Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #3: Human Demographics

Lleu: 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.

Tequila Mockingbird: And today we're talking about numbers, which, on one hand, is a dangerous proposition for a pair of English majors —

Tequila Mockingbird: — to set out on. Would never; would never. But, on the other hand, I am actually licensed to teach math up to the seventh grade level.

Lleu: That seems like a reasonable amount of math for us to have to use for this.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And we're, we're not gonna do any calculus here. If this is what you were hoping for from this episode, I'm sorry; you will not find it. But arithmetic, on the other hand — I am very confident in my arithmetic.

Lleu: Well, I think probably you're even doing algebra, right? If you’re doing —

Lleu: — population calculations, that involves essentially compound interest.

Tequila Mockingbird: But today we're going to be talking about the numbers that we get in the books, and also the numbers that we think should be in the books, but are not there, and a little bit about why and how. We are hopefully gonna be splitting this and looking both from a diegetic perspective of, how can we make the numbers that we get in the text to make sense, and also, from an extradiegetic perspective, what influences might have been working on McCaffrey. That would give her this information, which we don't know is actually accurate or realistic.

Lleu: Yes. Also we should specify. When we say numbers, we mean population figures.

Tequila Mockingbird: Let's start with a little bit of that extradiegetic context, thinking about the fact that as McCaffrey is writing these books, there is a resurgence of neo-Malthusian sentiment, or economic logic at work in American and European academia. So it's entirely possible, and I feel very comfortable saying that that probably influenced her thinking about some of the population shifts over Pernese history.

Lleu: Yeah. It's certainly difficult for me to imagine that it wasn't an influence, given how prevalent it is in so much older sci-fi — concerns about overpopulation, too many people, blah blah blah blah blah, all of these things.

Tequila Mockingbird: And even what we see in Moreta, where they have this plague, and it's very specifically bound up in this idea of like, “Oh, the holds have been overpopulated and that's the problem, or, like, that's the reason that we are primed for this plague,” with also the implication that they haven't had an influenza epidemic in the past several hundred years.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which I just don't actually believe. I just don't think that that is possible, but it definitely seems to be the claim that the text is making.

Lleu: It does seem, I must say, dubious, that after 1,600 years of isolation a feline variety of influenza would immediately be able to jump to humans.

Tequila Mockingbird: Also just the fact that they're saying with confidence that this hasn't ever happened before, and their most accurate written record is at most —

Tequila Mockingbird: You don't actually know if it's ever happened before. And the fact that someone was bothering to teach vaccination —

Tequila Mockingbird: — theory 50 years before seems to suggest to me, at least, that at some point somebody in the Healer Hall thought that that was necessary and relevant information to maintain and pass along.

Lleu: Yeah, that's sort of a general question about Pern, is, what kinds of illness actually are…around.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we do learn about some indigenous parasites and/or viruses and/or bacteria that affect people. The firehead fever that seems pretty endemic to the Southern continent.

Lleu: Although it also seems to be seasonal in a way — the way it's described, it's associated with the beaches, so it seems to be some kind of algae or something that was on whatever fruit Jaxom and Menolly ate.

Tequila Mockingbird: I'd buy that, but also we don't really know, because they don't really know.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it is, to me, beyond the range of possibility that you have a population that is primarily agrarian and involved in livestock raising. And there aren't any kind of issues with illnesses jumping from livestock animals to humans. Ever.

Lleu: We do find out in other books, like, in Renegades, the Hold that Thella has claimed is something where everyone died of a plague 100-ish years before.

Lleu: And no-one reclaimed it, so we know that there are other plagues, but also Moreta does kind of imply that this is the first plague in, at least, a long time.

Tequila Mockingbird: There's also obviously the questions both of, how much medical technology was able to persist through Pernese history, whether, perhaps —

Tequila Mockingbird: — they had some kind of medical infrastructure, medical information, or access far longer than other technology, because I do think it's fair to imagine that they would prioritize that, and that that maybe had —

Tequila Mockingbird: — faded away or died off 300 or 400 years before the Sixth Pass, during the First Long Interval. And so you hadn't had a significant illness issue but also there was a reason for that, and that reason has eroded by the time you get to the events of Moreta. So let's look at when the first colonists arrive on Pern. We get an actual number of people on the Yokohama, and we know that the Yokohama is bigger than the two other ships.

Lleu: Well, I think in fact, we're explicitly told that there are approximately 6,000 people.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, I think 6,023 — we get a very specific number. The Dragon Lover’s Guide to Pern, also gives some pretty specific numbers in terms of, about 2,600 of those people are charterers, and about 2,700 of them are contractors, and 721 — such a specific number, and I don't know why — are the nomadic refugee populations that have not technically signed onto the Pernese charter, but have also come to Pern. So that’s at the time of landing. Roughly. eight years later we get the first Threadfall, and we know that that kills a significant chunk of the population, because that's basically everybody who is outside in the strip of the Southern Continent that that Threadfall affects, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: There are, I think, three people who are outside, not undercover, and survive. And it's Sean, Sorka, and David Catarel, and, as far as we know, everybody else who was not under some kind of shelter doesn't make it.

Tequila Mockingbird: We get the two babies in the Tuareg encampment, and Porrig Connell and the Traveller community that hide in a cave and mostly survive, but we know that multiple entire communities are completely wiped out —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because they were using a compressed vegetable matter as their roofing, instead of stone or metal.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we are very specifically told right that most of the nomadic population is gone. And so I would put those numbers at…1,500 to 2,000 deaths, probably? Not sure. We don't get any hard numbers.

