Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #14: A Literary History of Dragon(rider)s

Tequila Mockingbird: And welcome to a bonus episode of 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 we are talking about dragons, but this time mostly not Pern dragons, and also by “we,” I realistically mean that Tequila is going to talk about dragons and I’m going to provide color commentary.

Tequila Mockingbird: Uh, color commentary and your wisdom. This is very important.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, what I wanted to do today was to talk about the narrative chronology of dragons in fiction and a little bit in folklore, ’cause that’s going to be the kind of background radius that gives birth to the fiction. This is just something I’m interested in with stories: I like to learn about how they grow and change, what influences them, how they merge. And because McCaffrey had such an influence on stories about dragons, I think it’s really cool to look back and see what she was pulling from and then who has been inspired by her. Uh, spoiler warning, the answer is kind of: everybody.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s sort of everybody. If you read a book about a dragon, which, if you’re listening to this, you probably have, that has in some way been touched by McCaffrey’s work.

Lleu: The Lord of the Rings, shockingly, was not influenced by a book published 13 years later.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, actually — no, no, no! He knew, psychically — he had a vision. Fair.

Lleu: You might say he had a telepathic bond to a friendly creature that informed him that —

Tequila Mockingbird: “Run! Pern is coming! Escape!” So let’s get back to the very basics, and let’s start with, in Europe, it all comes down to Beowulf. And I personally am a big Beowulf girly. I love Beowulf. So I’ve really enjoyed a really recent translation by Maria Headley, who’s very deliberately translating it into contemporary American speech, and “Hwæt” as “Bro” is really delightful to me, uh, but I — the first one I read was the Seamus Heaney translation, which is not a very literal translation, but it is a very beautiful one. And the idea of the dragon as the ultimate monster is baked in, I think, to a lot of English folklore and English storytelling traditions from the very beginning, and then you get Tolkien picking it up with Smaug, and obviously that sort of resurges it back into American and English literature as this kind of scary, bad guy dragon. But you’ve also got Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which is St. George fighting the dragon, and a lot of English fiction prior to the 20th century that is playing with dragons is playing with those two dragons specifically.

Tequila Mockingbird: As their kind of template for dragon concepts. There are a few specific things I wanted to flag as early narratives that might have started placing seeds that could grow towards McCaffrey. In 1898, you’ve got “The Reluctant Dragon” by, I think, Kenneth Grahame, in which they find a dragon in a cave, and he’s like, “Oh, I really don’t want to fight St. George. I’m just a friendly little dragon who wants to drink tea and read books.” And so they help fake the dragon’s death so that the dragon can escape and live his quiet, retired life. And in 1899, Nesbitt has a Book of Dragons, which has a bunch of different short stories about dragons, and in most of them, the dragons are evil, but in one of them, the dragon gets turned into a cat.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which seems very relevant to me. And it’s a very gradual — they sort of trick the dragon into becoming increasingly domesticated, until eventually it just is transformed into a regular cat.

Lleu: I did want to flag the other medieval dragon reference in Western Europe is the dragons in part of the Arthur story that’s assigned to different parts of the timeline —

Lleu: — um, and different characters at different times, but the — the red dragon and the white dragon fighting under the hill and that leading —

Lleu: Also a motif that’s picked up later, especially when the Arthurian narrative gets linked to British imperial nationalism, specifically.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. ’Cause, is that a motif that’s actually originally from Welsh literature that gets —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; yeah. The man was, um…creative. Okay, cool. So, that’s kind of the European side — well, no. To be fair, that’s the English-language side. We’ve also got — and I know very little about this other than some research that I did trying to learn more about this episode, but — apparently Romanian folklore has evil dragon riding wizards called the Solomonarii,[1] and the evil fairy Gorgonzola in some French folktales rides a dragon.[2] I think in both of those cases, it’s a very clear, like, “Wow, this person is so evil and powerful that they can ride on top of a dragon,” rather than anything that’s, like, supposed to show the dragon as being more friendly or more engaged with people, if that makes sense? It’s to highlight the villainy and the power. You also have, obviously, quite a lot of East Asian folklore and narratives involving dragons. Their dragons are a lot more friendly, right? The idea is that they’re usually very protective and powerful, and you can definitely make them angry, and that’s not good, but they are, fundamentally, usually a force for good on a community, and so there’s a lot more of that, like, “Oh, a dragon is, like, dangerous but good,” instead of an evil monster.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the other thing that I thought was interesting from there is that the Journey to the West, which is, I think, the 16th century, has a dragon that turns into a horse that gets ridden. So, again, you’re aligning the idea of a dragon with the idea of a domesticated animal that you can maybe bond with in a better way.

