Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #12: “The Ford of Red Hanrahan” (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.

Lleu: And today, for our sins, we are talking about “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” which is the third short story in The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall.

Tequila Mockingbird: As a warning, in this episode we are gonna be talking about racism and, at some length, about pregnancy, childbirth, and death in childbirth.

Lleu: Not a lot happens in this one. Red Hanrahan gets permission to go north and establish what will become Ruatha Hold, and…then he does that. The highlight of the story is him riding back and forth across a river a few times — thus the story title, and thus ultimately the name of Ruatha Hold, as we discussed previously and as is glossed badly at the end of the story itself. There’s not really a ton else to say in terms of plot. Mainly what this story is doing is world-building and giving us background information to bridge the gap between the Second Crossing that we saw close up in “The Dolphins’ Bell” and at a little bit more distance in Dragonsdawn, and, well, the rest of the series, but also in particular the next story, “The Second Weyr,” which is about the establishment of Benden and several other Weyrs, sometime further into the Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: I definitely read this, and I definitely didn’t remember any of the plot, but I do think I remembered some of the world-building. There were several things that I had a vague sense of, “Oh, yeah, there were a bunch of fevers in Fort Hold, and a bunch of people died, and it was really bad.” And then when we were doing our bonus episode on demographics and I was looking up all the plague stuff, I couldn’t find my sources on that. I was like, “Wait, where did we actually get that data?” And it turns out it was here. So I think this stuff did seep into my consciousness of Pern as a 14-year-old, but I didn’t consciously remember anything other than the riding the horse back and forth across the river six or seven times.

Lleu: Yeah. If I read this, it made no impression on me whatsoever. So, as far as I’m concerned, I read it for the first time last week.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it definitely has an interesting flavor of almost a myth? In the sense that I think McCaffrey is very consciously trying to work back from the world-building that she established in the Ninth Pass and in the previous books and trying to make that make sense with what she has now established in Dragonsdawn. And in some places, it’s a little bit rough and ready.

Lleu: Yeah, and clearly this is something that she was preoccupied with, because she then went on to write Red Star Rising slash Dragonseye, which is entirely trying to make the Ninth Pass world-building make sense. I don’t think that succeeds particularly well, either, but it’s clearly something that she, at least, saw as a problem that she needed to address.

Lleu: I don’t know that it necessarily actually was, but that’s how she felt about it, it’s clear.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think it is reasonable to say that some of the world-building that you end up with in the Ninth Pass feels like a bit of a leap. It feels weird. How did we end up here, specifically? And the answer is: because Anne McCaffrey wanted to end up here, specifically, rather than because it seems logical or natural or inevitable that a human society will end up there. But I don’t think trying to establish one specific time when the entire society pivoted to that decision or choice or way of thinking and having that one specific time be 19 years after they landed on this planet really solves the problem.

Tequila Mockingbird: So there are several things here where I’m like, “I actually think it makes more sense if this developed gradually over literally hundreds, if not thousands, of years, than if you’re proposing that 19 years after they landed, because Peter Hanrahan did one specific thing, everyone on the planet did that specific thing forever and ever after that.”

Lleu: Yeah. Frankly, I feel like almost all of the things in the Ninth Pass that I look at it and be like, “Huh, how did they get from a presumably enlightened liberal space future to feudalism?” are answered by them arriving on the planet in Dragonsdawn and immediately singing “Home on the Range.” I’m like, “Oh, now I understand how they got where they ended up.” I can see why she didn’t feel that way, but, yes, frankly, I did not particularly enjoy this story. I did not think it was very interesting, and all of the world-building came down to, “Oh, there’s the first Weyrwoman. Oh, there’s the first tithe. Oh, there’s the first this; there’s the first that; there’s the first this other thing!” Wow, all at once. What a coincidence! Isn’t that convenient? It just felt lazy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. And I definitely did notice — and I mentioned to you when I was reading it — things that she didn’t bother to explain because they were invisible to her, because she couldn’t see past her own preconceptions. So, there’s a moment when Mairi is cleaning the wooden chest that has come all the way from Ireland to Pern, to the Southern Continent and now to the Northern Continent, and is being finally set up in Ruatha Hold, forever and ever, etc., so she’s busy and she can’t feed the baby. And so, obviously what happens is that her tweenage daughter feeds the baby while the baby’s father stands and drinks a cup of coffee and looks at them.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, sorry, a cup of klah and looks at them And that’s not something that McCaffrey is trying to logic, right? She’s not trying to explain the sexism that we get in the Ninth Pass in a lot of ways, because that sexism is already there when they hit the planet in Dragonsdawn, because that sexism is there when she’s writing this in 1993.