Lleu: Yeah, well, it's hard to discern how widely distributed the population was at this point.

Tequila Mockingbird: We're told that it's pretty spread out, because we're told that then everyone has to come back to Landing and recentralize. And it's implied that that's a very significant change, that Landing, which had been pretty empty, is suddenly overcrowded.

Lleu: Yes, that is how that is how it's described, but it's not like there's a bunch of kind of scattered homesteads across the southern continent. It's that there are a handful of in turn relatively centralized stake settlements —

Lleu: — scattered across the Southern Continent. So it's not like, “We have to bring in people from 200 different communities.” It's, “we have to bring in people from 15 different communities,” which requires effort and time and resources, but it’s not quite on the same level.

Tequila Mockingbird: Fair. But I do think it's imply that those stakes have maybe multiple households contained within them.

Lleu: Yes, but it seems from the way they're described — Tarvi and Sallah’s —

Lleu: — mine Hold, for example: it seems to me that that is being described as, fundamentally, it is one settlement that has maybe four or five families living in it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, and the implications for that in terms of the education that they were planning to offer to their children is fascinating to me. But, in general, I'm not super thrilled by a lot of the choices that these initial colonizers were making.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because, we are also told — and this is in a short story, “Rescue Run,” that we will get to on the podcast in February — that the population on Pern at that point is almost 20,000 people.

Tequila Mockingbird: Now, it is entirely possible that that number is not accurate, because that number comes from Stev Kimmer, who is a lying asshole, but I don't think there's any real reason for him to lie at that point about that information.

Tequila Mockingbird: If anything, he would be downgrading the population numbers instead of inflating them.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that's wild, because that implies that there was a 15% population growth rate in the first eight to ten years of settlement on Pern, which suggests that since of that initial 6,000 and change people arriving — we know that not all of them were adults, right, although it does seem like not a lot of people were kids, because it's implied that part of the reason they bond is there aren't that many other people their age —

Tequila Mockingbird: — on the planet, and not all of those women would have been of childbearing age, because we do know that a fair number of them are pretty elderly. Cherry Duff is more than 100 years old, etc.

Tequila Mockingbird: So if we're gonna assume, call it 2,000, 2,000 and change, women of childbearing years in that initial 6,000, they would each have to have had six kids in that time? But that does not actually contradict what we're told, which is that Sallah’s got four kids, her friend who marries Drake Bonneau also has four or five, Mairi Hanrahan has had multiple other children…

Lleu: Yeah. There's a vague implication, that I think if these numbers are remotely accurate probably it supports, that there is some kind of legal obligation to have children if you are signed on to the charter.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And I get that, okay, we're trying to populate a planet here. But what's your rush? You don't actually need to do it all in the first ten years, my guys.

Tequila Mockingbird: But that does mean that if we look at that slightly less than 20,000, more than 14,000 of those would be children at the time of the first Threadfall.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I would assume that for those outlying communities that are completely wiped out right, that would be probably the entire family would be completely wiped out.

Tequila Mockingbird: But of the Landing-based deaths, those would mostly be adults, because it's hunting parties, it's people who are taking care of livestock. Those are the people who would have been outside without shelter —

Tequila Mockingbird: — as opposed to children who probably would have been in some kind of childcare situation.

Lleu: — or immediate family member, as we see in the prelude to the Threadfall.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even if they were playing outside, it would have been close to a house, and therefore more likely to be able to bring them inside —

Lleu: The people who die are the people who were out on tasks, which is not usually the case for six year olds —

Tequila Mockingbird: — it's not impossible that there would have been pretty significant rates for tweens and early teenagers, because traditionally, in an agricultural situation like that, kids of that age are outside doing independent field work.

Lleu: Yeah. It seems like, yes, they did enlist the teenagers when they first arrived on the planet to do that kind of work — Sean and Sarka are out doing biological survey stuff at age 13.

Tequila Mockingbird: True. Those would have been children who arrived on the planet at like four.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is kind of an awkward age to transport kids through space.

Lleu: Yeah. Even if all of the tweens did die, I think it's probably not actually making a huge impact relative to the —

Tequila Mockingbird: Alright, so that makes me assume that post-Threadfall you've probably got, I don't know, 4,500 adults and maybe 10,000 kids left standing?

Tequila Mockingbird: And that adds an interesting dimension to the kind of chaos of the evacuation of Landing and the initial resettlement at Fort, because, my god, you're trying to get anything done with 10,000 children under the age of ten underfoot.

Lleu: Well, it's no wonder, then, that we get the detailed descriptions of all of the different tasks that children under the age of ten are being assigned to do —

Tequila Mockingbird: And also the fact that they do have an entire shuttle just full of children taking the Crossing.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would suspect they would need more than one of those — that might have just been orphaned children, or children under the age of five, you know, something like that, who couldn't go with a family unit —

Tequila Mockingbird: And it's just funny, too, because we really don't get a window on that in the second half of Dragonsdawn, because Sean and Sorka could not care less about their own infant-slash-toddler child, and in fact, it is implied that that is specifically what leads to a lot of Weyr fostering culture, is that Sean and Sorka are just like, “Uh, Michael? We don’t have time for this baby.”