Lleu: — I don’t know exactly what the origin of Journey to the West is, so it’s possible that that means that this motif was circulating orally before that.

Tequila Mockingbird: You also do have, separately from the dragons, specifically, stories in Greek mythology about riding a pegasus, and this idea of, you have to be special in some way, like, Bellerophon has a special relationship with Pegasus, and that’s why he can ride Pegasus and nobody else can. So, not, obviously, the same as a dragon, but this idea that you are able to ride a flying creature because you have a special bond with it is perhaps relevant to our interests here.

Lleu: Well, especially, we may note that, um, McCaffrey does have a short story collection published in 1973 titled To Ride Pegasus.

Lleu: It, I gather, is related to the Talents books from the ’90s, but she was thinking about —

Lleu: — Pegasus, at least as a symbol around the same time that she was writing Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. And along those veins, there’s also the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in the 14th century, where there’s a horse that only Lü Bu(?) can ride. And I don’t think — I don’t actually know that there are a lot of historical ideas about riding unicorns. I think historically you just pet them and —

Tequila Mockingbird: — riding them is more of a 20th- and 21st-century fantasy innovation.

Tequila Mockingbird: But the idea that there are special magic horses is something that clearly we’ve been interested in for a while. So, that takes us up to the 20th century. So once we hit the year 1900, we have The Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany, in 1912. Book of Wonder has a knight and a princess riding a dragon after they’ve defeated it, but it’s not because the dragon likes them; it’s because he’s sort of imposing his will upon the dragon to express that he’s won and the dragon has lost. So not particularly, I would say, relevant, except that it’s much more recent —

Tequila Mockingbird: — than other stuff. Friendly dragons are pretty thin on the ground. What isn’t, however, is the idea of the idea of horses that you have a special bond with, ’cause 1941 has The Black Stallion, by Farley, and that is, I think, in many ways a very similar emotional narrative. Like, we talked about the horse girl energy of Pern, and that’s the original horse boy story: he’s trapped on this island, and he meets this wild stallion, and he and this stallion have this very special connection, and only he can ride the stallion. You know, obviously you’ve got Misty of Chincoteague, you’ve got all of those —

Tequila Mockingbird: — horse books. Yeah. Um, although, to be fair, Black Beauty is less about the special bond between a person and their horse —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because it’s from the horse’s point of view. So it’s more just about, like, the experience of being a horse in late 19th-century London. But, yes, the —

Tequila Mockingbird: As they become less functional, they become more an object of narrative. Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then we get to what I think is a really key stepping stone in this path, which is My Father’s Dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh! Well, yes. Well, I mean, I mentioned Tolkien, but fair. Go — go Tolkien.

Lleu: Yeah, if we’re doing — if we’re doing this chronologically, okay. So, alongside the interest in horses and so in the companion animal that you can ride and is a little bit wild but also is your friend, we also get a big bump in interest in dragons following The Hobbit in 1937. Tolkien — obviously drawing very heavily on Beowulf specifically and to a lesser extent, I think, Norse texts in his construction of Smaug as the evil dragon who’s very smart and so not just the rampaging monster of St. George legends and also not the kind of national allegory of the Arthurian dragon story, but rather an intelligent and evil creature that you can talk to and that you could even maybe negotiate with. (But also it’s really dangerous to do so, and it probably won’t last very long, as Bilbo finds out.)

Tequila Mockingbird: Indeed. My Father’s Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett, which is a children’s book about the narrator’s father as a child who rescues a dragon with a series of delightfully specific tricks and traps that he plays on the various other animals of this island, which have captured the dragon and tied it up. My favorite one as a child was always the fact that he gets the tigers to not attack him by telling them that the chewing gum is special and it will change color if they chew it long enough, so they’re all so busy chewing the gum and, like, looking in each other’s mouths to see if it’s changed color yet that he’s able to sneak away. So that has a friendly dragon, a speaking dragon — so it’s a dragon you can talk to — and the narrator’s father ends up riding on the dragon in order to escape. There were, I think, also a couple of sequels; I didn’t grow up reading them, so I’m not as familiar, but this was a beloved book of my childhood, and I think you can see a pretty close connection to the ideas that McCaffrey ends up playing with about 20 years later.

