Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #2: The Smallest Dragonboy (1973)

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

Lleu: And today, as a little bonus episode, we’re talking about “The Smallest Dragonboy,” which is not technically the first Pern short story but is the first that wasn’t immediately adapted into part of a novel. It was originally published in 1973 and then republished in 2001 in A Gift of Dragons, which collects all of the standalone Pern short fiction.

Tequila Mockingbird: And “The Smallest Dragonboy” follows a small boy, Keevan, who is in a Weyr, Benden Weyr, and desperately wants to Impress a dragon but is, you know, smaller than all of the other boys and clearly getting bullied, particularly by Beterli, who is almost too old — he’s been attempting to Impress a dragon multiple times, and it hasn’t worked, and they have some friction, which comes to a head when Beterli knocks Keevan over and breaks his leg and gives him a serious concussion. Beterli is kicked out of the Weyr, but Keevan is heartbroken, because this means he will miss out on the opportunity to Impress a dragon at this Hatching round, and he feels very complicated about this, like he’s not good enough, like he needed to prove himself. So this small child drags his broken leg all the way to the Hatching Ground, and he gets there too late, but then learns, mysteriously, that a bronze baby dragon hatched but didn’t Impress. And everyone’s kind of like, “What happened? What’s going on?” And then, of course, Hoth[1] finds Keevan, and they bond, and K’van does in fact get to become a dragonrider.

Lleu: The one thing I want to add to that plot summary is, it’s not just a concussion — his skull is also slightly broken. So, he’s truly had a time of it and then has a time of it dragging himself all the way across the Weyr to get to the Hatching Ground.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because no-one was supervising this injured small child. Although, to be fair, he was very unconscious.

Lleu: He was very unconscious. One of the things that I do think is interesting here — and also that will show up again in later books — is the bullying.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think that comes from two different places, one of them being that this, along with, I would say, the, Dragonsong, Dragonsinger — like, the Harper Hall books — seems a little more aimed at children?

Tequila Mockingbird: And that bullying is a permanent theme in literature aimed at children, because unfortunately, so far, to the human condition it is a permanent feature of childhood. And I think that McCaffrey clearly wants to set up this idea of, bullying is bad and bullies will be punished, and usually the people who are bullied will be narratively rewarded, and they will get to triumph over their bullies. And, secondly, because it seems clear, whether she meant to do this or not, that Pern is full of bullies, and that this culture of feudal aristocracy, uh, produces bullies. Shocker.

Lleu: I think it’s really interesting that you say this feels like it’s directed at children, ’cause I would absolutely agree, but as far as I know it was not, in fact, published as a children’s story, which is weird, ’cause it…

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, again, there was sort of this very blurry line with speculative fic publishing in the mid-20th century and children’s fiction, and is it or isn’t it, so I would believe that there was this general understanding that a…anthology of fantasy and science fiction books was intended to be read by children, if not only by children, in the ’70s.

Lleu: Hm. Yeah, I’d have to, I guess, look more closely. It was published in Science Fiction Tales, edited by Roger Elwood.

Lleu: Yeah, possibly. The other things that I’m seeing it here are Creatures of the Cosmos in 1977[2] and then Top Fantasy: The Authors’ Choice — that one actually has a Wikipedia article. “An anthology of fantasy short stories edited by Pachter” — I don’t know, this doesn’t seem — there’s, like, J.G. Ballard in here. I don’t think that was probably aimed at children.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, again, I don’t think any of it was intended to only be read by children, but I do think it was sort of —

Tequila Mockingbird: If that makes sense. Honestly, I don’t know that it’s a short story that would hold much interest to an adult if they were not engaged in a project to read all of them and talk about it on a podcast.

Lleu: That’s probably true. There’s some stuff in it that meshes with my specific interests in terms of the series, but it’s…not the most engaging entry, I would say.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. By the time I got about a third of the way through that summary, you could probably have finished it based on the trope and have hit pretty much every beat. It’s not doing a lot that’s new.