Lleu: Truly everything comes down to Sean and Sorka's personal preferences, and that got extrapolated outwards, which is so funny and clearly was not —

Lleu: — how she was conceiving of it as she wrote the earlier books. But it's so funny to me that she decided to commit to that in characterizing the first dragonriders, like, yeah, actually, all of the weird stuff is just because Sean is like that. And Sorka is —

Tequila Mockingbird: Once they get to Fort Weyr, there’s a plague about 4 years after their arrival that also kills off 4,000 or so people.

Lleu: Yeah. So if we take these numbers that we've been working with, that number feels in some ways low, because you’re going to have thousands of children under the age of still eight at that point.

Lleu: Who are much more susceptible to illness and living in a confined area where there's thousands of people in —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, although there are also gonna be weird situations, ’cause “plague” is so vague.

Tequila Mockingbird: We don't really know what that means. Spanish influenza epidemic, specifically it was the adults who died, and young children pretty much were fine, so maybe that's what it looks like.

Tequila Mockingbird: If you're talking about something like cholera that's actually from like fecal contamination in a water source, which I could fully believe, since you've packed 14,000 people into a cave. That's gonna be incredibly localized. If this part of the water source got contaminated, everyone who lived right over here and was drinking from this water source is going to die, and the people two rooms over who had a different water source, aren't going to.

Lleu: I believe it's explicitly referred to as the “fever years,” but I think that is all that we know about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And the thing about fever is it's kind of gonna show up —

Tequila Mockingbird: — anytime you're sick, ’cause that's an internal immune response.

Tequila Mockingbird: That could be flu, that could be cholera, that could be flipping diphtheria. But they would have still had pretty solid medical technology at that point. Presumably they might still have had medications at that point.

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that wouldn't have been true later. And so, if you're losing a quarter of your population, that to me might suggest that either it's something like a virus that you can't whip up a cure for —

Tequila Mockingbird: — or it's something like cholera, that basically just kills by —

Tequila Mockingbird: — symptoms; you can't cure it, you can just manage symptoms, and there's nothing else you can do about it once somebody has it.

Lleu: I'm thinking also about other aspects of medical knowledge that are available to them. It's one of the, I would say, running inconsistencies in the series, in that things show up when it's convenient narratively, which is, I mean, perfectly reasonable frankly, especially for a book series that ran for 35 years.

Lleu: But also means that attempting to follow it over the course of the series is sometimes, as with everything that we are discussing in this episode —

Tequila Mockingbird: The other thing about it being so close to the initial colonization point is, they still would have known things about water contamination.

Tequila Mockingbird: Once, you know that it's water contamination, you can make better choices about when and how you are getting your water source and notice things, and, you know, respond more effectively than you could when it was just, like, “Yeah, some people die of cholera, and we just don't know why.”

Lleu: Especially in a context where there is a highly centralized administrative structure —

Lleu: — that they put in place precisely to deal with a community-wide emergency.

Tequila Mockingbird: But you know it's not like people don't die of diseases today. And it's not like they're stupid; it’s just that you don't have resources to deal with them, so I could believe that you lose enough real resources in the Crossing —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that maybe you know exactly what's going on, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you lose 4,000 or people.

Tequila Mockingbird: Then that gives us, call it 10,000 or so. And we don't get really specific numbers for the entire population of the planet ever again in the text. We do get, in extracanonical sources like the Pern Atlas, the Dragon Lover’s Guide to Pern, things like that, which I would call I don't know, moderately canonical? Representative of authorial intention? But not necessarily completely canonical. Is that fair?

Lleu: Yeah, that seems fair. I would rather not consider them canonical at all, frankly, given some of the things that are in them, but…

Lleu: Yes, I think we can take them barely as an indication of McCaffrey's intentions.

Tequila Mockingbird: And sometimes they seem wildly contradictory with the lived reality of the text, and sometimes it just seems like she didn't understand the numbers, or didn't double-check.

Tequila Mockingbird: But in that we get a number of roughly 5 million as the total Pernese population in the Ninth Pass. And I don't actually hate that number. That number to me seems roughly plausible. I'm not great with conceptualizing of numbers like that. My problem is that, I can solidly conceptualize of a settlement roughly 6,000 or so. Because that's our undergrad population, right? Not counting grad students. It was about 6,000 people.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I sort of feel like I have a feeling for a community of that size. I can conceptualize less than 200 people cause. That's the community my grandparents live in in a rural area. And I live in New York, which has a population of eight million, with roughly 14 million people who work here. So in between, I'm not great.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m kinda like, well, I've only ever lived in communities at those two extremes. I don't really have a good gut check for what five million people feels like.

Lleu: Given the kinds of indications that we get of Hold populations. And some of that, it’s hard, because sometimes the numbers that we're being provided for with Hold populations clearly have to be the population of the Hold proper, right?

Lleu: In Moreta we're apparently told that Igen Hold has “nearly a thousand people.” That has to be the Hold proper and not —

Lleu: Which I think is almost certainly the whole area, and not just the Hold proper.

Tequila Mockingbird: There's an implication, too, though, that by the Ninth Pass the Northern Continent is kind of bursting at the seams. We have this repeated political issue, where there are “too many people,” and not enough space for all of the people. So I think it does make sense to say that the population has grown significantly in the Second Long Interval, in a way that maybe it was never able to grow previously to that.