Lleu: I also wanted to flag — I haven’t read it, but — Stephen Gilbert’s The Landslide, published in 1943, which is about, there’s a landslide and it uncovers a sort of primordial landscape, including some eggs, which hatch into dragons. And I don’t entirely know how they’re portrayed, although I think they are sympathetic. Based on what I’m seeing online, it seems like the plot rests on the hardline local priest being like, “Rah, these evil creatures!” which makes it sound like we’re supposed to be fond of the dragons. But, either way, sets up the idea of dragons as a creature that you can raise from birth and so domesticate, something that McCaffrey obviously is also playing with.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, with that, I think the stage is set. Those are the primary friendly dragon or “bonded to a magical creature that loves you back” narratives that we could track down. And then obviously McCaffrey comes onto the scene in 1967 with “Weyr Search,” and there you have the combination of these elements. You have the dragon as a sapient creature. You have the dragon as a thing you can raise and domesticate. You have the psychic bond with a dragon that is unique and permanent. You have the idea of riding on a dragon as, of course, that’s what you do with a dragon. And you have the idea that you specifically have a community of people who are all riding on dragons together for a purpose.

Lleu: Yeah. We were talking beforehand about — obviously some of this comes, I think, from the Tolkien boom in the ’60s and this sort of revival of interest in dragons in folklore. Um. I believe McCaffrey was on record as saying that dragons have gotten kind of a bad rap and she was interested in intentionally reversing that and saying, like, “No, what if dragons but good?” I also — you know, there’s a lot of big lizards in science fiction and especially in the broader kind of planetary romance and sword-and-planet genres, which Pern is very much in conversation with and I think emerging out of. I believe that the creatures that at least some Martians ride in Leigh Brackett’s Mars books are reptilian? So we’ve got lizards you can ride already present in the sci-fi milieu, as a jumping-off point for “what if the lizards are dragons?”

Tequila Mockingbird: God help us, the Gor series does have “tarns” that people ride.

Lleu: There’s also — we couldn’t find a definitive timeline for when the first dragons in Michael Moorcock’s Elric books and stories show up. They’re more or less contemporary with Pern, but the earliest Elric story was published in 1962,[3] so if there are dragons in it that work the way the dragons in the later Elric stories do — which seems to be, they’re intelligent, and you can communicate with them, and you can ride them, and I don’t know that you’re permanently bonded with them, but you can sort of connect with them — then it’s possible that that may have been on McCaffrey’s mind, but it seemed like that may be either post- or basically contemporary with Pern, as with the other fantasy dragon that immediately comes to my mind, which is the dragons in Le Guin’s Earthsea books — but A Wizard of Earthsea published the same year as Dragonflight, so dragons were in the air, literally and figuratively.

Tequila Mockingbird: It was — it was the new hot topic. And I think that does contextualize: she didn’t come up with this idea, obviously, but I do think the things that she added that nobody has been able to let go of is that idea of that bond, the idea that —

Tequila Mockingbird: — you have a creature that’s magical and powerful, that in some ways it’s like having magic. And I think there is maybe the idea of a witch’s familiar that she’s drawing on, too, that you have this bond with a creature that enhances your abilities in some way.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it doesn’t have to be a dragon, obviously, and a lot of — as we’ll see — the people who were influenced by that moved away from dragons. But I do think that that brainwave was very what was coming from McCaffrey and has been incredibly influential.

Lleu: Yeah, absolutely. So, as we’ll talk about as we move into the legacy of Pern, which is everywhere, the two key things that I think stand out as clear, “This is Pern influence, specifically” and not “This is sort of —”

Lleu: “— an idea that has diffused into the genre more broadly” are, one, the idea of psychic animal companions, so you have a psychic pet that is intelligent and, you know, it might be friendly with other people, but it’s your special best friend forever that you communicate with; and, two, the idea of “dragonrider” as a character type, as an occupation that is established that you can have in the world, and especially of a kind of community or corps of dragonriders. So, pretty immediately people start playing with dragons as creatures that you can be friends with. I’m thinking, in 1974, Patricia McKillip’s Forgotten Beasts of Eld: one of the many creatures in the menagerie, is a dragon that the protagonist has befriended slash controlled magically. Diane Duane’s Middle Kingdoms books, first one published in 1979, have dragons, although I think the dragons don’t become extremely prominent until later in the series, and also they’re sort of… It’s complicated. Anyway, I don’t think the dragons become as prominent [until] later in the series, but there is a person who is psychically bonded to, initially, at least, the ghost of a dragon who lives in her head but is kind of an equal presence in the world.

