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

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

Lleu: But the only one by us. I’m Lleu, and I, technically, was alive for the last few months of the Soviet Union.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I posit that my conception actually caused the dissolution of the Soviet Union, because I was born almost exactly nine months after it ended.

Lleu: So, today we’re talking about the ’90s. A lot of things happened in the ’90s.

Lleu: Only some of them are relevant, and we’re not entirely sure which ones, but we’re gonna offer you a bunch of speculation. But first, let’s talk about the ’90s books. We covered All the Weyrs of Pern and “Rescue Run” in the ’80s recap episode, and we will probably touch a little bit on Skies of Pern, although this episode is coming out before the Skies of Pern episode, so not too much.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I do think, culturally, the dissolution of the Soviet Union to 9/11 is a far more meaningful 10 years than ’90 to 2000, and maybe I just think that at this point in historical time, and in another century, it’ll seem very different.

Lleu: I would agree, though, with that assessment. However, I don’t know if it’s a particularly relevant unit for Pern, though, because the ’90s books that we have are: the bulk of Chronicles of Pern: First Fall, Dolphins of Pern. Red Star Rising/Dragonseye, “Runner of Pern,” and Masterharper of Pern. What the fuck?

Tequila Mockingbird: So a lot of prequels, especially if we’re not counting All the Weyrs of Pern, we’ve got an even number, basically, and then the short stories weight it more towards prequel energy. And I think there’s something to be said for: this is Pern after Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s finished telling the story that she set out to tell in 1967, and now she’s just having fun! She’s just noodling around. She’s like, “Hey, let’s talk about the Second Pass, shall we?” And she does that for a while, and then she’s like, “You know what? Let’s hit ’em with those dolphins. They’ve always been there.” And she does that for a little bit. Yeah — it feels like retiree energy.

Lleu: It does feel like retiree energy. And, to be fair, I think some of the things that she produces in the ’90s with this retiree energy are pretty good!

Lleu: I love Dolphins of Pern. We were talking before this about awards — All the Weyrs of Pern was a Hugo finalist, and I was like, “If I were gonna give any of the books from the ’90s a Hugo, or have it be on the Hugo shortlist, it would not be All the Weyrs of Pern, it would be Dolphins of Pern or Red Star Rising/Dragonseye, both of which I think are much more interesting and more engagingly written.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Some of what I sense in the ’90s is a lot of novellas that could have been books and books that should have been novellas?

Tequila Mockingbird: Almost none of the ’90s novels really feel like one coherent story as much as they feel like a bunch of novellas shoved into a trenchcoat.

Lleu: — but there’s still the little bits of Toric plot in there to spice things up.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting to note something that she says in the introduction to Skies of Pern — she thanks her daughter, Georgeanne, for reminding her to stay on track, or that she needs to actually pay attention to the characters.[1] Maybe this is a tendency she’s starting to notice in herself, and trying to correct, but it definitely gets away from her over the course of the decade.

Lleu: Yeah. Masterharper, I feel like, is really the case in point, because it’s clearly the most self-indulgent, “Oh, yeah, I love Robinton, and we’re gonna write a big Robinton book.”

Lleu: “And we’ll say it’s because someone else was like, ‘But what about Robinton?’” But we’ve known for 20 years now how obsessed she is with Robinton, so it clearly was a long time coming.

Tequila Mockingbird: What I was saying about retiree energy — she’s indulging herself.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s just writing the stories that are fun for her to write, because she doesn’t have a bigger plot that she needs to address.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s no beats she needs to hit; there’s no loose ends she needs to tie up. She’s frankly going through and untying some ends that were not loose, and winding them out into their own little thing.

Lleu: Yeah, and it pays off. All of the ’90s books, for all their flaws, are, to me, more interesting and more enjoyable to read than All the Weyrs of Pern for precisely that reason, ’cause she’s clearly having fun with it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, there’s a certain sense of Pern returning to its roots, its roots being “satisfying the id in any way necessary.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t really know that I see a lot of overarching thematic interest in those books otherwise. I think her continuity gets even sloppier, and she’s doing a lot of retconning. She is less interested in making the world of Pern make sense, possibly because she’s got an audience — we believe in Pern. We don’t need, to a certain extent, for it all to tie together quite so neatly, because we’ve already bought into this fully realized world. And now, if it starts to get a little messy, we’re willing to give her that grace in a way that maybe we wouldn’t have been if we were coming to a new series without any of that context, or without any of that established route.