Lleu: Yeah — well, more to the point, she actually does try to explain the sexism in the Ninth Pass, but she does it in Dragonseye. I don’t think she’s attempting to do it here, and I don’t think she was attempting to do it in Dragonsdawn. Clearly, sexism is still there, but I don’t think that she perceives many of the things that we look at and are like, “Oof.” I don’t think that she was necessarily perceiving that as sexism. I think she was perceiving that as enlightened space future with gender difference.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so that is fascinating to me, in the way that it’s always cool to see science fiction attempt to predict the future and be unable to escape the present.

Tequila Mockingbird: The same way that “in my tapes” in “The Survey” — these little moments of, okay, you’re doing your best. You’re trying to imagine a space future, and you’re writing this in the ’90s, and you can’t entirely get away from that.

Lleu: One thing we learned that I had forgotten we learned until I went back, because when I said “the first Weyrwoman,” I knew that was wrong, but I couldn’t remember what it actually was. The first headwoman —

Lleu: — is established here. But also the other things that I listed are, like, that’s the first Ruathan runner beast, that’s the first tithe, and those are the first fosterlings. So, rather than taking fosterage as what it is, which is an extremely common social arrangement in many different societies around the world, and in particular common in feudal societies, especially in high social strata, but really at all levels of society for different reasons, and sort of taking it for granted that that’s something that could or would develop on Pern, McCaffrey has to be like, “Oh, well, 6,000 people died of a plague. So there’s a lot of orphans and they were all assigned to foster-parents” You didn’t need to explain this, actually. It made sense before.

Tequila Mockingbird: That was a mystery that did not need solving. But I did enjoy hearing about everyone dying horribly of the plague, because that’s exactly the kind of reader I am — I’m the kind of person who does a whole podcast episode about plagues, so it was interesting to see that we have this big dramatic “the fever year,” and that’s where we do get, Emily Boll dies, Ezra Keroon dies, some of the named characters from Dragonsdawn. But it’s also not the first or only one, because it’s not possible that this was the fever that killed all of the dolphineers, or at least not probable, because that would not have resulted in the memory of dolphineers and dolphineering being lost. You still have a bunch of adults who remember dolphineers and know that the dolphins are capable of communication.

Lleu: Yeah, well, and then they still have the dolphineers’ gear, presumably, even if they had all died, and they still have access to computer programs, presumably including at least some instructional materials for how to scuba dive, which is, I think, probably the biggest practical obstacle to reestablishing the dolphineers if they had all died.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it seems like that this is going to be an ongoing problem, and we also specifically are informed that vaccination is being carried out here, so we know they still know how to vaccinate people. But that does, to me, become even more curious in the context of, one, well, why are they having all these fevers back to back to back? It’s possible that the bathing facilities in Fort Hold are not ideal or at least are severely overtaxed, because part of what people are excited about coming to this new Hold is, like, “Wow, we can take baths!” So if basic hygiene is not being supported in Fort Hold, I think I know why you’re getting all of these fevers, guys.

Lleu: Yeah. My instinct is that hygiene facilities at Fort Hold are overtaxed severely because it’s so crowded. We know even after 6,000 people died of the plague, it’s still too crowded at Fort Hold. They still have too many people. There’s just not enough space.

Lleu: So, first of all, Ruatha is not the second Hold. South Boll is the second Hold. That’s already been established. Pierre de Courci went south with people and established a hold there. So Ruatha would be the third Hold. They’re clearly conscious of this as a problem; it’s just a matter of whether and where they can find enough space for people that is safely accessible also. They have to know the routes and know there are safe travel locations. So Ruatha fits the bill ’cause it’s two days’ ride, and Threadfall at this point is passing over this region roughly every three or four days, depending. So two days is usually safe enough that if you leave right after one Threadfall, you can arrive before the next one.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think the implication is that as they are trying to move further and establish what we will learn in the next short story is Tillek Hold they have to build temporary shelters on the way ahead of time —

Tequila Mockingbird: — they need to coordinate the dragonriders — it’s kind of a more complicated process.