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially with the very boring, “Bullies are only bullying because they’re insecure, and also you should just kick their ass and not worry about that” theming.

Lleu: Yeah. So. On the subject of children, one of the other things that this shows us that is interesting is the way parenting works, and this is really our first example of “normal,” quote-unquote, parenting on Pern, except that it’s also not, because it’s within a Weyr. The way child-raising works on Pern generally is that children are fostered out to other Holds or at least to other families within a Hold, in order to, kind of, spread — well, first of all, spread the gene pool around, but also to expose people to different ideas and also implicitly to lift some of the burden of child-raising, especially from the Lord Holders who tend to have large families and lots of children.

Tequila Mockingbird: The impression that I get is that there are some people in the Weyr, specifically, who like kids and want to raise kids, and a lot of people, maybe, who have kids, because they had sex because that was fun, but have really no interest in engaging with those kids.

Lleu: Yes, so, parenting in the Weyrs follows that same structure, in that children are, kind of, fostered by other people than their, kind of, biological parents, but it seems to be for a different reason, or for two different reasons. One is, I think, exactly that — certainly we know Kylara has at least one child, and she would be a horrible parent, so presumably —

Tequila Mockingbird: And even within this story, it doesn’t seem like Keevan’s biological father, K’last, is particularly interested in him, or good with kids, or really engaged in any way other than, “Huh, I’m tall and you’re short; weird.”

Lleu: Yeah. So, he has some, a sort of abstract interest in his child, and also his child kind of reflects on him, so if his child does well and Impresses a “good” dragon — which we’ll talk about later — then that reflects well on him.

Lleu: But he doesn’t, as you say, doesn’t seem to have any particular interest in, you know, raising his child. So he’s raised by someone else. So that’s one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is that it seems also to be done partly to break down family ties, which I think is probably connected to the fact that Weyrs need to function as a harmonious whole and also as a relatively egalitarian whole. There’s a hierarchy within the Weyrs, but the hierarchy is essentially a military command structure. So everyone needs to be obedient to the military command structure and indifferent to any other possible connections.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that, that structure is very much based on the color of your dragon, rather than anything else about you. Not “My kid inherits ’cause he’s my kid,” or “This person gets special privileges because we’re romantically involved.” It has to be just, the dragons make the decisions, functionally.

Lleu: Yeah. I think the other reason that fosterage works this way specifically in the Weyrs is also in order to ensure that there are no family bonds and any of that stuff potentially messing up the Weyr’s, kind of, military hierarchy that it needs to maintain in order to function effectively during Threadfall.

Tequila Mockingbird: But, on the other hand, I think we get a pretty firm — Manora is F’nor’s biological mom; that’s why her name is -nora and his name is -nor. But she does also seem to be the mom who raised him? Question mark?

Lleu: I don’t know that, I don’t think we know who his foster-mother was, but she explicitly tells Lessa —

Lleu: — that she’s proud of F’nor, but not because he’s her son, because that’s not supposed to matter —

Lleu: — but rather because he’s a good dragonrider, and then she’s, pointedly, is like, “I would also suggest three other riders —”

Lleu: “— who are just as good as F’nor.” They have a particularly close bond —

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. Circling back to, “Oh, the dragons make the decisions, it’s not about who you are, it’s about your dragon” — but that does feed into this very clear understanding within the logic of the book that the dragons make that decision based on how good of a person you are.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, it’s repeatedly narratively enforced that Impressing a bronze or a gold dragon specifically means you’re a better person than the people who Impress blue or green dragons. Brown can kind of go either way.

Lleu: Keevan-slash-K’van takes his status as the smallest dragonboy — he’s anxious about the possibility of Impressing any dragon, obviously, ’cause you always want to have a dragon, regardless of color, but in particular he’s like, “Oh, I’d really like to have a brown,” ’cause he doesn’t feel like he can aspire to bronze, ’cause he doesn’t feel like he’s “worthy” of it, but brown is, like, the highest he can imagine.

