Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #5: ’60s and ’70s Retrospective

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 doing a bit of a retrospective on the first six books, both in and of themselves and in the context of 1960s and 1970s speculative fiction. So Dragonflight comes out in 1967, and we get the first trilogy of Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon and the Harper Hall trilogy — Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums — all before 1979, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: Fair. So we’ve got basically 12 years to play with here, and although these two trilogies are now thought of as two trilogies and packaged that way — I had the first trilogy as an omnibus — they were definitely not published that way and probably not conceived of that way, because the original book was two short stories and it grew very organically, and it’s only really looking back at it that we tidily arrange them into, ah, yes, trilogies.

Lleu: Yeah, it's clear — I'm thinking about there was a episode of a British documentary series about science fiction where each episode focuses on a sci-fi writer. And I watched the one about McCaffrey, which was filmed in 1978, not long after The White Dragon was released. And she’s signing books and someone’s like, “Oh, what else do we have in store?” And she’s like, “Okay, well, there’s one more coming next year, and then it’s going to be a break for a while ’cause I need to write.” And the person's like, “Oh, really?” And she's like, “Listen, by next year, you’ll have had four books in four Pern books in four years.” So she seems to have been thinking of them as simply as “Pern books,” and she doesn't frame it as completing the trilogy.[1]

Lleu: Although I think it seems like, from a publishing perspective, at least the Harper Hall trilogy may have in fact been conceived of as a trilogy by the publisher.

Lleu: Certainly, it seems difficult to justify the existence of Dragondrums otherwise, I would say?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It is notable that Dragondrums is very much the odd book out. I think the original trilogy, you do have three different books. As I think you pointed out in our White Dragon episode, you start with Jaxom’s birth and you end with his coming-of-age. Each book does have arguably a different protagonist, but they’re all pulling from the same pool of characters. They're all talking about the same basic arc-thrust. And then with the Harper Hall trilogy, Dragonsong and Dragonsinger are so tightly entwined. They truly are just the same protagonist, the same arc; they take place immediately contiguously. And then Dragondrums is kind of, “Oh, also this other character, later, doing this slightly different thing, and we're sort of ignoring a lot of the characterization we placed in that previous book, but don't worry about it.”

Lleu: While also doing this different thing, that's also the same thing, but different.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, really, Dragondrums feels a lot more like the original trilogy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because it is interested in the broader political spectrum of Pern and the machinations about inheritance and land ownership and political ascendancy of dragonriders versus Holders. That is the main meat of Dragondrums and Piemur’s awkward coming-of-age story is stitched through that, but…

Lleu: I — actually, as I'm thinking about Piemur’s awkward coming-of-age story — in some ways it’s less awkward than Jaxom’s, insofar as it raises the same questions — who am I, who am I supposed to be, where do I belong.

Lleu: And whereas Jaxom’s answer to that is, like, “Oh, what people have been saying since I was born. That’s who I am, I guess. Sure.”

Lleu: What Piemur’s says is, “I’m going to do something genuinely different and weird!” You should’ve switched those, actually — would have been better that way.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right! Because the problem is that she doesn’t set it up with Piemur, and she does sort of set it up with Jaxom.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also interesting that both of these little trilogies start with a female protagonist and end up with a male one?

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think Lessa, Menolly, and Moreta are the three most richly nuanced and compelling female characters in this series, broadly, I would say.

Lleu: Yeah, I think you could maybe make a case for Debera in Dragonseye, but…

Lleu: It’s kind of an afterthought, and I wouldn’t want to commit myself to that.

Tequila Mockingbird: So you have these incredibly compelling characters and then, in terms of something being afterthought or a disappointment, after Lessa Jaxom is a bit boring, and after mentally, Piemur’s a bit weird and inconsistent and incoherent, ’cause Menolly is so specific.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s so herself And the Piemur that shows up in Dragonsinger and the Piemur that shows up in Dragondrums and the Piemur that shows up later in the series…if you had given those characters different names, I wouldn’t have been like, “Wow, these guys are all so similar.”

Lleu: Yeah, truly the Piemur and later books could just be some random other guy who’s been going around the Southern Continent and is friends with Master Robinton.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I liked Piemur in Dragonsinger. I reread Dragonsong and Dragonsinger as a kid. They're honestly two of the better books in the series, and I reread them a lot. And I read Dragondrums once and was like, “Huh. Wow.” And never reread it.

Lleu: Yeah, I remember thinking as I was going into it when I reread these books in 2013, being like, “Hm, I remember not being interested in this book, but I don’t really remember why I wasn’t interested in this book.” And then I read it and I was like, “Oh, now I understand!”

Tequila Mockingbird: It suffers a little bit from the way that she was trying to retcon it in some senses to make the drumming stuff interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where I feel like a lot of what she decides and says about the drumming in Dragondrums doesn't really end up matching what she sets up in Dragonsinger or what shows up in the later books.

Tequila Mockingbird: There's this whole cool, complicated drum code, and then it's like, “Oh, by the way, we’ve sort of made that meaningless ’cause we’re inventing a telegraph and/or we have dragons stationed everywhere to send messages.” And in Moreta and Nerilka it seems like the drumming is going to be important, and then it kind of isn’t. And it’s like, if you wanted this to be a key world-building feature, that would have been really cool, but you gotta commit to it.

Lleu: Rarely do we say “She should have committed more to this!” But she should have committed more to this one. So many things in these books she should have committed less to.

Tequila Mockingbird: And maybe this is a moment to talk about the world-building, ’cause I think that is something that, I would say, by the end of these six books she’s decided what Pern looks like in the Ninth Pass. She clearly hasn’t, I think, entirely fleshed out what Pern looked like in the Sixth or Second or First Pass, because she hasn’t gotten there yet, but I do feel like, yeah, this is what Pern looks like in the Ninth Pass and nothing that she gets to later significantly complicates that, with maybe the question mark for how the Holdless are treated or how we feel about Lord Holders in general.

Lleu: Yeah, something to note about this is that between Dragondrums in 1979 and Moreta in 1983 is the longest publishing gap between Pern stories in its entire publishing run. Otherwise, it’s “Weyr Search” in 1967, Dragonflight 1968, Dragonquest 1971, “The Smallest Dragonboy” 1973, and then Dragonsong-Dragonsinger-The White Dragon-Dragondrums from 1976 to 1979, and then a four-year gap, and then Moreta, which is doing something very different from what these books do. And then she only returns to the main timeline in the Ninth Pass in 1986 with “The Girl Who Heard Dragons.”