Lleu: Which brings us back to one of the things we discussed in the demographics bonus episode, which is: the limiting factor for human expansion on Pern is not any of the things that are normally a limiting factor for human settlements expanding. It is the lack of safe, stone-covered or metal-coverable spaces to endure Threadfall. That’s what conditions how small and weirdly distributed their population is even into the Ninth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: And at this point, they do still have stone-cutters, but they’re clearly being very conscious of trying to use them less and trying to conserve power, because they know it’s not going to last that much longer. And this does align with what we have kind of vaguely picked up in the Ninth Pass and in later books, where they know that, okay, some of the Holds and the Weyrs have clearly been carved out of the rock in some special way that we can no longer understand, and it’s incredibly smooth cuts, and many of them are instead just roughly or more more hand-hewn, even if hand-hewn by talented artisans who made it quite impressive. To that point, I think what McCaffrey does a good job of in this short story is giving us the information about what has happened since the Crossing and laying the scene without it being too exposition-y, in a way that, to me, it gives you like an interesting level of curiosity and, like, “Ooh, this is kind of fun. This is interesting,” and doesn’t belabor it. I think, again, her information control remains very good.

Lleu: That I will accept. I do think that the story handles its own background well. It’s when it’s trying to give you background for future things that it becomes very clunky, like the kind of extended and unnecessary explanation of fosterage. This didn’t need to be here. We didn’t need to hear about this at all. It was fine.

Lleu: But, yes, its explanation of how you get from “The Dolphins’ Bell” and the end of Dragonsdawn to this story — that I do think is good.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also get some interesting hints about fire lizards and why fire lizards have faded away.

Tequila Mockingbird: That suggest it’s mostly about the climate? Which is fascinating, because it’s not like the climate is any different than it will be in 2,500 years, when they bring back a bunch of fire lizards with no difficulty?

Lleu: Yeah. And I think — we don’t read the Todd books, but I do think that it’s possible that the things we learn about fire lizards at that point, namely that there was a fire lizard plague — suggest that that was something that she also was still kind of puzzling over and —

Tequila Mockingbird: I think a much better explanation is the fact that the fire lizards keep going back to the Southern Continent to lay their eggs.

Lleu: Right — she gives us two explanations. One is, fewer and fewer fire lizards are staying with their human partners because they don’t like the climate, so they’re going back south, but we also are told that “Oh, the reason there are so few fire lizards is because they go back and lay their eggs at the place where they hatched.” And I’m like, that makes no sense. This species could not evolve that way, because they would all be laying their eggs all in the same place, and that’s not what happens. This is something that is stated in the Ninth Pass books, but it doesn’t make sense there either.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, but what we do know about fire lizard habits is that they do lay their eggs secretly, right? Beauty just leaves and won’t tell Menolly where her eggs are. So I could believe that they don’t know where they’re laying their eggs and they are theorizing, “Oh, like a turtle, they’re going back to where they were born.” Clearly they don’t have a lot of bandwidth to worry about this. It’s on the Southern Continent. It’s inaccessible; so sad, too bad.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also think, although not obviously a perfect overlap, the people who were super invested in fire lizards mostly are either old enough that they are dying, of an older generation now, or were dragonriders, because all of the young people who were super into fire lizards at this point I think have become dragonriders.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause that was the pool that they were pulling from. So they might be less than invested in, “Oh, I have to figure out like where my fire lizard laid her egg so that other people can get fire —” Like, no, we’re fine. We have dragons now.

Lleu: True, yeah, because they don’t have the kind of political pressures that prompt that move in the Ninth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also just, their population isn’t that big. Most of the people who want to be dragonriders can be.

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re expanding the number of dragonriders relative to the size of their population at a staggering rate compared to any other time in Pernese history.

Tequila Mockingbird: In less than a decade, they’re going to have four Weyrs.

Lleu: That’s what we’re told is like the ideal for a full Weyr, but also it is suggested that that’s an overfull Weyr, in fact, in the Ninth Pass, as it clearly is here.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although, too, these dragons are much smaller than the dragons will be in the Ninth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, 500 slightly bigger than a horse dragons compared to 300 the size of a 747 dragons, righ?