Lleu: Here's the thing, though. It has, and it hasn't, or it is and it isn't, because, on the one hand, yes, we're told that there's this growing Holdless population. There's all these people who don't have access to land. But also when the Lilcamps are crossing the countryside, most of the area, land that they are crossing is uninhabited. When Menolly is going up and down the Nerat peninsula, most of that land is uninhabited. When Aramina and her family are crossing the country, most of the land that they're moving through is uninhabited.

Lleu: It's clear that there has been a significant expansion of settlement of settled areas since the Eighth Pass. We're told that at multiple points in Dragonquest and then reminded again, at the beginning of Renegades. But it still seems like they're not using even close to the whole of the Northern Continent, I don't think.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. But there's a difference between square footage and habitable square footage and arable square footage and square footage that is suitable for pasturage right.

Tequila Mockingbird: I could believe that they are running out of arable land, even if there's large stretches of physically empty space.

Lleu: Well, the thing is that arability is not actually the limiting factor on Pern. It's access to safe shelter for Threadfall.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, yeah. So maybe they're running out of cave structures —

Lleu: My point being that even if the population is bursting at the seams. It's bursting at the seams relative to where there are habitable cave systems and similar possible areas for shelter.

Lleu: Which is very different from actually bursting at the seams, and we'll talk more about that at the end, I guess, when we are thinking about —

Tequila Mockingbird: So, five million gives us roughly the population of early medieval Britain. If we're trying to scale for a roughly medieval level of technology and a roughly feudal kind of social structure, and what that means for population organization, and we're assuming a pretty mountainous and rainy, but also fairly rocky and not a lot of it is great for cereal crops, but you could get a lot of pasturage, and also just frankly thinking about what McCaffrey would most likely have been pulling from —

Tequila Mockingbird: — when she's creating Pern, scaling it to Britain, the UK, doesn't seem like an unfair comparison.

Lleu: Yeah, you know what that actually does feel fairer to me, provided that we take the northern continent as being actually big, and not 1.5 times the size of Great Britain.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. And here's where I want to shout out podcast listener tumblr user threadfall. They linked us to a really great website called News from Bree, which is run by a guy named Hartley Patterson. And he did a lot of great calculations, using the information that we get from the books to try and figure out what population sizes are we looking at, what physical sizes are we looking at, how would the money have worked, things like that, and we don't always agree with his calculations, but it provided a really great jumping off point, and it's lovely to have them all in one place. So thank you very much, threadfall. And —

Tequila Mockingbird: Indeed! He goes through a lot of different attempts to figure out how big the planet of Pern is, and how big the Northern Continent is, because we do know, I think, that it's “Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible.” It's a little bit smaller than Earth as a whole planet, and a little bit less dense than Earth, the gravity is supposed to be a little bit lighter, but in terms of how big is the Northern Continent, there's a couple of different ways that you can try and look at it. One is, you can just take the information that is given to you in the Pern Atlas and the Dragon Lover’s Guide to Pern. But that gives you about a UK and a half, in terms of square miles.

Lleu: If the entire northern continent is the size of the UK, even and a half, that's tiny. That’s not a continent. That's an island.

Tequila Mockingbird: There's also the question of what feels good in your head, versus what matches the text, versus is the text internally consistent, because I really don't know that it is.

Tequila Mockingbird: In the Atlas of Pern they used journeys within the text, like, this is how many days it takes to get from point A to point B to try and scale it. I think there's always the question of how fast your horse and/or oxen are going? Both whether that is internally consistent and whether McCaffrey actually knew how fast that was.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because a lot of people don't, especially broadly in fantasy fiction.

Lleu: Yeah, I strongly think that a lot of the travel times that we're given are unreliable, or that we should take them with a large handful of salt in terms of how they map onto how far humans can actually travel.

Lleu: Meanwhile, I'm also looking at the summary of the information from the Atlas of Pern. Karen Wynn Fonstad took four journeys to estimate scale: the Lord Holders’ march to confront F’lar; Robinton and Menolly’s sea trip from Cove to Southern Hold; Piemur’s walk in the opposite direction; and 36 hours to fly across the Northern Continent. But I note that “36 hours fly across the Northern Continent” is explicitly stated in the text to be not accurate.

Lleu: F’lar suggests this, and to me it seemed like he hasn't actually done this and is just kind of guesstimating, based on how far dragons can fly, and D’ram indicates to him that's wrong.

Tequila Mockingbird: Just in general, why would you ever do that, right? You would go between.

Tequila Mockingbird: — overland, unless, for example, you've just had firehead fever, and you can't go between.

Lleu: Yeah. So I don't trust F’lar’s ability to estimate how long it would fly from end to end of the Northern Continent, especially because the text tells us that it's not 36 hours.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, and realistically he's probably trying to extrapolate from like, okay, how far do we fly covering a Threadfall. But that’s probably not —

Tequila Mockingbird: —as fast as you could fly, because you're fighting Thread, right? You're not trying to go somewhere at speed. So it's a little messy, and there's also the question of, okay, horse versus runnerbeast. The sort of in-universe justification, right, that we get in… Dragonseye, I think,[1] for why the terminology changes is that there has been some genetic manipulation of their livestock population.

Lleu: I’m thinking about the book covers also where we can see, for example, on the cover of Renegades of Pern, that things that presumably were originally oxen also now look kind of reptilian. So something's happened.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, again, how canonical are we supposed to count that —

Tequila Mockingbird: Depending on how big you think the continent is, that's gonna give you very different understandings of how much arable land you have and how much pasture-friendly land you have. But thinking about the climate situation, the implication that I think we get is that, High Reaches, you're not growing any crops around there, and you're probably not having much pastorage other than a particularly hardy bovine, ’cause I don't think they have any, like, bison or anything. Maybe some alpacas or llamas, which they do have on Pern.