Tequila Mockingbird: Does that mean I enjoy that? No — I get twitchy. But I accept it.

Lleu: I actually do think that there is some significant thematic continuity through these, and it’s that after All the Weyrs of Pern, she gets really interested in the relationships and tensions between what we might call “national politics” and “international politics” —

Lleu: — and I think that’s something that we can see running through all of the ’90s books. Certainly Dolphins of Pern; certainly Red Star Rising/Dragonseye, to perhaps the most obvious extent.

Lleu: But also in Masterharper with Fax, and everyone’s like, “Oh, well, that’s a High Reaches problem,” “Oh, that’s a High Reaches and its neighbors problem,” and finally, like, “Oh, I guess maybe this is everyone’s problem, after all.” And then Skies of Pern, too.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s a question of, is this where autonomy on Pern ends?

Lleu: I think, to some extent, yeah. Certainly by the time we get to Skies of Pern there’s no longer the separation of Hold, Craft, and Weyr that we saw even in-world, apparently, only two years before, in All the Weyrs of Pern, because in the Council in Skies of Pern — and we’ll talk about this in our episode — everyone is voting on confirming the new Lord Holder, not just other Lord Holders, but also the Weyrleaders, apparently the Weyrwomen, and the Craftmasters. Something that, two years previously, as confusing as the numbers at the Tillek Council were —

Lleu: Maybe, yeah — there’s a couple secret Craftmasters who snuck in and are voting in some rounds and not voting in others. That’s probably it, yeah.

Lleu: And — right, and so by two years later, they’ve given up, like, “Well, the Craftmasters are gonna sneak their way in anyway —”

Tequila Mockingbird: So that’s an interesting question, of whether that reflects the specific changes on Pern in the sense of, Thread is no longer there, and so there isn’t this justification for incredibly siloed autonomy and more authoritarian rule, but also the question of whether this is McCaffrey moving away from libertarianism or a belief in this political philosophy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I do think there’s a vibe that she puts that into the original colonists and into the original Pern world-building because she thinks it’s a good idea.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because she believes the fantasy of American libertarian colonialism in space, and maybe this is her, 30 years later, going, “Eh…”

Lleu: Well, I think in some ways it’s her changing her mind a year or two later, between writing the stories in Chronicles of Pern: First Fall and the time that she’s writing Dolphins of Pern and especially Red Star Rising and then Masterharper.

Lleu: And there’s some significant historical things that happened in that period that might have made her look around and be like, “Huh, maybe autonomy is not actually the be-all, end-all for this.” I’m thinking about the Rwandan genocide, and then also the Yugoslav Wars, and in particular, the way that she handles refugees in the ’90s books, in Red Star Rising and in Masterharper, especially, and —

Lleu: — a little different, but to some extent also in Skies of Pern, really, to me, feels like she was thinking about —

Lleu: — contemporary politics, yeah. There’s a lot of things happening in the ’90s. She was living in Ireland during the time when the European Union was created. So, the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 officially transformed the European Communities into the European Union. The Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 restructured the EU, and then the Treaty of Nice in 2001, which was written in particular with an eye to expanding the EU to encompass the newly independent post-socialist states in Central and Eastern Europe. So there’s definitely a big transformation going on in European politics at the time, and it’s something that, and it’s something that, notably, there was anxiety about in Ireland, because in June 2001 —so, four months after the UK release of Skies of Pern, two months after the US release of Skies of Pern — Irish voters rejected the Treaty of Nice in a referendum, and then it had to go back for another round of voting.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I could see how it would be something that would preoccupy her professionally, as well as perhaps personally.

Lleu: Yeah — the question of this negotiation between autonomy — local autonomy, national autonomy — and international politics, international intervention, transnational governance, that that might have been particularly on her mind, because it was particularly on everyone’s mind.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And I think, in general, we talked already about the “end of history”[2] and the post-Soviet, post-Cold War world and the “end of history” in terms of All the Weyrs of Pern and the end of the plot, but I think there’s something, as well, to the question of where you go when there isn’t an easy and obvious answer. What story do you tell when you’re not fighting the big, scary bad guy that’s been the big, scary bad guy the whole time?