Tequila Mockingbird: Which would you rather fight? 500 Carenaths or one Ramoth?

Tequila Mockingbird: One of the places that she is slightly clumsily trying to line up the continuity and trying to preemptively justify or back-logic her previous world-building is the way that the feudalism is happening hot and heavy here.

Tequila Mockingbird: — in a way that’s, like, do you think that this is normal? Do you think that this is weird? Do you think that we think this is weird?

Lleu: So everyone’s been asking Red, “What are you going to call the Hold?” And he’s like, “I don’t know. The name will come when it’s ready.” And he’s kind of brainstorming with Mairi and we have this:

Lleu: Mairi, what do you think is happening here? Do you not know how being a landlord works? That is what you are about to become, is the lord of the manor, literally.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also the way that it’s constructed, it says that Ruatha Hold is not just Peter Hanrahan’s land grant; it is: his stake combined with others’ who have come with him. So presumably that’s Mairi’s stake, what she’s entitled to; possibly that of the fosterlings that they take in. It’s unclear whether they inherit their deceased parents’ land rights. The other smaller land grants that come with the adult craftspeople and the skilled workers who are coming with them. But it’s Red Hanrahan’s Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: So he’s already subsuming their land rights within his land rights in some ways?

Tequila Mockingbird: And he’s clearly making unilateral decisions about this community and the way it will be established.

Lleu: And this to me is the thing: I think she still thinks that the groundwork for feudalism has not been established, is how it feels to me with that moment of lampshading. That clearly, to me, suggests that McCaffrey thinks Mairi Hanrahan is right and they are not becoming the lord of the manor yet, and then that transition will happen at some later point. But I don’t think that’s true, because what we’re seeing very clearly here is a stage after, in fact, the first step of feudalism, which is making it possible for one person to hold a lot of land that people under them are delegated to work on. So, for me, the thing that needed explanation in this is not “How did Ruatha Hold get established?” or any of that. It’s: “How did Red Hanrahan come to be the stakeholder for all of Ruatha?” Did the other people grant him their land rights in some capacity? And, if so, why? What do they get out of this? Is it that he claimed the Hold proper, and everyone else is like, “Hm, there are no other good locations nearby. I guess I need to cede my land rights to Red Hanrahan in order to have access to the Hold proper that he’s claimed.” Because if so, that’s extremely sleazy and makes him look really bad. None of the things that are in the story, or in later texts by way of illustrations of how feudalism on Pern developed, explain this initial step that’s missing here. And for me, that’s the thing that I have the most questions about in terms of why later land tenure on Pern works the way it does.

Tequila Mockingbird: “The extent of his legitimate stake, combined with the acreage of those who had joined him in the enterprise, added up to a considerable hunk of real estate, as Brian put it.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, “joined him in the enterprise” sounds sort of like shareholders in a larger concern, like that they do have, still, their land rights within this larger land rights — except that, again, he’s just exercising unilateral judgment over things like what to name it, and what to plant where, and who should be in charge of what thing. So…

Lleu: Are we supposed to think of the Holds as corporations that everyone is a shareholder in, but no individual smallholder has the voting power to unilaterally overturn decisions of the CEO?

Tequila Mockingbird: That honestly doesn’t seem wrong from the way this is lined up, in that it feels like a bunch of people are like, “Okay. We like and trust Red’s judgment. We think he will be good at being in charge of this. Let’s all combine our land and let him make decisions about how best to utilize it that we will carry out and then reap the hypothetical profits of all together.”

Lleu: Yeah. I think we’re going to have to maybe put a pin in this and come back to it when we do get to Dragonseye —

Lleu: Yeah. That we’re definitely going to have to talk about when we get to Dragonseye, ’cause we get to see sort of an early phase of unfree labor on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. There are some interesting nuggets. There’s some food for thought mixed into an otherwise slightly boring short story short. We also get some fascinating information about names, since this is fundamentally a story about naming things, and I gotta say, I’m going to come out firm with: almost all of the naming decisions that are made in this short story are bad.

