lleu: Yeah. The relationship is set up differently, and, so, on the one hand, it’s missing the overwhelming intimacy and the unconditional love aspect, but also…maybe that’s healthier, actually.
Tequila Mockingbird: And I do enjoy the framing that they come to at the end of this, where Jim Tillek is like, “Yeah, we’re going to be in a romantic relationship, but I understand that Dart is of equal or greater emotional importance to you than I am. That’s not going to be a problem for me.” And I think that’s part of what appeals to Theo about him. She’s like, “Hey, you have your boat. You love your ship. I have my dolphin. I love my dolphin. We are also going to love each other, but nobody has to feel upset about an emotional imbalance, because we do both have something outside of this partnership that is maybe more important to us or that has been there for us first.”
Lleu: Yeah, and I think probably when she says that, she’s being a little bit, in her head, like, “Mm, gotta humor this boat thing.” But yeah, that is very much the framing, and it is, I think, part of what makes the dolphins so appealing to me. Obviously I want a dragon. And then Theo also wants a dragon, to be fair.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: But I loved Dolphins of Pern, growing up, and part of that is ’cause Readis’s plot just Menolly 3.0 and because T’lion is there, but also…the dolphins are just really fun, and it makes spending your time working with them, even when you have to do gross vet stuff that I don’t want to deal with, sound appealing, because then you get to hang out with the dolphins, and the dolphins are chill and funny —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: — and intelligent and people in a way that dragons don’t often feel like in the series —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: — frankly, with the exception of Moreta and Orlith —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: — and, frankly, of T’lion and Gadareth, and of Ruth —
Tequila Mockingbird: Canth.
Lleu: Sort of Canth, on a good day.
Tequila Mockingbird: Canth when he’s not busy being an emotional support dragon. She really did knock it out of the park with the psychic animal friends.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think it’s fair to say she completely originated the concept, but she definitely popularized it in English-language media.
Lleu: She really did.
Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s so good. It really is the wellspring to which you can return pretty much eternally.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And she did, you know, shake it up a little with the dolphins, with the dubiously psychic cheetahs, but it’s a good formula. I’m not mad about it.
Lleu: That would really be the peak —
Tequila Mockingbird: The peak!
Lleu: — of Pern psychic animal companions, if you could bond with one of the psychic felines instead of having them attempt to eat you.
Tequila Mockingbird: Sadly, for that, you do have to read David Weber’s Honor Harrington books.
Lleu: Alas.
Tequila Mockingbird: It is kind of alas. No. Well — well. There are good things about them, but. Alas.
Lleu: Anyway, the other thing I wanted to say besides that I love the dolphins is, speaking of other Pern short stories, I think it’s interesting to juxtapose this one not with “The Smallest Dragonboy,” in terms of being in terms of being good stories, or at least decent stories —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. Yeah.
Lleu: — but rather with “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” because it seemed to, I think, both of us as we were reading it that this, in the same way, or in a similar way, not exactly the same, that “The Girl Who Heard Dragons” is a kind of test run for Renegades, where she wrote it and then was like, “Yeah, okay, I do want to do more exploring this concept” — and then she wrote Renegades and it was not good…
Tequila Mockingbird: But, to be fair, “The Girl Who Heard Dragons” isn’t good, either.
Lleu: Yeah, so the question is why she wrote “The Girl Who Heard Dragons” and was like, “Yeah, I need to do more with this,” instead of being like, “Oh, okay, well, that’s done.” But I think this story is also very clearly her having thought a bit about the dolphins between Dragonsdawn and this — they come up in All the Weyrs of Pern — and this story, to me, reads as her sitting down and being like, “Okay, I’m going to write a dolphin story.” And she came out of it being like, “Yeah, I do want to do more with this.” And then wrote Dolphins of Pern. And I think, unlike “The Girl Who Heard Dragons” and Renegades, it pays off, ’cause I think Dolphins of Pern is really fun.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I definitely think this feels like her feeling out, “Okay, what is the relationship between a dolphin and a dolphineer,” and also laying some groundwork for things that are going to come up later, or plot elements that she can kind of seed in Dolphins of Pern, and I don’t know that a lot of it like directly pays off in that way.