Lleu: Yeah. If we take the ’90s Pern books as answers to that question, I think some of it’s really interesting. Obviously, Red Star Rising/Dragonseye is leading up to the return of Thread, but it also is thinking about, what do you do when there’s nothing to do? There’s no one to fight. There’s a political crisis to deal with, but then you deal with it, and then you’re just kind of waiting for the next shoe to drop. And I wonder if, to some extent, that’s how she and, I suspect, many other people, felt in the ’90s. The new world balance of power is still working itself out. We’re coming out of the Gulf War, so there’s sort of this renewed attention to the Middle East, but not in a way that makes it clear what’s going on…

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s also the Troubles, which are going out with a bang instead of a whimper —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and definitely could be described as waiting for another shoe to drop, I would suspect, at various periods.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think also the question of, what enemy do you fight? And the way that you think about an enemy that has to be justifiable. And I’m thinking of this more in a genre context, I guess, than in a real history context, but American film and literature definitely suffers from the, “Well, who’s the bad guys if it’s not the Russians anymore?”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Who is our easy, obvious enemy that isn’t morally complicated at all?” And the answer turned out to be “drugs” for a while. We tried that, you know, drug dealers and kidnappers. And then we pivoted hard into “terrorists,” and we kind of haven’t quite climbed out of that yet.

Lleu: Yeah. As we’ve seen, bad guys in general are something that McCaffrey struggles with. She has a hard time generating believable villains.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t really think the 90s is an exception. Chalkin is very cartoonish.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think she does a slightly better job with “situational enemy” rather than a specifically villainous character.

Lleu: The thing that jumps out at me in the ’90s is that in the ’90s Thread is no longer really a meaningful villain-obstacle.

Lleu: Red Star Rising/Dragonseye, Thread shows up in the last 20 pages. Dolphins of Pern, it’s there, but it’s there as annoyance rather than strong threat.

Lleu: Yeah, and in Skies of Pern, again, Thread is kind of an annoyance. It’s the Abominators who are the villain, and natural disasters.

Lleu: If we, I think not unreasonably, suspect that perhaps part of the genesis of Thread and the evil Red Star was, in fact, Cold War politics, then it makes sense that with the end of the Cold War, she’s a little bit like, “Well…”

Lleu: Yeah — “I have to find something new.” And she doesn’t settle on anything new. She explores a bunch of options, and none of them are really super compelling, frankly. But she does try them all out.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think it is interesting that she ends up closer to Thread, as in a natural disaster, right? An unthinking menacing, but not malicious —

Tequila Mockingbird: — enemy, rather than a human villain closing her out.

Lleu: She is better at that, I would say. The other thing, historically, that I wanted to talk about is the two sides of globalization and resistance to globalization. So, on the one hand, left-wing anti-globalization protests I would say are not necessarily a huge influence, but on the other hand, the ’90s are also the big jump in right-wing Christian violence, and especially, again, we’ll talk about this in Skies of Pern, but I was thinking a lot about the way that she frames technology and access to technology in terms of “choice,” that made me think, “Hm, she was thinking about bombing abortion clinics —”

Tequila Mockingbird: And there is, I would say, a renewed focus on the rights of women and the autonomy of women within Pernese society in the books in the ’90s, partly because a chunk of them are prequels where she’s going back into Pernese history. But even in the quote-unquote “contemporary” books, I think we are seeing more of that question of, can you have a female Lord Holder? Can you have a female Craftmaster who is leading their Craft instead instead of just a master in their Craft?

Tequila Mockingbird: And how much does the average wife have a say in a relationship with her husband? If those terms are meaningful on Pern.

Lleu: Yeah — who knows, genuinely. After a period where, in a lot of the ’80s books, we get some gestures towards social questions, but not, I would say, a ton of in-depth engagement with gender politics, sexual politics, now they’re back.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think it’s been since Moreta and Nerilka that we were really this up close and personal with it, in some ways.