Lleu: You are correct. First of all, we have to talk about Ezremil, which is Ezra Keroon plus Emily Boll’s names squished together. And everyone’s like, “Oh, what a good name! We need more Pernese names like that! We’ve got to leave behind those old Earth names!” Do you hear yourselves? It’s a horrible name!

Tequila Mockingbird: And I really think it does honestly make me believe that that’s why the Dragonrider names got started. The dragons were doing it, and they were like, “Oh, that’s cute. Haha.” And then some poor son of a bitch like Ezremil was like, “No, no — the dragons are doing it! We definitely have to all start doing this, too.” Because, oh, my gosh, it’s a crime. It’s child abuse. You’re harming this little innocent baby who did not consent to be named Ezremil.

Lleu: Unfortunately, the thing about it is, all of the other children that Ezremil is growing up with are also going to have these weird fucked up names. So they’re not even going to know that they’re weird and fucked up. So I think Ezremil’s probably going to be fine. There’s not going to be any name-based bullying.

Tequila Mockingbird: Famanoran does not have any high ground to bully Ezremil. It’s all bad.

Tequila Mockingbird: I shudder to think what F’neldril’s name was before it was F’neldril.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think that’s a charming streak of optimism that you hold in your heart.

Lleu: But we also get another account of the name of Ruatha, which, as we discussed in the past, is from Irish — although here it’s just referred to as “the old language.” She can’t even be bothered to call it — even “Gaelic” would be preferable to this, but I’m going to… link in the episode and on the website a piece by Orla Ní Dhúill titled “Do Fantasy Writers Think Irish is Just Discount Elvish?” that is pointed and relevant here.

Lleu: In terms of names, there’s two other quick things. One is, we were puzzling over Gorghe Logorides, who the wiki identifies as “Gyorgy,” which is a name that shows up as the name of someone who is based at Thessaly, which we know is where the Logorides family is, in Dragonsdawn.

Tequila Mockingbird: Specifically, I think as the person who owns Thessaly Stake, or whose stake Thessaly is.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it seems like the patriarch of the Logorides family.

Lleu: People who edit the wiki have concluded that Gyorgy and Gorghe are the same person and that this is just, I guess, a T’ron-T’ton name situation. I don’t know that there’s necessarily a strong reason to think that, because that’s fully Anne McCaffrey changing his ethnicity when Logorides is so clearly Greek. And it just seems weird for her to have intentionally been like, “Ah, this guy has a Hungarian name,” and then later been like, “Ooh, no, that was wrong. I should have given him a sort of off-brand Romanian name instead?” It just seems like a weird choice. I think they’re two separate people.

Tequila Mockingbird: But if they’re two separate people who are in the Logarides family, that — that doesn’t solve the conundrum. One brother has a Hungarian name and one brother has a Romanian name, and they’re both are very similar? Many name crimes are being committed, but I don’t think that you would name two of your children those two names. I hope not.

Lleu: We both literally know someone whose sister has the same name as her but slightly different. So it is well within the realm of real possibility.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, yes, but their parents committed crimes. I’m not saying that it can’t happen; I’m saying that it would be a crime.

Lleu: What I think I would say is, one, do we know that the Logorides family are the only people who are at Thessaly?

Tequila Mockingbird: No, but the context in which Paul Benden is talking about Gyorgy to try and rebut Tubberman, like, “Hey, it’s not falling on Thessaly Stake because Gyorgy is angry at us”; he’s being used synecdochically to represent the stake, which implies that Gyorgy is the one in charge of Thessaly Stake. And here that does seem to be how Gorghe is being described, as the head of the Logorides family.

Lleu: I’m just choosing to believe that they’re two separate people because T’ron-T’ton — I can think of plausible explanations for that; they came forward in time and there was already a benden rider named T’ton and T’ron very graciously — atypically — was like, “I’ll just change my name. No big deal.”

Lleu: Listen, it was day one in the future. I absolutely could see him being like, “Oh, I am your magnanimous savior. And to show that…”

Lleu: Yeah, so I am willing to accept that headcanon for why T’ton’s name changed, but I don’t think there is any plausible explanation you could give me in-world for why Gyorg and Gorghe, why that name change happened.

Lleu: Well, my other explanation was that Paul Benden is a Turanian nationalist and is Magyarizing Gorghe’s name as a political point for some reason, but that seems a little bit implausible.