Lleu: At this point it feels (a), as you say, complete and (b) in suspension. There’s a whole bunch of questions that have been posed at the end of The White Dragon —

Lleu: — and they don’t start to be answered for another eight years when we get to “The Girl Who Heard Dragons” and then subsequently Renegades and then All the Weyrs of Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is curious to question — did she know? Was she stopping at the end of The White Dragon and Dragondrums with a clear idea of, “Yeah, this is ultimately going to resolve by having the artificial intelligence from 2,500 years ago guide the dragons into telekinetically blowing up spaceships.” I don't know that she did, because that’s bonkers, so —

Tequila Mockingbird: — it seems like she set herself up, she had this world, she's like, “Okay, I have this interesting problem, Thread, very bad. We’re going to figure that out somehow, dot, dot, dot.” And then she paused. She messed around. She was like, “All right, I’m going to go write some prequels. I’m going to expand the world-building a little. I’m going to complicate my ideas a little bit. And then I’m going to sit down and sort of finish the story.” And then she was like, “Oh, never mind. I’m not done, I’m going to noodle around a little more,” but I don’t know that she knew how she wanted to triumphantly destroy Thread forever when she took that break.

Lleu: Yeah. On the one hand, The White Dragon does leave us with all these questions. On the other hand, I think if this series ended with The White Dragon I’d be perfectly satisfied.

Lleu: I mean, I wouldn’t be because of how messy The White Dragon is, but as a as a narrative arc, Jaxom’s arc is frustrating, but the arc of the series I think is actually pretty good.

Lleu: We start from this position of impending disaster. Everything is a mess. Society is falling apart at the seams in many ways at the beginning of Dragonflight. And by the end of The White Dragon we have a functional united world that has this new purpose. They’re beginning to kind of rediscover their past, and it seems like that will help them accomplish their goals in the present in order to create a better future. In some ways, I don’t necessarily need the later books. I obviously would want the later book — well, I don’t know about “obviously.” I would probably want the later books. But I actually think if it ended at the end of The White Dragon, it would be perfectly satisfying.

Tequila Mockingbird: I take your point and I think it definitely feels resolved, if not completed.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that is… In some ways, maybe it feels more resolved than The Skies of Pern does, because you're never going to, unless you're ending on an apocalypse, you're never going to tidy everything up. So I think a “We know what the job is. Now we just gotta do it,” fade to black is a satisfying definitely point of pause and probably ending.

Tequila Mockingbird: When I read Dragonflight when I was 10, I definitely don’t feel like I was sitting there going, “Wow, if they don’t utterly eradicate Thread by the end of this book series, it will have failed in its promise to me.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I think the promise that it makes narratively is, they’re going to fight Thread on the back of some sick dragons.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s a vision that these books return to a lot, that end of Dragonflight moment, in some ways the end of The White Dragon moment, the end of Dragonsdawn, definitely, this, “Okay, the dragons are in the air! They’re mid-battle! This is what it's all about, babe! This is what it's all for! Dragonmen must fly when Threads are in the sky.” Cut to black.

Lleu: For all that many of the books are very frustrating, she’s really good at that kind of triumphant ending.

Lleu: — where Menolly’s like, “I’ve got Harper boots. I can walk anywhere!” And I'm like, “Yes, you can, Menolly! Hell yeah!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Absolutely. And I think ending on a good beat, and to that note, it’s not always a tidy beat, right? We don’t know everything about Menolly’s life, but we know she’s accomplished something. She’s a journeyman. That’s the note we’re ending on.

Lleu: — because then not only do these first two trilogies not end with The White Dragon but the Harper Hall trilogy also does not end with Dragonsinger, so I really just have to ask, what was the point of Dragondrums?

Tequila Mockingbird: I'm genuinely — how does Dragondrums end? Menolly and Sebell show up at Southern, right?

Lleu: And they send a note to Master Robinton and he sends back a little note being like, “Congratulations, Piemur, drum-journeyman.” And you're like, hooray! And then ten years later, she’s like, “Oh, that’s not true, though. He wasn’t really a journeyman. He had to go back and formally walk the tables before he could do that.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Also literally the same beat, but I didn’t remember it, because it doesn’t achieve that feeling of triumph and that also that like narrative tidiness, where the whole thing about Menolly is metaphorically and literally she has to find her feet, and so her being able to walk is both —

Tequila Mockingbird: — physically she has recovered and also emotionally, she has the confidence —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and politically and legally, she has the status, and it’s all synechdochizing as her being able to physically walk the tables in her Harper boots. And that’s a really cool moment.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, again, with Dragonflight, the idea of being able to fly on her dragon becomes this recurring motif of Lessa being denied the ability or being denied the knowledge to do that. And so when she does do it at the end, it’s a triumph that's been earned narratively.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that’s how she pulls off those incredibly emotionally effective triumphant endings.

Lleu: We talked a lot about this in our Dragondrums episode, but, god, it’s just such a mess of a book.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s so much more readable than The White Dragon. I gotta say, reading it and editing our episode on it, I just have this deep instinct of, whatever this is, I don’t want it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that's maybe not fair to it, ’cause there are parts of The White Dragon that I like, but the vibes are not good, is all I can say.

Lleu: You know I, as I said in my meme, the fake good version of Pern that lives in my head is something that can actually be so personal. And truly, for me, that’s about Jaxom and The White Dragon.

Lleu: The fake good version of The White Dragon that lives in my head is great. Love that. What a great book. And then the real version of The White Dragon that exists on bookshelves, including my bookshelf, is…not that.

Lleu: I also do just want to shout out to K’van, the smallest dragonboy. We haven't talked about him at all, but he is in the middle here, too. He’s the one keeping there from being a five-year gap between —

Lleu: — Dragonquest and Dragonsong, so he’s got a big contribution to the series.

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s, frankly, probably his biggest contribution to the series.

Tequila Mockingbird: I suspect that part of why he exists and why she wrote it was ’cause she had a little bit of writer’s block.

Lleu: Yeah. It's charming in its way. It's just also…what it is. Well. Let’s talk about gender and sexuality. As you noted, it is striking that both trilogies start with a female protagonist, Lessa for the original trilogy, and Menolly for the Harper Hall trilogy, and end with a male protagonist. We'll put a question mark on the protagonist of Dragonquest. I think if I had to pick one, I would say it’s F’nor; I don't think he gets that much more page time than F’lar, but either way, they both get way more page time than Lessa. It’s possible that Kylara gets more page time than Lessa.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think I really object to it in the original trilogy, in the sense that, yes, there are characters who are maybe the central viewpoint character of each book, or even the character whose actions are driving the plot of each book, but it’s hard to identify a protagonist of Dragonquest.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, yes, Jaxom is the protagonist of The White Dragon, but his is not the only story being told, because, I think, that first trilogy is more interested in Pern and its politics than people.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so I think the one that’s the most jarring for me is the switch from Menolly to Piemur, and I sort of assume that was just because she felt like Menolly’s story was done as a protagonist?