Lleu: Yeah. The last time that a nontrivial portion of a book was from a female protagonist’s perspective was Dragonsdawn —

Lleu: — but that’s a solid eight years and several books between that and when Debera shows up again in Dragonseye.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Some of these preoccupations with the questions of refugees, with autonomy versus governmental oversight, with the rights of women and the roles of women in futuristic society or even contemporary society are also showing up in McCaffrey’s collaborations with other authors, which is something that really kicks off in the ’90s. We’ve mentioned this before: she starts co-writing a lot with younger writers, and I think it’s pretty clear that she was starting to feel like she was slowing down, you know, mentally, physically, in her health, all of that. She is getting to be kind of elderly, and so she’s co-writing with these younger writers, and it seems like often she’s providing ideas and storyboarding and maybe characterization, world-building, and the other writer is doing a lot of the mechanical craft of actually writing the book. We don’t, I think, know that, but that seems congruent with what she said in interviews about this, and what we see in the texts of the books themselves. A lot of them don’t really “read like McCaffrey,” quote-unquote, in the words, but the story beats are very much there.

Lleu: Mm. It’s also worth noting that after Skies of Pern, there’s just two short stories left that she wrote solo, and then everything else that’s Pern is either her notionally co-writing with Todd, Todd writing solo, or — much later — Gigi writing solo.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and, similarly, in her non-Pern stuff, there’s — Freedom’s Ransom in 2002 is credited to her solo, and I don’t think anything after that is.

Tequila Mockingbird: But she does continue to publish co-written things until, I think, 2008? 2009? Before her death in 2011. This is where we — Tequila — comes to the fore, because I actually discovered McCaffrey simultaneously in two different directions. I was reading the Pern books, and then I also found some of her co-written stuff, because I was a huge Mercedes Lackey fan. I hadn’t really known that it was co-written with McCaffrey, so I had this cool, like, “Oh wait, that’s the same person!” as a little child. So there are six authors that she’s collaborating with in the ’90s, some really only once. S.M. Stirling, she has one book with him; he’s a military sci-fi kind of a guy. And one book with Mercedes Lackey, who is more on the romantasy-before-it-was-romantasy side. And those books are both from the Ship Who Sang continuity, so that’s a short story collection that McCaffrey wrote all the way back in the ’60s that then she opens up the world and ends up co-writing and allowing other people to write in that universe without her, I think, as well, sometimes. And one of those is also Jody Lynn Nye, who ends up writing The Ship Who Won with her, and she collaborates a couple of other times with Jody Lynn Nye, who you might remember from the Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern, and I think most of those are also sequels to previous McCaffrey concepts, like the Crisis on Doona and the Treaty at Doona, but one of them, I think, is original, The Death of Sleep, but I haven’t read that one, so I can’t say much about it. She has a couple co-written with Elizabeth Moon, who is also a military sci-fi author. She also has a couple with Margaret Ball, who is mostly a romance novelist, but has a couple of crossover sci-fi romances with McCaffrey, including inventing the Acorna series. And then a bunch with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, which includes continuing the Acorna series. So she was hopping around a lot, and clearly — it seems like a lot of these ideas were very much seen as communal ideas, you know, open sandbox, “Hey, let’s come play together,” or “Oh, that’s a fun idea; come write a book with me!” It doesn’t really seem like anybody was worried about whose ideas were whose, which is nice, I think.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I know at least Mercedes Lackey has been on record as saying that she thinks you can’t copyright an idea and that’s ridiculous. If you like it, write it, and if it’s good, it’ll get published, and if it’s not, it won’t. But the Acorna books were very big for me. I read a bunch of them, and in there I think you do see a lot of those similar ideas about refugees and human rights and the ability of a government to intervene when a corporation is abusing human rights.

Tequila Mockingbird: You also see some gestures at ideas about feminism, and a whole lot of Islamophobia, sort of woven together in some very clumsy ways, uh, and that does all feel very ’90s and very much in keeping with some of the ’90s themes that we’ve seen in her Pern books.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think most of these collaborators are about one generation younger than McCaffrey, like, most of them are 20 to 30 years younger than she is —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and several of them have had significant, you know, publishing careers beyond these books. I think it’s fair to say that in almost all cases, she was more famous than them, or more of a draw, publishing-wise, when they first collaborated.