Tequila Mockingbird: 1979 has Peter Dickinson’s Flight of Dragons, which is basically a speculative anatomy book, so more just talking about how dragons are in the milieu, they’re becoming popular. We’re also seeing, as we move into the ’80s a lot of authors, as I said, taking that idea of connection and not taking it in a dragon direction. So, the Gandalara Cycle has a similar, oh, you Impress or you connect, but it’s not with dragons; it’s with ligers. The Valdemar books, again, similar, like, psychic bond that lasts forever, but it’s with a magic horse called a “companion,” instead of a dragon. Patricia C. Wrede’s Talking to Dragons is 1985, and that’s not any kind of psychic bond, but it is this idea of a dragon as a friend, and when we get to when we get to the later books in the series, Cimorene rocks up and becomes Kazul’s princess, so there is this idea of a special connection between a dragon and a person.

Lleu: Right: “princess and princess’s dragon” or “dragon’s princess” as an established relationship.

Lleu: No psychic bond, but definitely occupational in the same way that dragonriding on Pern is. There’s also, in the ’80s, uh, Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon series, which, the second, Neveryóna, published in 1983, I’ve mentioned it a bunch of times already, ’cause it’s dedicated to McCaffrey, and it does start with a scene that I think is very intentionally meant to evoke Lessa flying on a dragon for the first time in Dragonflight, where the main character of the novel gets on a dragon and flies off in order to escape her provincial life and make her way out into the world. But the difference is that, because Delany is interested in deconstructing the sword-and-sorcery, specifically, and fantasy more generally genres, these dragons are just animals. They’re not very intelligent, and they also don’t actually fly; they glide. So they’re rare outside the mountains, because on the ground they’re quite clumsy. If they glide too far, they tend not to be able to walk themselves back up to high ground and just either die because they can’t find food or get killed and eaten by predators. The other thing I wanted to mention is, jumping back to Moorcock, the other thing that jumped out at me in terms of the dragons in the Elric books is the pseudoscientific explanation for fire. They don’t actually breathe fire; they spit a —

Lleu: — venomous substance that is extremely flammable and combusts, in the same way that McCaffrey’s like, “Okay, well, they don’t ‘breathe fire’; they exhale a gas that ignites when it comes into contact with oxygen.” So, yes, but the idea of providing a scientific explanation for this, what is fundamentally just a fantasy trope.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And thinking about other kind of subversions or complications, Jane Yolen’s Pit Dragon Chronicles in 1982 — you have a similar idea of a bond with a dragon, although in that one it’s a little more complicated than just Impression, but it’s, I think very deliberately, making it the darker and grittier fantasy, right? These dragons are fighting animals — you basically have evil Pokémon matches going on, and — so that people can bet on them, and the protagonist ends up kind of like stealing a dragon and escaping from this community in order to try and reconnect. You also have the Darkover books, which we’ve discussed before, but in 1982 you get that same psychic animal bond story going on in Hawkmistress! You’ve also just in terms of general, you know, dragon vibes, you’ve got Dragonlance and D&D going on in the ’80s. The Paper Bag Princess is an iconic children’s fiction, and that’s 1980, but I do think it’s relevant, because in The Paper Bag Princess the dragon isn’t necessarily the bad guy. The dragon —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, subverting the, the stories like the St. George story, more than it’s in conversation with later media, perhaps.

Tequila Mockingbird: You also have Dragon’s Milk, by Fletcher, in 1989, which is, again, leaning more into domesticated dragons and the idea that dragons can be vulnerable and have to be protected rather than being scary. So the ’80s is a boom time for dragons, and I do think it’s fair to say that a lot of that is, if not directly inspired by Pern, at least there’s a knock-on effect, if that makes sense?

Tequila Mockingbird: Pern is coming to prominence, and therefore other people are running dragon stories, and therefore other people are — like, it’s the first domino, or one of the first dominoes.