Tequila Mockingbird: No, I think that’s the world-building hill that I’m going to die on now.

Lleu: I think the most likely explanation is that McCaffrey was like, “Hm, I need to give a reason for Lord Groghe’s name to be that.” And I was like…

Tequila Mockingbird: Please, this whole podcast is us being petty, Lleu — embrace it.

Lleu: Yes. So Red Hanrahan makes a big deal about how “I need to get out first before the Logorides and the Gallianis can get out there and establish their Holds, because I need to make my Hold the best place for horses. We’re going to have the best horses on the whole planet. Fuck livestock animals.”

Lleu: “Horses are where it’s at. And I’m going to put the Logorides and the Gallianis in their place.” And it is true that Ruatha is the place for horses. It’s also true that Keroon, which presumably was founded by either the Logorides or the Gallianis or both, is the site of the Beastcraft Hall, so it seems like Red Hanrahan maybe won the battle but lost the war, on that front. But also, if what I think is a logical conclusion from the way this interaction is presented in the story, that Keroon was established by either the Logorides or the Gallianis or both, if that’s correct, that raises questions about, why is Lord Groghe the lord of Fort Hold, then? Maybe she just wanted to establish that this kind of name was in the pool somewhere, but it seems like a weird choice.

Tequila Mockingbird: I could also believe that the Gallianis established the Beast Hold and the Logorides stayed in Fort Hold.

Lleu: Maybe. Well, especially because we later learn that Paul Benden is not, in fact, the patriarch of Fort Hold, right?

Lleu: Joel Lilienkamp succeeds him and then possibly not Joel Lilienkamp’s children.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also people could intermarry, right? It’s entirely possible that Joel Lilienkamp’s daughter marries a Logorides, and etc., etc.

Lleu: Yeah, so one of the other things that’s revealed in this story is the initial impetus to abandon surnames, which is like, “We’re breaking with the Earth past,” basically. So we’ll just be “Ezremil of…Fort Weyr,” right?

Tequila Mockingbird: “[...] ‘It’ll come to us. The right name will come to us.’”

Lleu: Yeah, but (a) this only works if everyone has unique names, which, to be fair, they are proposing, and (b) this only works if everyone stays in one place. So you can see why the Lilcamp traders, who are presumably descended from Joel Lilienkamp, have the surname that they do, because it was advantageous for them to have something that would identify them collectively because they don’t belong to a specific Hold.

Lleu: In retrospect, of all the people that she could have identified as their ancestor, it does seem a little weird that it was Joel Lilienkamp, the supply officer who wants everything to be in its place and to know where everything is, and not…one of the traveler kids —

Lleu: — could be an ancestor. Some indication that any aspect of the “ethnic nomads’” (quote-unquote) culture survived into the Ninth Pass would have been nice.

Tequila Mockingbird: You are genetically predisposed to care about supply and demand? Genetically merchant-y.

Lleu: Yeah, and that your itinerant practices are sui generis rather than being any kind of inherited tradition.

Tequila Mockingbird: And another place where it does not actually make as much sense to me that everyone would look around one day and go, “We should just stop using last names, effective now,” as it does that that practice would be gradually lost over time as it ceased to have utility or as it was unclear because you needed to identify people by their place of origin or by their trade in some way.

Tequila Mockingbird: But in all of this stuff that is being named, we don’t get any information on why they called it a “Weyr.”

Lleu: This drives me bonkers. Why, of all of the things that she could have chosen to explain, all of the Pern words, all of these naming practices, the names of the Holds, the names of the random specific creatures, the fact that they spend so much time telling us wherries are named because they look like barges — you explain all of that and never once do you comment on the fact that your dragons, the most important characters in the whole series, the most important element of all of your world-building, live in places called “Weyrs.” Where the fuck did that word come from?

Tequila Mockingbird: I always vaguely assumed it was connected to “eerie,” but that was truly just me in my tweens making an assumption.

Lleu: It’s not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but of all of the things that she chose to explain, given all of the things that she chose to explain, the fact that she chose not to explain this is very weird, to me.

Lleu: One of the other things that we wanted to talk about was, again, the racial politics, in particular because I spent some time as I was reading it puzzling over what Hold Zi Ongola is founding.