Lleu: Which, again, is bonkers to me, and also has some really homophobic implications if we think about Weyr sexual politics more broadly —

Lleu: — where green riders are almost exclusively gay men. It’s like, oh, okay, so you think it’s “better,” morally, to be a bronze rider, who are almost always straight men? How fascinating. Novel.

Tequila Mockingbird: Or, at least, specifically in competition to have sex with the female queen dragonriders, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: And there is this implication that what you do recreationally might be different, but only if you’re a bronze dragonrider are you in the running for having sex with the queen dragonriders and being the Weyrleader and having this cultural and military authority. And then it loops back around to, “Oh, yeah, dragons specifically choose hypothetical bronze riders that are gonna be good at that or that are gonna be worthy of that.” And, like, the dragons are psychic, but I don’t think, honestly, personally, that you can tell from a random eleven-year-old that they’re gonna be a good military leader in ten to fifteen years. Like, I just…ehh…

Lleu: I also don’t think, in Dragonsdawn, that that’s one of the things that they are selecting for, for example. And one of the other things that I think is really interesting about this story is, as you put it, the predestination aspect of it, which really, to me, reads as essentially Weyr superstition.

Lleu: That they have all of these ideas about what it means when you Impress a bronze, and that…

Lleu: …kind of pushes people into a particular social role that may not actually reflect their personality or temperament, and certainly we meet unpleasant bronze riders over the course of the series. T’kul is horrible, so it’s difficult to imagine that he Impressed his dragon on the basis of —

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s also this interesting question, because here we see that Hoth[3] was not choosing any of the other candidates, presumably because he in some way knew or sensed that K’van was present, was available to him, and so he was holding out for that.

Tequila Mockingbird: But in other contexts we see these hatchings where it’s like, “Okay, you know, this is the pool of people,” and I think it is implied that, “Oh, you know, somebody managed to Impress a dragon just ’cause they were the best available person, even if they weren’t, maybe, worthy to be a bronze rider,” or something like that. And it’s sort of ambiguous.

Lleu: Yeah. There are two other exceptional cases I can think of, both of which don’t show up until later in the series. One is, Mirrim Impresses —

Lleu: — because she’s like, “I know who I want, and she’s here,” and Mirrim is like —

Lleu: “What’s going on?” And the other is, I’m pretty sure that’s how T’lion Impressed also.

Lleu: ’Cause his older brother was on the Hatching Ground, was a candidate.

Lleu: And T’lion was present at the hatching but in the audience, and Gadareth went looking for him. But it’s clear that this is uncommon.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. So maybe there’s just some radius — the best available human in that radius is what this unhatched dragon is psychically seeking out.

Lleu: So, a newly-hatched dragon is not going to Impress a 40-year-old, as a rule.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s interesting to question the idea of, how much is this purely the dragons’ decision and how much are they also making maybe some kind of reciprocal psychic connection with a young person who is, sort of, open to to the idea of Impressing a dragon, which might affect the age thing, right, where a 40-year-old in the audience —

Lleu: …thinking of themselves as, like, “Oh yeah, I’m ready to become a dragonrider.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Or even wistfully thinking, “Oh, if I could be a dragonrider,” right? Which we sort of assume —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that Mirrim and T’lion were maybe doing in that audience, thinking, like, “Oh, if that could be me…”

Tequila Mockingbird: That there is that psychic openness, maybe, to the possibility.

Lleu: Definitely. I was also gonna say, this is something that we see implicitly in the hatching in Dragonquest —

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, I was just gonna think of Brekke, who’s very much not open to that.

Lleu: But also the queen dragon, like, somersaults out of her egg and several of the other candidates help her up and then step out of the way.

Lleu: — is, like, as soon as a human interacts with the dragon, basically, that’s the, it.

Lleu: Clearly something is going on here where they are consciously excluding themselves for that moment.

Lleu: Yeah. So I think there is something implicitly going on there, yeah. And then also, how much of all of this is shaped by…

Lleu: Cultural expectations especially that are maybe being filtered through the mass of telepathic dragons and dragonriders who are also watching the hatching.

Tequila Mockingbird: And all have very specific ideas about what is supposed to happen here.