Lleu: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of these come after 1978, when The White Dragon was published and became a bestseller.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Even if it’s just this very straightforward, the publishing industry has figured out the dragons sell right now, so it’s —

Tequila Mockingbird: — a boom time for dragons. And The Colour of Magic, the first Discworld book has a Pern parody sequence in it, and I remember, I hadn’t read a lot of the other stuff that Discworld was parodying. I hadn’t read a lot of other sword-and-sorcery. So I tried to read that and I was like, “I can tell that this is bad on purpose, but I don’t understand why.” And then I got to the Pern sequence, and I remember being like, “Oh! Okay.”

Lleu: Yeah, so by, clearly, 1983, there had been enough Pern and Pern offshoots that Pratchett zeroed in on it as something to to play with.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think, in general, we don’t need to exhaustively list every single book with a dragon in it since the 1980s, because we would be here all week and you can google that. But authors aren’t just passively receiving this; they are engaging with it, as we’ve talked about, and they’re kind of taking it to the next level. Um. So what is the next level from Pern, where you have this very specific connection between an emotional relationship with a dragon and a concomitant sexual relationship with a person, right? That they’re not distinct, because the dragon is the reason that you have this sexual relationship with another person. And how do you move that concept to the next level? You fuck the dragon. So we do start to see, in the ’80s and ’90s, people saying like, “Okay, what if you have this emotional, sexual relationship with a dragon?” I think the first one that I’m really finding is 1992, Vivian Vande Velde’s Dragon’s Bait, in which a village girl is the maiden being sacrificed to the dragon, and she’s furious about this. And when the dragon shows up, she’s like, “Hey, I get it. You’re going to eat me. But can you also eat the whole village? ’Cause I didn’t volunteer for this, and I think they suck.” And the dragon’s like, “Actually I love this for us. You want to get revenge? That’s really fun!” And they end up on a fun revenge spree, and then, of course, it’s revealed that the dragon can shapeshift into a sexy dude —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and events unfurl as I’m sure you could guess. You also have Mary Brown’s four different dragon books that are in the same world, but they don’t share any other characters, in which the protagonist of I think the second one, Pigs Don’t Fly but Dragons Do,[4] which is 1994, does end up falling in love with the dragon, I think.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I can’t remember if the protagonist of the third book ends up in love with the dragon or with the shape-shifting cat. I think it’s the shape-shifting cat, but it’s possible that he is also secretly a dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think he was cursed by a witch into the form of a cat and is trapped there. I read them in middle school. They were not good. But I think that next step is something that you then see. There’s dragon Harlequin romances; there’s sexy dragon shapeshifters narratives.

Lleu: Well, a question that comes to me then that I hadn’t thought about until you framed it this way just now is, to what extent should we think of not the kind of shifter romances where a person turns into hybrid creature or, like, werewolf romance stuff, but the kind of romance —

Lleu: — where human falls in love with an entity that sometimes is in an animal form fully and sometimes is in a human form. I’m thinking about the crow in the —

Lleu: — to what extent is that also an outgrowth of Pern and the ways that emotional and sexual relationship are hinged on this specific, non-human companion creature.

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of that. You definitely do see a lot of that coming out of the 2000s, but I think we should talk about the dragon in the room in terms of the early 2000s.

Lleu: Yeah, which is Eragon, published in 2002. Everyone was reading it. I read Eragon. My partner —

Lleu: — loved Eragon. although mainly saw the movie first, actually, and really liked the movie —

Lleu: — and then read the books and then was devastated that they’d ruined the movie. Um. I think it mainly was because he thought —

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. All right. ’Cause I was like, he’s a nice person and I don’t want you to break up with him, but, like, that’s worrying, but all right. As long — if it’s a foolish crush, we’ve all done foolish things for love.

Lleu: We have. But yeah, we noticed as we were assembling our list of post-Pern things, huh, a whole lot of these things came out in 2003. I was reminded of Diana Pharaoh Francis’s Path books, which don’t have dragons, I don’t think, but do have psychic animal companions that bond with you forever. The Dragonology art book was released in 2003.

Tequila Mockingbird: How to Train Your Dragon — the book; the movie’s much later than that. We’ve also got Mercedes Lackey coming back for her second? Third? Try at a Pern riff with her Joust books in 2003. I think that’s the second one, because I think the Outstretched Shadow books are after that.[5] But that’s yet another psychic bond with a dragon book. I mean, it’s a good concept! And I do kind of feel like every eight or nine years the publishing industry turns around and is like, “Great! Dragons! Those are great!” And you get another wave.