Lleu: Because it’s a little unclear in this story, and only in “The Second Weyr,” the next story, do we find out specifically that it’s Tillek Hold. So, knowing that Ongola is going to found a Hold, first of all, that raises one of the recurring questions that I have had since Dragonsdawn: why is there not an Ongola Hold?

Lleu: Person who was primarily responsible for the defense of the colony seems like…maybe important.

Tequila Mockingbird: And just everyone seems to like him. Everyone else has some drama with somebody but Ongola just seems like a chill guy.

Lleu: There’s fucking Bitra and Lemos Hold and Nabhol Hold, but there’s no Ongola Hold? Come on.

Lleu: And on one level, I’m like, that has to be because Ongola is Black, but also here it was weird because I was like, “Wait, we just had this long story about Tillek, and all of the other Holds and places that have been named seem to be named memorially, so it seems a little weird to be naming a place for Jim Tillek while he’s alive,” but then we find out in “The Second Weyr” that he’s died at some point in the intervening time, which, you know, it makes sense. He was in his 60s already. But it’s a little, like, eh, okay, fine. In any case, Ongola is the founder of Tillek Hold. Assuming that the pattern from Ruatha Hold follows, that suggests that Ongola is the originator of the Tillek Hold Bloodline. I don’t think this makes a huge difference, because obviously it’s been 2,500 years and the racial dynamics of the colonists are no longer in effect. But knowing this, I do think that, in retrospect, we were correct that we should be reading Briala, who is, like, the granddaughter of Lord Oterel?

Lleu: I think this is an indication that we are, in fact, meant to read Briala as, at the very least, not white, if not specifically Black.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, well, and we get a very, I am tempted to say very ’90s portrayal of race here in that, when Paul and Peter are talking about the people who will be going with them to found this new Hold…

Lleu: “Among the fosterlings, there seemed to be at least one representative from every ethnic group, and Paul wondered if Red had done that on purpose.”[3]

Tequila Mockingbird: One, I love the confidence of “every ethnic group” — every single one in these 141 people.

Lleu: Mhm!

Tequila Mockingbird: And, two, just this approach of, “Ah, yes, we have this tidy array of different people, and I’m just throwing all these different names in there, and maybe they’re Greek and maybe they’re Romanian and maybe they’re Hungarian, and I’m just kind of dumping it all in there, and I’m confident that this is a good world-building choice,” in a way that I think represents her optimism or her intentions, unfortunately, that she does not really live up to in terms of actually crafting nuanced and interesting characters of color or characters with a specific ethnic heritage that seems meaningfully incorporated into the story in any way.

Lleu: Yeah. It also positions Ruatha as a kind of utopian melting pot. Once again, Ruatha is the specialest place in the world.

Tequila Mockingbird: And yet — it’s the specialest because it’s the most Irish, but it’s not the most Irish, but it — it boggles the mind.

Lleu: Irishness in superposition.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: When you observe it, the wave function collapses and it always collapses on the side of “Ruatha’s very Irish.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: Somehow it always coincidentally turns out that that’s the most important part and not the ethnic melting pot.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then the last thing that I wanted to talk about was what we see about their medical capacities and their technological capacities at this point 20 years in, about a decade after the first Threadfall. They signpost a couple of times in the story that we are stepping down to a lower level of technology, that we are running out of the power packs, the high-tech things, and we see the door from one of the shuttles getting repurposed into Ruatha, and I do think that’s a little bit of a fun Easter egg because we know that Ruatha’s door is special, that it’s unique enough that Lessa’s able to use it to time travel for the first time. I don’t think she intended that when she originally wrote Dragonflight, but I think it is possible to read this to mean that this door is still the door of Ruatha Hold 2,500 years later.

Lleu:Yeah, it seems at the very least like she probably had, “Oh, Ruatha has a special door,” in mind when she wrote this story.

Tequila Mockingbird: But more specifically, we get a dragonrider dying in childbirth of postpartum hemorrhage, which is fascinating to me, because, yes, that is something that does just happen sometimes when people are giving birth, it’s not unusual complication — I think it’s, like, 5%; it just sort of shows up. But the treatments for it, ultimately, are: give the person who is bleeding out more blood. And it seems very surprising to me that they’ve gotten to the point where they can’t do a blood transfusion only a decade after the first Threadfall. Like, what do you need to give someone a blood transfusion? You need to know their blood type. Alianne was born before they came to Pern, if she’s old enough that she is —

Lleu: One of the first dragonriders.