Tequila Mockingbird: So she’s given a hand up to younger writers, as well as, perhaps, relying on them as she’s winding down her career.

Lleu: Yeah. Mercedes Lackey might be the exception, but Arrows to the Queen was —

Lleu: — ’87, so, yeah, never mind. The other thing I was gonna say about Lackey is that I also don’t know how many people are coming new to her work now.

Lleu: Which is, I suspect, perhaps also true of Pern. I don’t know, in the ’90s, how many people were coming new to any of the ’90s books. There were still new people coming to Pern, but I don’t know that they were coming to Pern on the strength of the ’90s books, or even necessarily on the strength of awareness of the ’90s books.

Lleu: My copy of Skies of Pern is a first edition from 2001 hardcover that I read in 2001 and had not read again until this past week, but I don’t think that — I don’t think it was the new books —

Lleu: — that were coming out that inspired my mother to get Dragonsong out of the library on cassette. I think it was her being like, “I like these books.”

Lleu: So I guess the last little thing to talk about is a little bit about the broader genre context, which, in part because McCaffrey was collaborating with so many people, she certainly was still engaged with the broader science fiction and fantasy scene, but I can’t really speak to what impact that might have had, because none of the ’90s science sci-fi and fantasy books that I’ve read feel particularly relevant to this. The one big development that I know was going on beginning in the late ’80s and picking up in the ’90s was the quote-unquote “new space opera” boom. Iain Banks, Lois McMaster Bujold…

Lleu: So McCaffrey’s doing something that’s certainly different from Banks and I think different from Weber —

Tequila Mockingbird: Definitely, although he is also thinking quite a lot about politics and the way that autonomy versus nationalization versus —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that stuff definitely does show up a lot in the Honor Harrington books, especially sort of in the middle of the series, although I’m not sure if those were published until the early 2000s.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think it is interesting to note that she’s not doing what mainstream sci-fi is doing at that point —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in part because Pern is carrying over what was trendy 20 years before.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right? She’s still in planetary romance in some ways. But in part just because I think some of what is happening in American sci-fi in the ’90s is developing more specific subcultures, right? You’ve got space opera; you’ve got cyberpunk; you’ve got more women-led, romance-heavy sci-fi; and they are developing these very separate flavors.

Tequila Mockingbird: We spoke in previous decade retrospectives about the way that science fiction really consolidated in the ’70s, and “Hey, this is a genre, guys!” for fantasy — “We are all actually playing by the same rulebook,” and maybe now it’s been long enough that we’re scattering again, publishing-wise.

Lleu: It’s funny you mention cyberpunk, because it’s interesting how absent computers continue to be from Pern —

Lleu: — even in Skies of Pern, where there are computers still, but it’s because she kind of wrote herself into that corner in 1988 —

Lleu: — and she’s still stuck with, they can’t have more technology than what I wrote them with in Dragonsdawn.

Lleu: Yeah. The turn of the 90s and the Four Asian Tigers period in the ’90s, everyone’s all about Cool Japan and techno-Orientalism, all of these things, and McCaffrey’s like, “Don’t know about that. Don’t care.”

Tequila Mockingbird: — Elizabeth Moon was in the marines, and so she’s writing military sci-fi with female protagonists in the ’90s, and I think still to this day.

Tequila Mockingbird: And by the late ’90s she’s being joined by Tanya Huff — there are definitely military sci-fi books out there —

Tequila Mockingbird: — by female authors with female protagonists, or by male authors with female protagonists, in the case of David Weber. But it’s definitely, I would say, not the norm. It is, I think, worth noting that although I don’t think you could or should call most of McCaffrey’s stuff “military sci-fi” there is almost always an enemy, at some point, that we blow up or shoot at or set on fire.

Lleu: — structured, highly trained force dedicated to defeating that enemy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even the Rowan books, the Tower and the Hive series, which start as very much, their job is transportation — they’re the Teamsters Union; they’re not the military.

Tequila Mockingbird: We do get alien enemies showing up that we have to negotiate with or battle, and that becomes a big part of it. TV-wise, I do think we are seeing a lot of female protagonists in sci-fi and fantasy pop culture. We’ve got Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we’ve got Charmed. We’ve got Xena —

Lleu: Yeah, also, as we talked about with some of the late ’80s books, not only is Star Trek back, but three Star Treks are back all at the same time.