Lleu: Yeah, which just seems weird, because then she keeps telling Menolly’s story in Dragondrums.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And it's also the way that she awkwardly and artificially alters a lot of the situation so that Piemur gets kind of the same arc that Menolly got, sort of for no reason?

Lleu: Yeah. I still probably wouldn't have liked it as much, but if the plot of Dragondrums were Menolly and Sebell falling in love —

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause, yeah, it could have been, Menolly is now doing the spy stuff along with Sebell and this is them gradually and slowly falling in love as they try and infiltrate Meron and figure out what’s going on with Nabol. You could have absolutely told that story.

Lleu: And it would have made the mating flight not be like…why is this here?

Tequila Mockingbird: Let’s pause in Piemur’s coming-of-age to have an awkward…

Lleu: And it could have instead been a compelling character moment for them where it is something that they have both genuinely wanted but they didn’t necessarily want it to be like this, but they’re not mad that it’s like this. That could have been interesting if we’d gotten to see more of that development, rather than just Piemur looking on and being like, damn, Sebell’s really in love with Menolly, huh? And she totally hasn’t noticed.

Tequila Mockingbird: I once again notice that we are writing the good version of Pern that secretly lives in our head.

Lleu: We sure are. As an aside there, I'm also just thinking like, hmm, Menolly sure didn’t notice Sebell was into her, huh?

Lleu: Even though he’s constantly making excuses and doing everything short of muttering “I love you!” under his breath every time he says something to her…

Tequila Mockingbird: Look, sometimes, when you have nine fire lizards that are also in love with an old man, you’re busy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Looking at the sexual dynamics of this book, to the point of Menolly and Sebell, it’s not like it would have been unusual to have a female protagonist-driven romance subplot-centric story in which you come into it being like, “Is this the romantic couple? Really? Eugh.” But by the end of it, she’s a compelling writer, and you’re like, “Well, I don’t get it, but I want you to be happy.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because she pulls that off convincingly with F’lar and Lessa —

Tequila Mockingbird: — god help us, with F’nor and Brekke, with even — ah — mos- — sort of Jaxom and Sharra question mark?

Lleu: ’Cause the thing is, I think Brekke gets more interesting by the end of Dragonquest, in that more things happen to her so that she —

Lleu: — is less of just the doormat who occasionally voices a feminist opinion and makes all of the male characters around her go like, “Whoa! Women are getting crazy again!” But I think Shara gets less interesting by the end of The White Dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah… My only defense is that she starts interesting enough that I do want her to have what she wants. And if she wants is Jaxom, then I'm like, okay, babes.

Lleu: That's fair. Whatever else we might say about Jaxom, textually, he is described as physically attractive, so…good for her.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is interesting to think about the state of publishing and children’s fiction, because even though we don’t get any people sex in Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, we do get the sort of Menolly and Sebell fade to black scene in Dragondrums, but no explicit sex scenes because it was for children.

Lleu: I think Alanna was published in 1983, so it’s really not that long after and —

Tequila Mockingbird: But children's publishing now — absolutely not. And I think it’s interesting to question whether we’ve gotten more puritanical, or whether we just now have dedicated children’s fiction, in a way that, yes, there was children's fiction, but it was a little more loosey-goosey?

Tequila Mockingbird: I suspect that, publishing having these more and more specific subcategories — I do think there has been something lost in terms of, now it’s a lot harder to publish things that don’t exist in a tidy publishing category.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I also — Well. I will say two things. One is that, personally, as a kid, I think it was useful and valuable to me to read about romantic relationships and even sexual relationships in a way that showed that characters had agency in them.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m giving the big caveat in that the characters in this series don’t usually have agency in their sexual relationships.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that is my point, too, which is, there is also the appeal of the forbidden, the tweenage “Ooh, this book has a sex scene! I don't know if I'm interested in this or not; I don't know if I’m creeped out by this or not. This feels in some way tantalizing, because it feels sort of inappropriate, but also, mm, all of that is happening…” And I do think that serves an important role in the psychosexual development of our youth. I don't know that, again, I want to recommend this, but when I think about the other stuff that was out there, like Clan of the Cave Bear, it's not like it was better.

Lleu: Yeah. The thing that was that for me as a, like, 11- to 14-year-old was Piers Anthony, which, oh boy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, you brought up Song of the Lioness, and I do think, something I am very grateful for is that that series very clearly signposted the — she is in a romantic and sexual relationship, and she really likes Jon. And as soon as he’s like, “I want you to change your personality to continue to be in this relationship with me.” She’s like, “Well, so sad, too bad; this relationship is done.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And then the exact same thing happens with Liam and exactly the same — she’s very upset about it, but she’s like, “Oh. That really sucks. I’m really bummed, but you don’t want me to be the person that I am, so I can no longer be in a romantic and sexual relationship with you.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And for all of the many ways in which those books are, eugh, very racist and yikesy, and a lot of the #feminism hasn’t aged great. There’s a lot of problems. But that is good.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I wish that there were more options for contemporary children’s literature that gave those kind of options or laid out those kind of pathways, because I do think a lot of romantic subplots hit pretty hard on the “and then you're in love and you're in love forever.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Breaking up, which I think is a very important narrative pathway to model for tweens and teenagers, is not something that a lot of fiction wants to engage with.

Lleu: Yeah. I said this before in I think all of the original trilogy episodes, and part of this is just, it’s one of the things that I’m interested in specifically, but I also really do think, especially reading the whole series in succession, it becomes more and more obvious that, really and truly, the thing McCaffrey is most interested in, in the original trilogy especially, but continuing on in the later books, is the management of sex and sexuality and how sexual relationships are structured, how they're initiated, how sex itself is initiated, what it’s like having sex, whether people enjoy sex or not, in ways that are bizarre but really compelling.

Tequila Mockingbird: You pointed out before something that I thought about but not in that way, this idea that you are truly removed from yourself in these sexual relationships and in these sex scenes. You are literally out of body.

Lleu: Truly the more of these books I read, the more I find myself thinking like, man, Anne McCaffrey was a lesbian and either couldn’t or would not acknowledge that fact to herself. And the result…

Tequila Mockingbird: It definitely seems like, for all that she's writing a lot about women having sex with men, she doesn’t really want to linger in that moment, and she doesn’t really have an argument for why they would want to do that if a dragon wasn’t making them do it.