Lleu: Yeah. ’Cause this is something that we’re told in other contexts, too, right, that in mating flights, for example, it’s not always the best or fastest bronze.

Lleu: — someone else to win, their dragon will be the one that catches the queen anyway.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also interesting to think about the self-fulfilling prophecy of it all, right? If you think, “Oh, this is the way it always happens,” and then you make it always happen this way, and then it does, and it kind of confirms your own superstition or your own cultural concept of what’s supposed to happen. Again with the bullying, right? Do dragons actually care about bullies, or is there this cultural idea, or… You know? That’s something interesting to tease out, maybe, looking at dragonrider behavior and culture over the course of the series, ’cause I would definitely call, you know, R’gul a little bit of a bully.

Lleu: I would agree, yeah. There are some question marks where some of it maybe is real, some of it seems to be folklore or Weyr superstition, and some of it seems to be some selective interpretations going on, perhaps, in how people remember or put social pressure on people, like, “Oh, you’ve Impressed a bronze; now you have all of these new social expectations on you,” and that inevitably shapes your development as you become a teenager and then a young adult.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. There’s also the fact that K’van-Keevan touches an egg while he’s on the Hatching Grounds ahead of time. Do we know if that’s the egg Hoth[4] hatches out of? I don’t think we do, ’cause he’s not there when it happens.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think it is implied, right. And similarly, Jaxom touches the egg that Ruth ends up hatching out of, and that’s another weird hatching situation.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I do think there’s some implication, and if I recall correctly that might even be stated in Dragonsdawn, that they’re touching the eggs while they’re hardening and that’s on purpose to send the psychic vibes, or whatever.

Lleu: It’s also explicitly mentioned in Dragonflight, too — hatchings used to be bloody and violent and people would die or be seriously injured on a regular basis.

Lleu: And then they decided to start letting candidates onto the Hatching Ground early, and then at Ramoth’s first hatching it’s like, “Yeah, the dragons hatched and they went straight to their chosen riders. It was as if they all knew” —

Lleu: There’s definitely some implication in the series that the touching actually does mean something. It’s interesting that in this K’van-Keevan is explicitly told, like, “We don’t know if it does anything, but it certainly doesn’t do any harm.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It, it does seem like we might know this. Although — ’cause we meet K’van later, right?

Lleu: Yes, when he’s grown into himself, although he’s still… I don’t know; he makes some very stupid off-color jokes in Renegades of Pern. I’m just like, why did she write him this way…

Tequila Mockingbird: Look, he has a short complex, and so everything about his life is fundamentally determined by that for all time.

Tequila Mockingbird: My only other thought is, on one hand, I do believe that kids — not only but particularly boys between the ages of eight and thirteen — have a lot of very intense feelings about how tall they are, because I work with kids of that age —

Tequila Mockingbird: — not infrequently, and, oh, by gosh, they do. But part of what I think makes this feel like a children’s book is the degree to which that fear and that concern is so prevalent in the narration, because it seems so trivial to an adult reader. And it’s interesting that that is something that she’s centering this —

Tequila Mockingbird: — entire story and its title on, which sort of implies that that is considered more important on Pern than I think is otherwise substantiated? I don’t feel like we see a lot of scenes where this, like, “Ah, you’re short and there for useless!”

Lleu: Yeah. The only other thing is people constantly pointing out how short Lessa is, but that’s —

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think that’s more ’cause she’s so terrifying.

Lleu: Right, it’s because she has this wild telepathic presence and attitude.

Lleu: Right, and loves to do murder, so it makes sense that people would be a little bit, like, “But she’s so small!” Which is what Menolly says when she first meets Lessa. Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It’s a perfectly pleasant, a little bit anodyne short story.

Lleu: Yeah. And we somehow got twenty minutes of conversation out of it. So, that’s who we are as people.

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.

[2] Wikipedia describes this as “an anthology of fantasy and science fiction short stories for younger readers,” so Tequila is right that at least some publication venues in the ’70s saw this as a children’s story!