Lleu: The one thing that did ping for me is the extremely sudden bad squall that they get caught in, but I don’t think it’s in the right location. But, as we get the narration of in All the Weyrs of Pern, that is the first thing that happens in Dolphins of Pern, is that Readis and Alemi get caught in an extremely sudden squall —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: — and they’re rescued by dolphins.
Tequila Mockingbird: Right.
Lleu: And that sets the whole plot in motion.
Tequila Mockingbird: And, to be fair, that is a significant part of the plot of this book —
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: — that in severe shipwreck emergencies, dolphins are really good at their job, and their job is to rescue people from shipwrecks. And we do get informed, in a sort of “okay, I guess, nothing that you wrote directly contradicted that” way, that they’ve been doing that for 2,500 years, just on their own.
Lleu: “Nothing that you wrote directly contradicted that,” except things that she goes on to write in especially Dolphins of Pern, actually, but…
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, look, it’s rough out there, Lleu. Continuity is hard.
Lleu: Yeah. But then she goes back and re-contradicts herself in Masterharper of Pern. There’s a lot going on.
Tequila Mockingbird: We love that. So it — it balances out. It equals out to, she didn’t contradict herself.
Lleu: Yeah, something like that. Two contradictions makes a continuity. Oh, my god, Masterharper of Pern is such a continuity mess. Can’t wait.
Tequila Mockingbird: We’ll get there.
Lleu: We will. We can’t stop now.
Tequila Mockingbird: I also do want to drop in a pin the question of why McCaffrey needs to repeatedly talk about the fact that men have hair that is too long and it needs to be cut shorter. I don’t know why this is a preoccupation of hers…?
Lleu: Did that come up about Tillek’s head hair, or was it just his body hair that Theo was looking at and was like, “Mm, it’s nice that his chest isn’t as hairy as other men’s are”?
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and then it comes up at the end where she’s like, “Wow, you really need a haircut.” And he’s like, “Why is she talking about this? I’m trying to propose to her.” And And then in “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” Mairi is like, “Oh, my gosh, you need a haircut,” and Paul is like, “Wow, Peter really needs a haircut.” I don’t know what’s going on here!
Lleu: She had haircuts on the brain. Presumably many of these stories were written around the same time.
Tequila Mockingbird: So she needed a haircut?
Lleu: Or someone she knew needed a haircut badly.
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not even the ’60s anymore.
Lleu: I don’t know.
Tequila Mockingbird: Eternal mysteries.
Lleu: We have to think about the timeframe, right? This is the ’90s. It’s about mullets. Jim Tillek had a mullet, and Theo was like. “Hm.”
Tequila Mockingbird: “Don’t worry, we’ll fix that.”
Lleu: “We’ve got to get rid of that.”
Tequila Mockingbird: All right. I think that’s about all we have to say on this topic.
Lleu: Yeah. I do have a recommendation. It is not, perhaps, the closest recommendation that I’ve given, but it’s also not totally distant. My recommendation is Kim Changgyu’s short story “Our Banished World,” which is in Readymade Bodhisattva, an anthology of Korean science fiction posted published by Kaya. It is a story loosely based on the Sewol ferry disaster, about a group of high school students who are sort of increasingly conscious of the fact that all of the adults in their lives are acting very strange. Something is clearly going on, and they’re trying desperately to figure out what it is, and I can’t really say too much more without spoiling things, but it is, I thought, an interesting crisis management story.
Tequila Mockingbird: And there’s even a connection to a boat.
Lleu: And there is, even, a boat.
Tequila Mockingbird: I’m so sorry — a ship.
Lleu: I think if it’s a ferry, it’s a boat, so…
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, fuck. What are you going to do?
Lleu: 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 dot tumblr dot 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 dot neocities — N E O cities — dot org.