Lleu: Yeah, and, I mean, Eragon is so obvious about it, I guess, but I think brings the two key components of Pern dragons, namely, “psychic animal companion” and “dragonrider as an occupation” back into the fore.

Lleu: So the psychic animal companions in the Path books are, that’s your job now; Joust, the Mercedes Lackey’s dragonriding books, dragonrider is an occupation again, even though the dragons are not psychic, they’re just animals. Then you get the Iskryne books, first one in 2007 — again, the psychic animal companion and bonded with psychic animal companion as a job.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that the psychic animal companion makes you fuck —

Lleu: Yeah. So it’s all Pern. And I mentioned I’m playing Baldur’s Gate at the moment, and, you know, it starts with the alien vessel that your character is trapped on being attacked by a bunch of dragons. With people riding them. Because one of the highest status groups in githyanki society is dragonriders, these special knights who ride dragons into battle. I was like, that’s straight-up just Pern. It’s still here.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s no escape. So yeah, I think that’s pretty much all we have to say. I would love to hear from you, O gentle listener, if there’s some dragon media that you think is very specifically in conversation with Pern that we missed. I just think it’s really fun how things as different as the eagle riders in 1991’s The Duke Who Outlawed Jelly Beans and the mechanical clockwork dragons in 2009’s Havemercy,[6] there’s something there that connects them. And the answer is Pern.

Lleu: Yeah. The other obvious dragon in the room that we haven’t touched on is Fourth Wing. Listeners, neither of us has read Fourth Wing. I don’t know that we necessarily want to, but also I think we’re both a little bit curious.

Tequila Mockingbird: And multiple people, having heard that we’re doing a podcast on Pern’s dragonrider books have been like, “Oh, well, have you read the Fourth Wing?” So, if you think we should, let us know. We are willing to do this terrible thing, but only if people actually want to listen to it.

Lleu: Yeah. I have a recommendation for this, which is Kij Johnson’s short story “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change,” which is, I think, most easily accessible in her excellent short story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees. This is a story about, what if your pets could talk? And, so that’s “the change,” is animals start talking for no reason that people can discern. And it turns out that this is horrible and no one wants this, because animals do not have the same general social values and social mores that humans do, so it turns out when your cat or your dog can talk that people often end up throwing their pets out and abandoning them, um —

Lleu: — so it’s about this community of feral and/or abandoned dogs in North Park and the ways that their folktales are developing, interspersed with the stories of a specific dog in North Park.

Tequila Mockingbird: And my recommendation for this episode is just going to be a good book about dragons, because another question that I’ve gotten a lot when I tell people about this is, “Well, what dragon books should I read?” Or “What dragon books should I recommend to my kids then, if the answer is not Pern?” And my answer to that would be Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, which is a delightful middle grade fantasy about a girl who goes on a fun adventure and ends up rescuing a dragon who becomes her friend and helps her to save her village.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it was great — I really did meet somebody at a wedding a couple of weeks ago who was like, “Oh, yeah, the Dragonriders of Pern books!” Like, “I read those as a kid. It was so great.” And I was like, “Yeah, you know, and then you look back, you’re like, ‘Wow, they were all having weird, creepy sex.’” And he’s like, “They were? What!?”

Lleu: Well, yeah, that’s the thing. I actually would feel perfectly comfortable recommending Pern to children, because they won’t notice.

Lleu: It’s adults that I am more on the fence about Pern for, paradoxically.

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.

[2] On further investigation, the only source we can find for this is the story “Heart of Ice” in Andrew Lang and Leonora Blanche Alleyne’s Green Fairy Book (1892). This is ostensibly a translation of an 18th-century conte de fées by the Comte de Caylus (aka Anne Claude de Caylus), “Le prince Courtebotte et la princesse Zibeline,” originally published in his Féeries nouvelles (1741), but a cursory comparison indicates that Lang and Alleyne heavily edited and abridged Caylus’s text, as well as changing most of the names. In the French text, the fairy referred to in English as “Gorgonzola” is instead known as “Guarlangandino.”

[4] Middle school Tequila misinterpreted the tagline “But dragons do…” as part of the title of the book, but it’s actually just called Pigs Don’t Fly.

[5] The Outstretched Shadow, the first book in the Obsidian Mountain trilogy, was actually also published in 2003.