Lleu: Yeah, truly every heterosexual relationship where we see them having sex on the page. So people like Jayge and Aramina later on, we just sort of gloss over that. The exception maybe would be Moreta and Alessan, but we’ll talk about them later.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. Although in Moreta, we do also get the the literal “Ugh, having sex with this guy is kind of a bummer, but my dragon’s worth it.”

Lleu: Yes, very much so. We’ll get there. But the thing that differentiates these for me from the bodice-ripper narrative that we talked about when we talked about Dragonflight, and also I think a little bit in Dragonquest —

Lleu: — of “Oh, I want to have sex, but I’m not supposed to want to have sex, so I can’t actually want to have sex. Oh, but now I’ve been kidnapped. So I guess I’m having sex now. Oh no…”

Lleu: — and then “surrendering,” and it’s passionate and everyone’s happy, except that she then bursts into tears.

Lleu: But that’s, the thing that differentiates the overall structure of heterosexuality in this series from that, for me, is the fact that the most dramatic instances of heterosexual sex in the book are cases where not only are you being denied agency by virtue of the situation, but you are truly not in your own mind.

Lleu: When F’lar and Lessa have sex for the first time, it's not F’lar and Lessa having sex. It's Ramoth and Mnementh having sex, and they are also using F’lar and Lessa’s bodies to do that at the same time.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, would you make the argument that these are actually heterosexual dragon romances and the humans are just there?

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think it's notable that repeatedly the emotional relationship that is emphasized is I guess a homosocial one of these female protagonists and their female dragons, this relation to this emotional, this romantic (question mark), this love that is overwhelming, that is the most powerful feeling they have, is between a person and their dragon, who, by the way, is of the same gender as them, but also not really a person, so, question mark — not between another human person.

Lleu: In that, you know, she goes on to neglect Prideth to Prideth’s death, but she does love Prideth, and she does not love Meron.

Lleu: She enjoys having sex with Meron, and she thinks they make a kind of objectively good power couple, but she’s clearly not like in love with him, whereas she does clearly love Prideth, even if she kind of doesn’t love Prideth “enough,” quote unquote.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And what's the what's the, like, “Dragonman, dragonman, something”?

Lleu: Oh, yeah. “Dragonman, dragonman, between thee and thine / share me that glimpse of love greater than mine,” which, especially knowing what we do from The White Dragon, namely that when dragonriders are having sex with a non-rider their dragon is telepathically connected to that non-rider through their rider —

Lleu: — clearly what this song is asking for is, “Have sex with me, dragonrider, so that I can access this relationship that you have with your dragon that is better and more powerful and more important and more fulfilling in every way than any relationship with a human could ever possibly be.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And, you know, she did kind of divorce her husband right when she wrote the first book.

Lleu: She sure did! Truly not beating the maybe-was-a-lesbian allegations from me, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: Or honestly, even just the, “this human interpersonal relationship thing, not so sure it’s great” allegation, you know?

Lleu: Yeah, no, I think there’s a lot of that we will talk about when we talk about some of the First Pass prequels.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Yeah. There is also something to be said about the fact that some people are just not cut out to be wives and mothers.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that that was not really an option as much in the 1960s. It was an option, but…it was not generally a great option.

Lleu: Yeah, absolutely. I think certainly regardless of anything about McCaffrey herself, I do think that the ways that heterosexuality is presented in these books is extremely a result of a disillusionment or dissatisfaction with the construction of heterosexuality in American culture in this period. Which is a great segue that I did not plan when I started it —

Tequila Mockingbird: I think it is notable that you are seeing a significant change in the way that America, possibly all of Western Europe, but I can't really speak to that, was thinking about sex and was thinking about gender. And I think some of that is playing out in fiction in the same way it's playing out in the real world, but a lot of it is getting rehearsed in fiction or explored in fiction, especially speculative fiction, as that way of boundary pushing or commentate commenting or riffing on what they saw in the world around them.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is notable, too, that McCaffrey’s other speculative fiction, not romance works, that she published in these decades — one of them is a extraordinarily straight up the line, heterosexual nuclear family, but so uninterested in that that it is such a background note. So the, Decision at Doona, the menfolk go ahead to the colony planet, and the wives and children come later. As a result, you really spend, I would say, the first third of the book in a more homosocial space. And even once their wives show up, it's a couple of jokes about like, “Wow, nothing's clean, ’cause god knows men can't clean!” But it's very much not the emotional thrust of the book, which is all about the interpersonal relationship with these aliens that they meet on Doona and the father-son relationship that the protagonist has with his kid.

Lleu: Sorry, side note. She makes the same joke there as she does in Dragonflight.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then The Ship Who Sang, which I believe also started as a collection of short stories and then got stitched together. The short story was first published in 1961 and then the collection was put together in 1969, and it included a couple of additional sections.

Tequila Mockingbird: In which, as a central theme, the protagonist is not entirely an embodied person, and she can never stop being a spaceship. She has been welded into a spaceship, connected so that she sees through the spaceship’s sensors; it’s called a brainship, and there's some ableism happening there.

Tequila Mockingbird: But a significant throughline is these deeply important emotional relationships that she makes with various people and then cannot physically have a sexual relationship with. And this is both good and bad, and it’s agonizing, and we yearn about it. Or there’s these female characters, and she feels this deep kinship with them, and it is, I think, interested in these emotional relationships that cannot become sexual.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so that's an interesting predilection for her to be tossing around and chewing on in her sci-fi and speculative fiction work.

Lleu: Yeah. It's interesting to set that against the backdrop of the ’60s and early ’70s and the free love movement, the idea of sexual liberation, the beginnings of, also, second wave feminism —

Lleu: — that for books that are extremely about sex all the time, there is this very weird ambivalence about sex that runs throughout Pern.

Lleu: And the times that sex shows up, it’s certainly not the kind of the kind of sex that people at Woodstock were envisioning, for example, as an ideal.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think that's fair. I am not perhaps as widely read in that era as I could be or should be; I don't know that I speak with any particular authority on that topic. But I feel like most of what I have read is not really interested in the romantic relationship in and of itself; it’s taking it as a given, like, “Oh, yes, we’re going to have a romance subplot in here. Oh, yes, of course, the female character will fall in love with the male protagonist now.” Rather than really being about the romance.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I don't know if that’s just the speculative fiction of that era that I was seeking out as a kid. ’Cause even though the bodice ripper is a creation of the ’70s, the romance novel is not. That's Georgette Heyer. For some just quick background, Georgette Heyer invented the Regency romance novel, in that she took the basic structure of Austen and the gothic novel and combined it in the historical Bildungsroman that involves a female protagonist and a romantic relationship arc.