Lleu: Yeah; the Nerilka cover has Nerilka leading a creature that looks more like a llama than it does like a horse, I would say. But also, I do think that there is some arable land in High Reaches, just not a lot, and I think, probably not for cereal crops.

Lleu: It seems that fishing[2] and perhaps pastorage are the main food bases there. We definitely know that there's fishing going on at High Reaches.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And checking my notes, it does say in the Dragon Lover’s Guide that they have llamas in the High Reaches, which makes sense, because llamas are from the Andes, so they're optimized for mountainous regions.

Lleu: I love that so much. I'm now imagining Fax dramatically riding down to Ruatha on a bunch of llamas.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don't think you can ride a llama. I don't think their spines are set up for that.

Lleu: Surely if they're doing genetic manipulation of the pack animals they brought...

Tequila Mockingbird: That's also, probably a significant chunk of their fabric is going to be llama weave or alpaca.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we know that cotton is an incredible luxury crop; they don't have a lot of cotton. So you're probably getting llama and sheep wool, and a lot of flax. We also know that silkworms did not survive the attempt to transplant them on. So they've got no silk. I mean, hypothetically spider silk. But I don't think that that's realistic.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, thinking about those kind of sizes and numbers, it is implied that a lot of man-hours or a lot of the population is devoted to livestock agriculture.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because there's a lot of mountains, and we know that because that's where they put the Holds; they need to live in a mountain. So if we are selecting for mountainous areas, then it makes a lot more sense to put your agricultural time and energy into livestock —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and then eat the livestock, than it does to try and primarily grow cereals, or fruits and things like that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And when you add the fact that they've got dragons, then there is even more impetus to have a pretty significant livestock population. We also see in Dragonsdawn that a lot of the people who initially —

Tequila Mockingbird: — colonized Pern were very big into ranching, or the fantasy of the American frontier. That seems to me culturally as well as logical.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think the numbers on that actually work out pretty well. Even if we assume a population of 5 million, which I think is at the upper end of what we want to assume for the population of Pern…

Tequila Mockingbird: …that would probably only require about a million cattle, herdbeasts, per year, to feed that many people. And if you are calling it — and this is a very sloppy estimate — two acres per cow per year, that's assuming, maybe better pasturage than you're realistically getting.

Tequila Mockingbird: But even if you're doubling that, four acres per cow per year is only about 8,000 square miles of acreage for a million cattle. So if we're assuming it's about the size of the UK, that's… one moment, please, while I do some quick maths.

Lleu: I would also revise my estimate of the size of Ista. I think it's probably more like Ireland.

Lleu: But even if it's smaller than Ireland, I think it is probably closer to the size of Ireland, which is about 32,000, 33,000 square miles than it is to the size of, say, Sardinia, which is about 9,300 square miles.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. Even if we're assuming it's roughly the size of —

Tequila Mockingbird: — the UK, that much acreage is… 4% of the total land area.

Tequila Mockingbird: That's nothing much at all. And that's not going to be perfect, but that's completely feasible. In terms of dragon consumption —

Tequila Mockingbird: — would we say, it's fair to assume a dragon eats about a hundred herdbeasts a year?

Tequila Mockingbird: Do they eat one herdbea—? ’Cause what we see is, during a mating flight they're blooding, a queen is, you know, two or three animals.

Lleu: Yeah, I think it's probably… three in every eight days, something like that, or three a week, maybe.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. So if we call it three a week, then that's more like 150 a year.

Tequila Mockingbird: And if we are assuming that the dragon population, which we will talk about, is stable at around 2,000.

Tequila Mockingbird: All right. Even generously estimating, that's only 350,000 cattle per year, which is about a 3rd of what you'd need to support the highest possible estimate of a human population. So we're really not pushing the physical limits of the planet to support this many people.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although it does seem like, maybe this is a slightly meat-heavier than medieval Europe would have been.

Tequila Mockingbird: Given all of the meatrolls that are constantly being consumed, and slices of beast and things like that. And so my question is far more about livestock location. Where are you putting all of these animals during Threadfall?

Tequila Mockingbird: That to me seems more likely the rate-limiting factor than is there enough pasturage, because they can't just be out at pasture all the time, unless dragons are able to cover the affected areas so thoroughly that you can have animals just out at pasture, which I think is maybe what's being implied, ’cause they can keep an entire forest alive.

Tequila Mockingbird: You wouldn't have to do it in the High Reaches. You wouldn't have to do it over Igen and desert areas.

Lleu: Yeah, but it does seem to me like they probably are at least attempting to store livestock.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that might mean that you're trying to get them into a corral, or some kind of smaller area, so that the dragons can blanket that smaller area as opposed to just roaming all over the mountainside.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we do know that they have pigs, or at least they had pigs originally when they landed, and traditionally, the way you raised pigs through —

Tequila Mockingbird: — to the 20th century is, you just turn ’em loose in the woods, and you get ’em back when it gets cold.

Tequila Mockingbird: So if you're doing something like that, it's harder to then have the animals under shelter during Threadfall. So maybe that means they weren't doing it that way. But…

Lleu: Yeah. Hmm, interesting. Something I'm thinking about in terms of land usage and in particular, in terms of meat availability. One of several limiting factors for meat availability in medieval Eurasia and Africa is the existence of large predators, and Pern doesn't have any except wherries.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don't think it's implied that a wherry can kill a herdbeast.