Tequila Mockingbird: So they would know her blood type. And you need a sterile needle and some tubing, and you need another person with the same blood type or a universal donor. And that’s kind of what you need. Maybe more than one other person if it’s a really serious hemorrhage. So the fact that they were not able to save her life suggests that either they didn’t have those things, or there was some error or breakdown in the process, something went wrong beyond just “she was in a medical emergency.”

Lleu: Yeah, there’s an implication — Sean says “I went to get Basil,” right?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: Who we know from Dragonsdawn is an obstetrician. This kind of suggests that Basil might be the only obstetrician.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause what Sean says is:

Tequila Mockingbird: “We couldn’t stop the bleeding. I went for Basil.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So...

Lleu: That also raises questions like: why is he not there already?

Tequila Mockingbird: Clearly they didn’t think it was a high risk pregnancy, but a dragon can teleport, so…how long can it take you to go get a doctor who is in Fort Hold if you’re in Fort Weyr?

Lleu: Yeah. Since we know — well, we will when we both reread Masterharper of Pern — that it’s close enough that the apprentices used to like make day trips up to spend the night at the spooky empty Weyr before the beginning of the Ninth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: And obviously it is possible to diegetically come up with an explanation. Maybe Alianne had a super rare blood type, this, this, this, this, that, that, that, Basil twisted his ankle; he could only hobble. Who knows what was going on. Someone else was having a high risk pregnancy at exactly the same time in Fort Hold and he was in the middle of a C-section. Who can say? But clearly, extradiegetically, McCaffrey wants to let the reader know that at this point, only 20 years after landing, women are dying in childbirth again. And I think that’s an interesting signifier of how she’s thinking of the technological regression and the way life on Pern is changing, because it is a benchmark for what is the life of a person who can get pregnant like. In 21st-century America — although unfortunately changing month by month at this point — you know the amount of risk you are in if you choose to get pregnant. There is always a risk to your life, but it’s not a significant risk. And I think McCaffrey wants to position, okay, on Pern, this is now a significant risk.

Lleu: Yeah. It raises, also — the fact that it’s specifically connected with pregnancy will lead us in the future to discussions about the changing status of women Pern, including already in the next story, “The Second Weyr,” when we talk about gay people because they’re back.

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re back!

Lleu: Or, well, one gay person is back.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s something that I know McCaffrey was thinking about, because she does have the short story about gestational surrogacy that she wrote in the ’50s — she is a writer who is thinking about how — I think she would probably have equated women and people who can get pregnant, but she is thinking about that in science fiction contexts —

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: — and has been at this point for 30 or 40 years.

Lleu: Yeah. And I think given the ways that pregnancy appears in the Ninth Pass books —

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: — we are meant to see changing status of pregnancy as the beginning of a throughline that connects the status of women in the First Pass to the status of women in the Ninth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: And it’s not necessarily going to be a linear trajectory, although in some ways Dragonseye suggests that it is kind of a linear trajectory.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.

Lleu: But we’re supposed to see these things as connected.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we’ll get there.

Lleu: And we will get there.

Tequila Mockingbird: My recommendation is not, I think, a particularly close match to “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” but it is also a story about a community coming together to build something new, or, rather, a group of people who weren’t really a community coming together to form a community for the first time, and it’s called “The Year Without Sunshine,” by Naomi Kritzer, and it is available to read in Uncanny Magazine.

Lleu: My recommendation is also not a great match, but it is a story about multiple perspectives on a particular community and the question of whether that community is a utopia, and, if so, for whom or from whose perspective — who needs utopia— and it is “An Account of the Land of Witches,” by Sofia Samatar, which was published in her short story collection, Tender, but is also available online, and there will be a link to that on the website.

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] The UK text has “ploughing.”

[2] In the UK text “are” is italicized.

[3] The UK text here is both different and slightly nonsensical: “Red had listed the training of the other fosterlings and wondered if Red was trying to get at least one representative from every ethnic group[.]” Presumably it’s meant to read “and Paul wondered.”