Tequila Mockingbird: Specifically, this idea that the romance novel structure is that you have two protagonists who are both in some way imperfect and incomplete, and in falling in love with each other, they improve each other or achieve some kind of growth or change that is meaningful and that brings them to being able to have a happy ending.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s also the one who innovates the sort of types; she has the saturnine male lead, the tall, dark, and handsome hero. And she has the sweet, young, friendly blonde guy. She has the saucy protagonist and she has the shy and quiet… She builds out a lot of the structures that then become the historical romance novel.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s funny because she was a thwarted historian — she wanted to just write Regency history, and she couldn’t get published as a historian so she just stuck a romance in.

Tequila Mockingbird: Her history of the Battle of Waterloo is truly, there's a chapter at the beginning where it's like, “Oh, Julia, I'm going to fight the Battle of Waterloo!” “Oh, no!” And then a point-by-point, impeccably researched, accurate retelling of exactly what happened at the Battle of Waterloo. And then a chapter in the middle where it's like, “Oh no, he's off fighting the Battle of Waterloo! Alas!” And then at the end, they kiss. It's a romance novel only because that was the only way she could get it published. So she is publishing from the late ’40s, really hitting her stride in the ’50s and the ’60s. So that already exists —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and that is definitely inspiring other authors in the ’60s, even as early as the ’50s, although quite a lot of discussion about, like, “Oh, scandalous sexual behavior” — maybe the steamiest it gets on page is one kiss, sometimes two or three, and discussion of orgies and sexual nonsense that other characters are doing off the page.

Lleu: Mm. I think the thing that makes Pern stand out in terms of its use of romance elements is the emphasis on sex.

Lleu: We talked re Dragonflight about the fact that it predates the first bodice-ripper by several years.

Lleu: Which on the one hand suggests that this was kind of in the air already.

Lleu: But also I'm thinking about other late ’60s science fiction that I’ve read, and certainly there are things that deal with sex and sexuality, like, The Left Hand of Darkness was a year after Dragonflight. But it's not exactly a romance novel, I would say.

Lleu: Certainly, Genly and Estraven’s relationship is the emotional core of the novel, but not in the way that Lessa and F’lar’s is, I think it's fair to say.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. And I think the emotional beat of the romance novel is that the relationship is the triumph. That's what you win at the end of the story.

Lleu: Yeah. And I cannot off the top of my head think of other things that I've read from this period where that is the case, although, to be fair, most of what I've read from this period is all of Samuel Delany’s books and all of Le Guin's early books.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, gentle listener, if you are sitting there thinking, “Oh, those fools! They know nothing of [fill in the blank here],” please let us know! I would be fascinated to get some broader context here. But I would like to shift to talking about Pern as Cold War fiction, because I had myself a lovely little rabbit hole of research for this episode. And I was really interested in thinking about Pern as specifically post-World War II fiction and nuclear horror or nuclear apocalypse. Because once I saw it, it seemed like, oh yeah, it’s really there. They are hiding in a shelter, in a bunker, from a horrible, unknowable death that is raining down from the sky.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm, even. And if they go outside, they will be consumed. It wants to utterly eradicate life on this planet. There’s no reasoning with it. There’s no arguing with it. It’s just, sometimes, at random, death will come. And I think that is very much coming out of horror of the nuclear apocalypse or horror of the idea of the bomb, in a way that is maybe a little harder to see until I suddenly was like, “Oh, wait!” But it was also interesting to think about the idea of Pern broadly, and its technological regression, and its medieval culture as being part of that narrative tradition.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because she's not the only one to suggest that you have this idea that World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. If you think about even stuff like Canticle for Leibowitz or “Chapter of Revelation” by Anderson, you get these ideas of, all technology is somehow going to be destroyed or obliterate itself, and authors exploring that as a kind of horror scenario or a sci-fi scenario.

Lleu: Yeah. Le Guin's first three novels, Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions, are all playing with that. Rocannon’s World is about an anthropologist who becomes trapped on the planet he’s doing field work on because a giant interstellar war breaks out and they destroy the ship that he and his team were supposed to leave on, killing all of his team members and leaving him the sole survivor stuck on this planet forever. Planet of Exile is about colonists who were trapped on another world when this happened. And City of Illusions is about a colonist coming back to Earth after the war has happened and finding this largely quote-unquote “primitive,” feudal culture where there are a few survivals of high-tech cities that have managed to maintain themselves, but they're very much the exception, rather than the rule. And obviously there's a bunch of other stuff going on in them but —

Lleu: Very much beginning from the same concern with, what happens if the world that you know is destroyed and you are trapped in this low-technology feudal past?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And they’re not the only authors thinking about it. We also have 1974, Walk to the End of the World, which, that one was interesting to me because it has this idea of the loss of rights for women as part of this post-nuclear discretion,[2] because we're kind of returning to violence and lack of agency, which is, I think, an interesting note, because we had talked about, in our Dragonflight episode, “Wow, this is kind of a pessimistic look at human nature,” right? To say that human nature at its core will regress to feudalism and misogyny. Yikes! And it was interesting to me to see that was not coming out of a vacuum, that in the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of science fiction and speculative fiction more broadly was very pessimistic about the human condition, was like, “Yeah, we blow each other up. We're fundamentally violent. We cannot be reasoned with. We’re doomed to be destructive as a species. Our governments cannot solve this problem. Our governments are corrupt or weak or useless.” And so I think both the libertarianism that is in its way at the core of the Pernese world-building and this negative take on human nature is not coming out of nowhere.

Lleu: Yeah. This is on the one hand a period of sexual liberation, but also a period of backlash against sexual liberation and against the social pressures of the 1960s, and that leads directly to the election of Reagan and Thatcher at the end of the ’70s, beginning of the ’80s.

Lleu: One of the things that I think we’re going to have to come back and do an episode about the ’80s for is the difference between the original trilogy and the Harper Hall trilogy as products of the period in the Cold War where it seemed like a real possibility that the US could lose.

Lleu: That the capitalist system could collapse, versus the ’80s when it seemed increasingly inevitable that the Soviet Union would, at the very least, no longer be able to meaningfully compete with capitalism.

Lleu: And obviously it's significantly more complicated than that in both periods, but thinking about these books as a period of genuine uncertainty and a period where, on the one hand, you have all of these hopes for social change —

Lleu: — and on the other hand you have this increasing reaction against the possibility of social change.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I also think there's this looming specter of totalitarianism. Both that we are applying that to communism and that, to be fair, there was some totalitarianism happening, that in some ways makes the libertarianism that is at the core of this narrative a little more logical? I don't like it, but it is in the context of this fear of complete state control or this fantasy horror of communist state control or lack of any kind of agency or autonomy.