Lleu: Yeah, so you don't have to worry about that. All you have to worry about is availability of cleared pastureland, which is much easier to arrange, and shelter from Thread.

Lleu: But because we know that it's possible for dragons to protect large areas such that very little, if any, Thread gets through, if we assume that it is possible to keep livestock outside, then shelter during Thread also becomes a much less significant factor. And it really just is, how much pasture space can you clear that still has centralized locations where you can keep them when you need to keep them in a centralized location.

Tequila Mockingbird: It's also worth noting that when they rediscover the Southern Continent, there are significant wild herd animals —

Tequila Mockingbird: — on the Southern Continent, which has had no dragon protection. It's just grubs.

Lleu: Yeah. We see in Dragondrums one way, at least, that wild herd animals take shelter. I think that what we see is maybe not —

Lleu: — entirely viable in the long term, given the amount of casualties that are apparent in that?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, but there are big cats on the southern continents, but broadly, there aren't a lot of predators. So it might just be that Thread and food availability are the only rate-limiting factors —

Tequila Mockingbird: — for wild cattle and goats and horses on the Southern Continent.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also, just, Thread is never falling everywhere at once, right?

Lleu: Yeah, which is presumably how life survived on Pern in general, is, Thread is never falling everywhere at once.

Lleu: And Thread also seems to kind of eat itself out pretty fast, so even when it is —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. The impression that I get with Threadfall is, the survival of any specific animal or person is pretty low-rate, but that if you have 10,000, it's not gonna kill all 10,000 of them.

Tequila Mockingbird: But thinking about those agricultural practices and livestock maintenance makes me ask the question, what percentage do we think of the population of Pern is in a Crafthall versus a Hold? Because if we go by medieval Europe, you can't really get less than 90% of your population devoted to agriculture, or you can't feed everybody.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think it's fair to say that the numbers here are going to be lower than that, because they do have farming knowledge, right? They know how to be more efficient. They have trained agronomists.

Tequila Mockingbird: They're probably doing a lot better. And if we look at 19th-/20th-century,[3] our efficiency, our ability to feed people ballooned wildly —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in that time. Now, not all of it was particularly sustainable, and presumably Pernese agricultural methods are trying to be sustainable. You don't wanna strip the nutrients out of the soil by monoculturing repeatedly over, you know.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I do think it's fair to say that maybe only 80%, or even 75% of the population has to be devoted to agricultural labor to feed everyone on Pern.

Lleu: Yeah, that seems reasonable to me, based on nothing but pure intuition Well, based on nothing but pure intuition and also, I'm thinking about, the line between Hold and Craft is blurred, first of all. Alemi is the son of a Sea Holder and so raised as a Holder but also is a Masterfisherman by the end of the series.

Lleu: And we're explicitly told — he has a conversation with Idarolan in I think Dolphins of Pern where Idarolan’s like, “Yeah, Yanus is really set in his ways, but he is good at training a journeyman up to mastery,” which implies that Yanus also has some Craft status as well as being the Sea Holder. And then, by the same token, there's an implication in Moreta that her family are not just at a Hold that is engaged in livestock hurting, but rather are part of a Beastcraft Hall that is entirely devoted to the Beastcraft in general but is not necessarily the central Keroon Beastcraft Hall.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and I think it seems likely to me that there are Farmholds that are part of the Crafthall system. Somebody has to feed Harper Hall, and it doesn't seem like they're getting tithes in the same way that a Weyr does. So there has to be some amount of farm —

Tequila Mockingbird: — Holds that are devoted to Harper Hall. Although maybe they're getting a wage from Lord Holders that then is being used to buy — but the Weaver Crafthall. Who's growing all of that flax? Is the Weavercraft Hall minting its own money that it then uses to buy Flax from independent Holders? Or are there Holders who are part of the system of the Weaver Crafthall, and their job is growing flax for the Weaver Hall.

Lleu: Yeah. My assumption is that it's a combination of both, because we do know that all the Crafts mint their own currency.

Lleu: I also am thinking about, in Dragondrums, where we learn that the Harper Hall has access to at least some amount of livestock that it itself owns.

Lleu: But also we know from Masterharper that being a Harper at a Hold is a paid contract. I don't know that we know what the division is of the payment between the individual Harper who is at the Hold and the Hall itself.

Lleu: I'm not sure, in fact, that we get any explicit indication that it's the Hall itself, but I think it's reasonable to assume that the Hall is also being financially compensated when a Harper takes up a contract.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and even just that maybe part of being a journeyman or a master is paying dues back to the Crafthall.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which I think would be logical, and we do see, in Moreta, what's-his-name, the Harper, and Alessan haggling over his contract —

Tequila Mockingbird: A lot of it is things like, this much wine, seating in this place, housing at this size, things like that that would not be transmitted back to the Crafthall in any way.

Tequila Mockingbird: But some of it does seem like, okay, and this much money, which might mean you're sending 5% back, or something like that, as your dues.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think this is a little tougher, because I don't know that there's a great way to try and map it onto a medieval structure, because…

Lleu: Yeah, ’cause guilds just didn't ever work this way in the real world.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, although you could sort of map it, maybe on the church, which was a big chunk of the population that was not doing subsistence agriculture, although a lot of monasteries and nunneries were self-supporting because they would brew alcohol, or they did have crafts that they were using to support themselves.