Tequila Mockingbird: More Star Trek than you thought you wanted, but, actually, it’s good.

Lleu: Technically not all at the same time; the TNG movies, anyway, overlapped with both DS9 and Voyager, so, same difference.

Lleu: One of the things that’s happening, then, leading up also to, in ’99, the return of Star Wars, is the —

Lleu: — consolidation of sci-fi and fantasy not as fringe nerd genres, but as mainstream-popular.

Lleu: Many people watch these, and a smaller number of many people read these genres.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and I think there might be something to the fact that — I don’t know if it would be in the ’80s or the ’90s, but, at some point in there, we definitely crossed the line from “the average person’s association with sci-fi and fantasy is books”[4] to “the average person’s association with sci-fi and fantasy is film.”

Lleu: Mm, yeah, definitely. I also don’t know exactly when that would have happened. If we had time machines, it would be really interesting to go back and poll people on that every year.

Lleu: One question that we might consider is, when were the Hugo Awards for visual media introduced?

Lleu: Okay, first awarded ’58, but split into long-form and short form in 2003. I think the split in 2003 is probably telling in terms of — especially given how long the process of changing the awards takes —

Lleu: — yeah, that probably is an indicator that there was a sufficient volume of speculative television, in particular, in the ’90s that people started to think, “We need a long-form and a short-form category; just one category for everything is no longer adequate.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I’d buy that. And I think it definitely didn’t wait until the ’90s, but the question of when is there going to be a movie or TV adaptation of Pern has certainly been floating around since then, if not before then.

Tequila Mockingbird: I know that it was clearly happening while Anne McCaffrey was alive, because she talked about it, having optioned things, and then it didn’t work out, or…

Lleu: Yeah. So, the rights were already circulating in the ’90s, because the animated TV show Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders[5] was originally a Pern adaptation, and it got redeveloped as what it turned out to be.

Lleu: ’96, McCaffrey sold the motion picture rights to an Irish company, but “distribution pre-sale efforts failed,” so it didn’t go anywhere. 2002, Warner Bros., but the writer didn’t like the amount of edits that were being suggested, so backed out, so that was canceled. 2006, rights were optioned; 2014, Warner Bros. optioned all 22 volumes of the series for a feature live-action film. Later in 2014, “Warner Bros. hired author-screenwriter Sarah Cornwell to adapt the first installment of the series.” I don’t think we’ve heard anything since then, so…[6]

Lleu: But in any case, I do think it’s worth noting that the ’90s were the first time that someone actually tried to do a visual media adaptation of Pern —

Lleu: — that ended up not being a visual media adaptation of Pern, but an attempt was made, briefly.

Tequila Mockingbird: Many have said, and I’m sure will continue to say, that it does seem like it should be possible. They’re very cinematic.

Lleu: Yeah. I think Pern would obviously be an amazing prestige TV drama —

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. You could really got weird with the dragons if you animated it.

Lleu: Yeah. You’d do Pern with gorgeous 2-D animation… It’d be really good.

Tequila Mockingbird: All right, and I think that’s about all we have to say.

Lleu: Yeah. This has been a very rambly decade recap episode, but it’s because the ’90s books are kind of rambly.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also think there’s something to, it’s weirdly harder to try and do a recap of a decade that you lived through?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because both I can’t help but keep privileging my personal experience and because I just have less academic exposure, critical exposure, because I’m more interested in stuff that happened before I was born.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so I think a lot of what I notice and what I think of as “this is what was happening in the ’90s” is “this is what was happening to tiny baby Tequila in the ’90s,” but that’s not necessarily representative of the genre as a whole or the market as a whole.

Lleu: Right — the fantasy and science fiction books that I was reading in the ’90s were mostly children’s books.

Tequila Mockingbird: Everyone was reading Animorphs. This is actually the key cultural preoccupation of the decade.

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.

[1] Rather, that she needs to pay attention to the main characters instead of side characters.

[2] To be clear, neither of us has actually read Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man; we’re just working from cultural osmosis.

[3] We should also have mentioned C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union books.

[5] Released as Starla and the Jewel Riders outside of the US and Canada.