Lleu: My initial pitch for reading Pern as Cold War fiction is, “Oh no, the evil Red Star —”

Lleu: “— is coming down to destroy the fruits of our aristocratic-slash-proto-bourgeois labor and steal our the products of our hard work.” It's like. Okay. Sure. Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, and: I think it's also interesting to think about the fact that she moved to Ireland right at the beginning of the Troubles.

Lleu: She also moved to Ireland before it was legal for married women to work in the public sector. 1973 was when that happened.

Lleu: So, another question that we do not really have the time to talk about and I don't think I'm equipped to talk about — Well, I can talk a little bit about some of this, but, the extent to which the series is informed by McCaffrey’s being based in Ireland, specifically, while also, you know, being an American citizen and obviously also responding to the…

Tequila Mockingbird: Thinking again about that fear of state control, there’s also that fear of the military industrial complex that I think in my first reading, and without this context, I was just seeing as technophobia, like, “Oh, okay, we want to abandon technology on purpose. Great.” But there is this recurring theme in these stories about supercomputers as agents of destruction — why are we developing high-tech computers? It's so that we can blow the world up.

Lleu: I'm also thinking about Samuel Delany, who we know, because he dedicated the second Nevèrÿon book to her, was in some kind of contact with her by the early ’80s, his Trouble on Triton, in 1976, includes, among other things, a horrifyingly prescient vision of drone warfare. There's this big solar system-wide war that breaks out and it kills 60% of the Earth’s population, and Mars and the outer planets emerge more or less unscathed, but one of the repeated refrains through the book that I think we are supposed to be horrified by is the, like, “Well, at least it’s not soldiers fighting!”

Lleu: As if a war that kills 70% of the civilian population of the planet is better because there are not soldiers fighting and dying face-to-face on the battlefield. Certainly that kind of anxiety about technology is there in the science fiction milieu and also in the broader cultural context in which she's working. A tension between the kind of optimism of the space race and an awareness of the fact that the space race comes out of the US military and the —

Lleu: — concern that the Soviets were spying on space or that they were going to be able to weaponize space and destroy America from space stations and whatnot. And it does, I think, especially thinking about some of the later books, cast aspects of them in a different light to think of the extent to which technological development in this period is so deeply rooted in the military-industrial complex.

Lleu: And to think about these characters and this setting as not kind of pursuing technophobia for its own sake, but rather as consciously a reaction against the ways technological development and war are intertwined.

Lleu: I just said the same thing that you did in more words, I think, basically, but.

Tequila Mockingbird: That's what the PhD is for. I’m thinking about the genre of it all. So, in our first episode, I talked about the fact that I’m going to die on the hill of, I don’t think psychics count as science fiction.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it was definitely interesting to look at a bunch of different speculative fiction of that period and kind of see and track that and look at the way in which telepathy is being pursued as this question about technological advancement. Even from the point of the X-Men.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we do get some sort of later thoughts and discussions about how she’s thinking about that in a science fiction way, but it is also interesting just to generally think about how science fiction was an established genre, but was still, I guess, narrowing down? Because early science fiction, you get stuff where you’re really thinking about just, what if it was exactly like it is right now and then tomorrow happened, right? Some of this science fiction is set a year in the future. And it’s, okay, and then the bomb blows up and we’re all destroyed.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m also thinking about jumping all the way back to Du Bois’s “The Comet,” that short story, and it’s set pretty contemporaneously, but it’s like, all right, this comic comes and kills everyone in New York. Is that science fiction? Is that horror?

Tequila Mockingbird: And the way that that is being kind of gradually established and specified until, by, I would say, the 70s, you do have a very specific, “No, this is what science fiction is.”

Lleu: You know, “The Comet” is a very interesting example in the context of this because it is structured around a romance.

Lleu: Yeah, I don’t think that McCaffrey probably had it in mind when she was writing these books, but…

Lleu: Two things I wanted to say. One is, I'm thinking also about some of, like, Heinlein’s early work where it’s like…

Lleu: Yeah, this is set hundreds of years in the future, but also it’s like, what if America but several hundred years in the future and it’s like, okay, yeah.

Lleu: We're really all going to Space Cadet Academy and we’re going to do all of our science in U.S. customary units, so we’re calculating force in foot-pounds, and like…Robert. It’s not gonna happen. But in a way that I find sometimes charming in its bizarre jingoism. So on the one hand, that, and on the other hand the fact that I think the main kind of body of science fiction that this is coming out of is really planetary romance, things like Leigh Brackett’s solar system novels, like some of Heinlein’s early work, like a lot of the pulp stuff of the ’30s and ’40s, or like Burroughs —

Lleu: — right? Where it involves, you go to another planet and there’s weird stuff going on and it’s things that we might now call fantasy, but it’s in space, so it’s got to be science fiction.

Tequila Mockingbird: But, you know, Burroughs was also hopping over and writing Tarzan, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: It's just “world that is not our world and we’re not really that fussed about how and if we get there.”

Lleu: Yeah, so in terms of speculative fiction, the big publishing development of the ’60s, (a) the first illegal and then legal reprinting of The Lord of the Rings in the U.S. and the Tolkien boom that followed that, and (b) the sword and sorcery revival led by like Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp and some others that culminated in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series that Lin Carter edited, which really is the moment when fantasy as a genre was consolidated as a marketing category. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series — and I’m getting this from Jamie Williamson's The Evolution of Modern Fantasy, which I have some issues with, but I think broadly his historiography is pretty good — essentially, this is when —

Lleu: The BAFS goes back and constructs this artificial canon of fantasy — insofar as any canon is ever not artificial — that that brings in a bunch of authors who are now seen as, like, oh yeah, obviously these are the fantasy canon, but there's two entirely disparate strands, on the one hand, you have literary fiction writers like Tolkien, like E.R. Eddison, like Mervyn Peake, like Dunsany; going back further, William Morris.

Lleu: And on the other hand, you have the very much pulp writers like Howard, Lin Carter himself, Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft, these writers who were just two completely different kind of publishing milieus —

Lleu: Tolkien was in conversation with popular fiction, but the popular fiction that he was in conversation with was like late 19th-century adventure novels. He apparently really liked H. Rider Haggard.

Lleu: Whereas Lovecraft was very much working in conversation with some of the early science fiction writers of the ’20s and ’30s, as well as being influenced by Dunsany, a more “literary,” quote-unquote, writer.