Lleu: Yeah. But they weren't like the primary source of specialist labor —

Lleu: — for all of Europe in the way that the Crafts are the primary source of most kinds of specialist labor for the whole continent.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Also just the fact of having fishing Holds skews your numbers in terms of, like, are we counting a Sea Hold as percentage of people in subsistence agriculture, because they are feeding themselves or trading fish for grains in a way that equalizes out?

Tequila Mockingbird: And we know that the Weyrs are being supported by tithes. But the Weyrs are not… If the population is at minimum 400,000 by the second pass, the Weyrs are no longer a significant fraction of that population.

Tequila Mockingbird: So they're probably fairly negligible, even if they loom large in the mind of Holders and Crafters in terms of, ugh, we're tithing all of this to the Weyr.

Tequila Mockingbird: They can't eat that much; it’s probably much more about luxury goods than it is about just enough grain to feed them.

Lleu: Yeah, although at the same time, if the population of Fort Hold is — let's say it's doubled by the Ninth Pass, so that the population of the whole Fort Hold area is 20,000, or even 30,000. If the population of a Weyr is in the 3,000-5,000 human range.

Lleu: Or in the equivalent to 3,000-5,000 human range, given the amount of livestock that dragons need —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, but I don't think it's enough that — you're not impoverishing the Hold —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in any way, especially since it seems like there’re several Holds that tithe to each Weyr.

Tequila Mockingbird: So each Hold is really only responsible for supporting, say, a thousand people, equivalently.

Lleu: Yeah, at least two major Holds are sending their produce I think exclusively to a single Weyr, and then —

Lleu: — a couple others are maybe overlapping, and then there are some other places like Half Circle. It doesn't seem like they're beholden to Nerat, so it seems like they are politically independent, just not a major Hold, but also tithe directly to Benden.

Lleu: So, hard to know exactly. The main difference is that we do get explicit comments that the Weyrs eat better than anyone else, when Menolly arrives, like, “Oh, the Sea Hold only has wine on special occasions, and the Weyr has it —”

Lleu: “— as a matter of course, with every meal, or at least with every dinner.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. It's entirely possible that the ratios would end up skewed, in terms of whether they have more, just, cereals versus fruit versus — that might depend on which Holds are tithing to which Weyr, too.

Lleu: Yeah, we're explicitly told at the beginning of Dragonflight, the tithes have given them a weird distribution of things.

Lleu: When Manora is reviewing their food supplies with Lessa, she's like, “The big thing we need is red meat, because otherwise the only protein we have is salted fish from Half-Circle, and no one wants to eat that all winter. Every day.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It's hard to draw complete comparisons, because that would presumably shift over time, depending on who's had a good crop year and who hasn't, and things like that.

Lleu: Yeah. Thinking of the population numbers in this way, makes the Lord Holders’ refusal to tithe —

Lleu: — even sillier, because at the beginning of Dragonflight there's one Weyr. The entire planet needs to send a tiny —

Lleu: — minuscule fraction of any of its produce to the Weyr, and there's like 150 people —

Tequila Mockingbird: And it doesn't seem like they are, because they're very aware that they haven't actually fought Thread in 400 so years —

Lleu: The Lord Holders are acting like this is some enormous imposition, and it's truly nothing.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think this is a good segue to talk about, what are the Lord Holders’ roles in terms of population.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I think it is implied that part of their role as Lord Holder is to control the population and prevent it from growing.

Tequila Mockingbird: Again I think some of this is this Malthusian “population trap” concept of, like, “Oh, you let it get too big and then the plague comes.” But if we assume that part of their job is to try and control populations, that both gives perhaps an internal logic for why some of the population numbers get a little weird over time, because maybe in a given pass they are either doing that job better or not.

Tequila Mockingbird: If we look at the growth rate from, call it 400,000 or so circa the Second Pass, and that's extrapolating from the population census that we are told that they do in Dragonseye, to 5 million or so in the Ninth Pass. That's a roughly 0.2-0.3% population growth rate —

Tequila Mockingbird: — over those 2,000 or so years. And that is about the medieval European growth rate from, call it 1000 to 1340 —

Tequila Mockingbird: — which is when the plague hits and starts making things weird. So that is a sustainable rate of growth for a medieval level of technology and an agrarian society.

Lleu: Yeah. The trick is that there were at least 2 plagues in between that killed large portions of the population.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, but there were also plagues in medieval Europe, and it is worth noting that it’s implied very strongly, I would say, that the big plague in the Sixth Pass is part of what regresses the rights of women on Pern even further. That women stop becoming Craft journeymen, journeywomen, and masters because there is a need to have them raising children, or, like, repopulating the planet.

Tequila Mockingbird: And if we look at what actually happened in Europe after the Black Death, that's not what happened at all. It actually opened up a lot of craft work to women, mostly just because, if the wheelwright’s dead, you need a new wheelwright, and if the person who steps forward is the old wheelwright’s widow or sister, then they're much more likely to know how to —

Tequila Mockingbird: — make wheels, and you don't have room to quibble about that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think I would probably say that that's, extradiegetically McCaffrey was looking for an excuse rather than that there's some unique reason that that would work in a different way on Pern than it did in medieval Europe.

Lleu: Yeah. That said, I do also think that the structure of land tenure on Pern is substantially different from the real structure of feudal land tenure in medieval Europe.