Lleu: And Ballantine was the first place where these two groups of texts, insofar, as either one was a cohesive group, got lumped together and published as, “This is fantasy, this is what fantasy is, and this is how fantasy came to be the way it is now.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Thinking about McCaffrey’s repeated insistence that she wasn’t writing fantasy, do you think some of that maybe came from an association with fantasy with more pulpy stuff?

Lleu: On the one hand, certainly she’s not writing fantasy in the way that Tolkien or Dunsany were writing fantasy, right?

Lleu: There’s simply no way that you could make that argument about Pern.

Lleu: And on the other hand, I do think it probably is at least partly that she wanted to distinguish herself from the sword and sorcery writers of the period, right? She’s not writing like Howard. She’s not writing like de Camp. It’s not that kind of story, either, even if it has the same kind of sense of melodrama. I think it really is in conversation, especially with people like Brackett, maybe some of C.L. Moore’s more kind of space opera things, where it is where it is invoking the signifiers of feudalism, of medieval Europe, or, thinking about Brackett’s work, also sometimes the signifiers of Orientalist fantasy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, Brackett also has The Long Tomorrow, which is very much about reconstructing history from the remnants of a civilization, which does seem very relevant to Pern, too.

Lleu: Yeah, something that she’s interested in in her other work, if the short story collection that I have read is anything to go by. And certainly Brackett was also writing in conversation with some of the things that we would now think of as fantasy. One of her Mars novels is The Sword of Rhiannon, Rhiannon being a character from the Mabinogi —

Lleu: — a medieval Welsh text. So McCaffrey is writing coming out of a period where these distinctions were not clear, but also where they were becoming clear, and I think she wanted to stake a place for herself on one side specifically.

Lleu: And I don't necessarily know why, but that's the context in which that insistence comes, I think.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. When she talks about her inspiration or her reason to want to write this, she’s talked about wanting to let dragons be good guys in some way. So I think it’s possible that there was also a set of, “Okay, in fantasy dragons are the bad guys.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Smaug, St. George, Spenser. So if you’re maybe trying to tell a story from the dragon’s point of view —

Tequila Mockingbird: — maybe you want to say, “No, it’s not like that. It’s this new thing that I’m doing over here.”

Lleu: Yeah. There's also maybe the question that occurred to me really just before we started recording of McCaffrey’s relationship to the New Wave, which was kicking off at the same time that Dragonflight was published, because I don’t think that she’s usually kind of read in conversation with New Wave writers like Michael Moorcock, like Le Guin, like Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, J.G. Ballard. And I think part of that is just because her style is less “literary,” quote-unquote, certainly less so than, like, Delany or Le Guin; I haven't read as much Ballard or any Moorcock yet. But she does, I think, share some of their theoretical and political concerns, in a way that maybe gets overlooked.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, on the topic of left- or right-wing, another thing that we have already spoken about but that I wanted to think about in context of genre of the era is the Western —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and Pern as a colonialist novel, Pern as a frontier novel, this idea of a new planet and an empty planet. Another commonality or another connection between the Western and this post-nuclear apocalypse story is that often it is portrayed as, once the bomb hits or once the America and the USSR are destroyed, there is this lawless, empty world, this sort of frontier space where people can rebuild a society or strike out on their own. So there is some sort of cultural overlap in those two conversations, and I think this is perhaps more thinking about Dragonsdawn than about the first six books, but it is worth pointing out that the Western was booming in the 1950s and the ’60s. And a lot of that is coming out of the way that masculinity is getting redefined in America post-World War II, and for that generation that missed World War II, is kind of trying to reinvent or re-mythologize itself and redefining what “freedom” means as America loves to do every 50 or 60 years, whether we need to or not, so that we can talk about individualist, libertarian, striding out on your own, complete independence as this idea of what it means to be masculine, and to be American, and to be free. And I think that is definitely something that comes into play when she’s thinking about dragonriders, when she’s thinking about like the bronze dragonriders, especially, as this epitome of independent, heterosexual masculinity. And I think it’s interesting to point out that it's not like McCaffrey didn’t know colonialism was bad. She has a whole short story called “Velvet Fields” that was published, to be fair, in the ’80s, part of A Girl Who Heard Dragons, the short story collection, which is about colonizing a planet and basically accidentally eating a bunch of the native sentient species because they’re sentient plants, and then having to make reparations. It’s a very interesting, a little overwrought, little horror sci-fi short, I recommend it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you know, you’ve also got Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not like the science fiction sphere is unaware that colonialism is bad. It’s that there’s this fantasy of this ethical colonialism in a completely empty world. Pern is this place where it’s okay to be a colonizer because you’re not hurting anybody, and the same with Doona in Decision at Doona.

Lleu: I’ve seen this pointed out a couple of times on tumblr recently, including, coincidentally, earlier today. First, someone pointing out the narrative of Australia as, like, “Oh, everything here wants to kill you” — that's justification for colonialism.[3]

Lleu: The idea of terra nullius is this untamed, hostile land that has to be…

Lleu: And then by the same token, one I saw earlier today — I’m just quoting from it because I have it open: “in general I do regard any work that positions the ecosystem of the americas as an alien and violent entity to be per se reactionary as much as themes of isolation and precarity are the staple of horror, the manifestation of any sort of ‘hostile wilderness’ [quote-unquote] story in the context of colonisation is necessarily one of a genocidal ideology”[4]

Lleu: That’s what Pern is, right? You arrive on this planet and you’re like, “Ah, yes.” And then, oh no, the planet’s trying to kill you! Or the next planet over is trying to kill you. But like… Hm…

Tequila Mockingbird: So much of science fiction is white people doing colonialism anxiety, right? Constantly rehearsing and replaying terra nullius or, is it bad, or if they do to us what we did to them, or if we do to somebody else what we did to them and then we feel bad about it. And then we have to pay for it. Do we have to like —

Tequila Mockingbird: — it’s this anxiety spiral. But I think it is interesting to see writers trying to write their way out of it. Because, as you point out, like you can’t —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but the justification and self-justification, and I think I see this more in Decision at Doona, but it does come to play, I think, later in the Pern series in Dragonsdawn, as well: this idea that you need wildness and you need this broad, empty frontier, and that lack of it is in some way destroying —

Tequila Mockingbird: — humanity or stifling the human spirit. And it’s this sort of self-justifying “We can't help it; we have to!”