Lleu: In ways that could lead to that situation, in the way that we see in Dragonseye, where we're told that one of the reasons that, for example, Debera’s family doesn't want her to Impress a dragon and go to the Weyr is because that takes her out of circulation for their land claims, and they want to be able to expand their Holdings by using children to claim new unclaimed land. If in the Sixth Pass you have parts of the planet where 90-100% of the population died, even if other parts of the planet 5-10% of the population died or 0% of the population died, that means that you suddenly have a bunch of unclaimed again, and given the way that land is distributed, on the basis of “Can you hold this land and work it successfully? Great? It's yours,” —

Lleu: — I could see that leading to, “Oh, everyone's got to have kids now, so that we can claim this now empty land.”

Lleu: But I also don't think that that's necessarily something that McCaffrey was actively thinking about —

Lleu: — in part because, again, she seems to think that the libertarianism is not a problem.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. In terms of the obligation to population control, the Lord Holders are definitely not controlling their own population.

Tequila Mockingbird: It's very clear that they are deliberately having as many kids as possible by at least as early —

Tequila Mockingbird: — as the Sixth Pass. Do we see it in the Second Pass yet?

Lleu: In fact, I think Chalkin only has two kids, and they're both by his legal wife. So it seems like monogamy is maybe more —

Lleu: — strongly established in the Second Pass. Which is also weird, considering that we're explicitly told that marriage works very differently in the early days of the colony, so. Don't know what’s up with that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Fundamentally, you definitely wanted to have a lot of kids in medieval Europe if you were an aristocrat. But you didn't actually want to have too many. This is part of why primogeniture is valuable, because in some places in Europe they were splitting it up to go to every kid, and that means that having a lot of kids actually screws you over, versus —

Tequila Mockingbird: Even though there is this implication that one child of a Lord Holder is going to inherit the hold, there's also this implication that they are trying to find smaller Holds to give all of their dozen children.

Lleu: After a certain point, you can only divide the Hold so much, which seems to be the situation that they're in in the main series. It's just weird that nobody points this out as a fundamental contradiction with the material organization of their society. No one seems to recognize this, up to and including, nobody is like calling the Lord Holders out for having too many kids.

Lleu: When their primary job is, ostensibly, population control. And even if at this point in time the obligation to control populations has been forgotten over the last 400 years, or has been let go of over the last 400 years...

Tequila Mockingbird: I would suspect that it had during the Second Long Interval.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause you have a significant chunk of people who don't believe Thread is ever gonna return. And we do see that it seems like a lot of people have moved out of the central Hold complex and out into the countryside, because we have these empty spaces in Benden Weyr and Fort Hold, cave complex spaces that are not being used anymore, even though we are told the population is greater than it has ever previously been.

Lleu: Yeah. That said, even if all of that is the case, I still would expect someone in the main series to, at some point, be like, “Hmm. Maybe the Lord Holder shouldn’t be having so many kids and raising them up all with the expectation that they're gonna have land of their own.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think that Toric is kind of saying that. He's like, “Oh, my gosh! Yet another useless son of a Lord Holder that I've been given to deal with in the Southern Continent.

Lleu: Yeah, but the text presents that as first and foremost a prejudice of Toric’s, that in this case is partly rational but also partly just him being an irrational contrarian.

Tequila Mockingbird: Fair; I definitely felt like the text was not saying that these young, useless dilettantes were being ill-used —

Lleu: Oh, yeah, no. But also, he frames it as specifically, like, “Oh, those Northerners again.” It’s like, well…

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, useless Northerners. I think these are useless aristocrats.

Lleu: Yeah. He's displaced the real kind of material power structures of the planet onto a —

Tequila Mockingbird: And it does seem like post-the end of the series, once you have, in fact, eradicated Thread — spoilers — and you have opened the Southern Continents to be more fully inhabited, you could see a pretty significant jump in the Pernese population, if the rate-limiting factor has been livestock protection —

Tequila Mockingbird: Then I could easily believe that you would go from, say, 5 million to maybe 20 million, comfortably, without straining the food and livestock capacity of the planet.

Tequila Mockingbird: And if they further industrialize and industrialize their food production, then you could be even higher than that —

Lleu: And it's clear that the aristocratic class on Pern, in which I would include the Craftmasters, does not want to industrialize, but it's also clear to me, I think, anyway, that many of the technological improvements that they are adopting are things that are going to lead to an increase in automation, the rise of a, effectively, merchant class, even if the merchant class is like Smallholders, mainly. I mean, people like Jayge, who eventually is, I believe, confirmed as a Lord Holder. But you can only confirm so many more people as Lord Holders before people start to go like, “Well, wait a minute. The problem here is that you're limiting the number of Lord holders.” And so, Pern is ripe for a liberal revolution is my point.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we’re actually going to pause there, because this has gotten too long, but we will pick up in our next bonus episode, which will air in two weeks.

Lleu: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It. If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast dot tumblr dot com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast dot neocities — N E O cities — dot org.

[1] Tequila was thinking of the indication we get in Dragonsdawn to the effect that the colonists are doing some minor genetic manipulation to adapt Terran livestock to life on Pern, not Gigi McCaffrey apparently saying in Dragon’s Code that Stupid has six legs.

[2] Delighted to report that Zoom’s automatic transcript rendered this as “phishing.”

[3] In point of fact, the modern agricultural revolution in Western Europe really started in the 18th century.