Tequila Mockingbird: But also this pointed, repeated concern about whether or not we can justify it because, a big part of the plot of Decision at Doona is that humans at one point had made contact with another alien species and done something wrong, and that entire alien species had committed suicide. Humanity was horrified by this —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and passed these incredibly strict rules about how we can never again make any contact with any alien society because we never want to do that again. And then a lot of the book is subverting and undermining that, because they do make contact with another alien species. And a lot of the dialogue of the book is, do we have to immediately leave this new planet or can we stay and try and work with this alien species —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and is that justifiable, is it necessary to have this kind of cooperation? Can this be possible to do? And in a way that ends up kind of being very, I think, reactionary or conservative because it sort of comes down on the line of like, “Well, that was just weak to think that we could never do that. And it’s unfair to think that you could never interact with another alien species. And that was just the government being too worried and too cautious —”

Tequila Mockingbird: “— and real people need to just go out there and do it anyway!”

Lleu: That’s interesting because now I think Eleanor Arneson’s Ring of Swords that I recommended to go along with I think Dragonquest is maybe in direct conversation with Decision at Doona. I’d have to read it, but the premise is, humans meet their first sentient alien species and the sentient alien species are trying to decide whether humans are legally sentient —

Lleu: — or not. Because on the one hand, if they do decide humans are sentient, that means that they have to respect the rules of war —

Lleu: — as they understand them, but they don’t think humans will respect the rules of war if war breaks out. And they’re confident that they will lose a war with humans if —

Lleu: — a war does break out. So they’re trying to decide, is it safer for us to declare that they are not sentient, that they cannot understand the rules of —

Lleu: — sentient, social, “civilized,” quote-unquote, social interaction or not. And so we can eradicate them now before they have a chance to realize that they could destroy us. Interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don't know that I recommend Decision at Doona, but it was definitely an interesting read.

Lleu: Well, I do recommend Ring of Swords. So it sounds like maybe it’s a better read.

Lleu: So, we’ve talked at different points throughout these episodes about places where we see Pern’s influence on later writers. You’ve mentioned Lois McMaster Bujold a bunch, we talked about Mercedes Lackey also —

Lleu: — as people who were able to write this kind of meandering, not strictly the kind of epic fantasy that you start to see in the ’80s, people like David and Leigh Eddings and, uh… Stephen R. Donaldson, and people like that who are writing these kind of long sagas —

Lleu: — of a specific character or a few specific characters. Terry Brooks, there we go, Shannara, I think. Anyway — that people like Bujold and Lackey were kind of operating in the model of Pern, where it’s not really a story about specific characters —

Lleu: — and it’s not epic science fiction in the way that Terry Brooks is epic fantasy. It is instead a story about Pern, where there is this recurring cast of characters, but especially as the series goes on, they’re increasingly being used to talk about the world rather than for their character development or whatnot. And there isn’t this overarching through line story the way there is in something like The Wheel of Time or the Belgariad.

Lleu: I think we've mentioned some more recent writers, but it's truly everything that I watch now, and certainly everything that involves dragons, I look at and I’m like, “That’s just Pern. That comes directly from Pern.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and also, nobody has been able to let go of the psychic animal friends. Even — whether or not a central element — even something like David Weber’s Honor Harrington books, which are just the Horatio Hornblowers in space, you’ve got to have the psychic tree-cats who bond with their human partners. It’s these little flavor elements, I guess, that have been permanently left as an option for what you can do in science fiction.

Tequila Mockingbird: And now that you know you can do it, why wouldn’t you do it?

Lleu: I’m literally just going through my spreadsheet of all of the speculative fiction that I’ve read, noticing books that are contemporary with Dragonsinger — Octavia Butler’s first novel. And there’s certainly, I would say, some commonalities between McCaffrey and Butler, especially in their treatment of heterosexuality as something that’s horrible and squalid and miserable and you would rather —

Lleu: — be outside your body while it’s happening to you. Here’s another McCaffrey thing that jumps out at me. And again, this is partly, this was going on more broadly at the time, so she’s kind of reflective of a trend rather than initiating a trend. But in terms of situating the books in their time period, this is the point where gay people start to show up more and gender nonconformity and possibly trans people start to show up more in speculative fiction. It's not all good. God knows the way gay people are represented in Pern is not good. But this is, I guess, one of the reasons why I keep coming back to these books. One is that you see them everywhere once you’re conscious of them. And sometimes it’s really specific things. Like, as I mentioned when we were talking about Dragonsinger, the way that bards show up in contemporary Dungeons and Dragons. I’m like, that’s just from Pern. You took the musician spies from Anne McCaffrey. Maybe not directly, but that’s her idea.

Tequila Mockingbird: That was happening in sword and sorcery, and it’s all happening at the same time. But yeah, for sure.

Lleu: Well, but I don’t know if it was happening in sword and sorcery in the same specific way where you have a college of musicians who use being musicians as spies.

Lleu: That’s Pern. But then also they are such an interesting document of their changing times, in terms of the way that the political context they were produced in is manifest in the texts, in terms of the way the genre context that they were produced in was changing over time. I think the books from the ’80s and ’90s that we’ll talk about are pretty different from the early books in a variety of ways, in ways that are reflective both of changing political context and also of changes in the genre context —

Lleu: — and what kinds of things people wanted and also maybe in some ways a sharper divide between fantasy and science fiction, whereas the ’70s was really the beginning of large scale original fantasy publishing of things that would now be readily recognizable as core fantasy —

Lleu: — whereas earlier things, we can look back and read them now as fantasy, but they’re not necessarily —

Lleu: Such that it becomes, marketing-wise, advantageous for her to more sharply distinguish herself from fantasy as it goes on, by bringing the science fiction elements more into the foreground. As I said in the clarification note about whichever episode it was, truly this is a live blog over 35 years. The longest break between Pern stories is four years. Mostly it’s one to three. And for this period in the late ’70s, it’s truly book, book, book, book. And then she took a little break and then she gets back to three years and then three years and then just kept going. And so it’s really interesting to watch her sense of the world change as the world around her as she was writing changed, and also as she hit on new ideas, got more interested in some things and less interested in others. I don't know.

Tequila Mockingbird: And as she grew up too. The entire second half of her life is marked by Pern books.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s not that she wasn’t writing other stuff, ’cause she was a prolific author. She had the Acorna book. She had…

Tequila Mockingbird: I don't know what the series name of the Rowan books are, but there were a lot of ongoing series, but none of them were as extensive and as long-running as Pern.

Lleu: There’s just something about these books that catches you. And it doesn’t catch everyone, but if it catches you, it does not let go, however much you might sometimes want it to.

Tequila Mockingbird: However much you might sometimes make a whole podcast about not reading them.

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] Episode 4 of the Time Out of Mind, available on YouTube.

Bonus Episode #5: ’60s and ’70s retrospective