Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #7: Listener Q&A

Lleu: And welcome to a very special 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 joined by listener, friend, and amateur Pern-reader, tumblr account password-forgetter onlysunscreen.

Lleu: As an amateur Pern-reader, sunscreen is here to ask us questions about this series, which both of us — and I especially — sincerely regret instigating you to read more of.

Lleu: So, on that note, to get started, maybe we can ask you a question, which is, what is it like coming to these books as a full-grown adult instead of an impressionable child? Especially a full-grown adult who’s read a bunch of good sci-fi.

onlysunscreen: Well, I can’t speak how it would have felt if I was an impressionable child. But since you bring that… It was really…a fascinating experience, in that there are so many things in this series that feel completely unhinged to me, and then there’s also so many things that feel like they must be the genesis of so many other things that I’ve read throughout the years. And encountering those back to back is sure some whiplash sometimes.

onlysunscreen: I think that if I had read this initially as a child, there’s many things that I just simply would not have thought about at all and would have taken as, that’s just how the world is. But as an adult reading it, I had so, so many questions about what was going on and many of those you’ve been able to answer, or might be able to answer now, but many of those also feel like they maybe simply have no answer.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I really think that’s what makes us want to do this podcast. The act of reading these books is constantly stopping and going, “What the fuck? Why is this happening? Why is this specific thing what is happening?”

Lleu: And the thing is, sometimes there’s an answer, like, ten books in the future. Which is part of why we’re here today, because you have only read the original trilogy, the Harper Hall trilogy, and part of Moreta.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we are doing our best, really, truly, to prevent you from continuing down this dark path and reading post-Moreta, ’cause it does not improve.

Lleu: Yeah; I have fond memories of some of the books from the ’90s, but — like, I think Dolphins of Pern is a good book, or is an okay book at least —

Lleu: — but you can’t read Dolphins of Pern without previously having read Renegades, which is bad, and All the Weyrs of Pern, which is messy at best.

onlysunscreen: I am very torn, because on the one hand every other time I’ve progressed through this book series, it has been with very clear and sincere warnings, but also at least some level of, “Okay, but soon you’ll hit another book that is actually interesting or good in a certain way.” And this time you've been extremely clear that I should not, under any circumstances, keep reading. But also, there’s so many things that I have questions about that I desperately want to see what Anne McCaffrey is going to write about in all these future books, so…I don’t know.

Tequila Mockingbird: What is that picture — “There's nothing in this cave worth dying for.” The diving warning.[1]

onlysunscreen: I don’t actually know at this point — you might — what the makeup of the kind of sci-fi reading audience was at that time, but it feels it certainly feels like she’s writing this narrative that is appealing to heterosexual women in a very specific way, but then also is having horrible things happen to heterosexual women and also cutting them out of the story quite a bit. And even though there’s a matriarchal aspect to the dragon society, the men end up being the ones who are kind of on paper in charge. It’s a very interesting blend of political power — but I guess mostly, most of my question is, if we’re saying that horse girl fantasy is part of what Pern is, why are there so few women and why are they so constrained so often?

Tequila Mockingbird: I think, personally, some of this is the beautiful song and dance of internalized misogyny.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we definitely see — and it varies some from book to book; Moreta is a beautiful exception in a lot of ways — that you get one special, magic, powerful female protagonist, and she has to be specifically better than all of the other women in the story, who don’t, often, get to be complete and fully realized characters. But I think some of why there are so few women in this story is because she is trying to express or connect this idea of being a woman in a world that does not particularly want to give women agency and power.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think some of this is coming from a fantasy of, “Okay, and if I had a giant fuck-off dragon, would you still tell me I wasn’t allowed to fly? Okay. And would I be able to fly anyway?” I think Lessa is in a lot of ways a power fantasy.

Lleu: Yeah. It is undercut, as sunscreen points out, by the fact that, as I said in the Moreta episode, there are five types of women, and they are: housekeeper, taciturn, slutty, lazy, and stupid. And then Lessa, who’s Lessa. So six types of women, but one of them is a single-person type. So there’s a metaphor there about white feminism.

Lleu: I was talking about Octavia Butler a bit in the ’60s and ’70s retrospective episode, because I think she’s an interesting comparison, because, in many ways, especially her treatment of sexuality and heterosexuality is markedly similar to McCaffrey’s, in that so much of it is about what if heterosexuality is something that happens to you, at a time when you are not in control of or sometimes even present in your own body. But, unlike McCaffrey, she very determinedly and pointedly has female protagonists, almost all Black women, and centers them and centers their experiences and also, usually, anyway, includes a range of other female characters as well, whereas McCaffrey sometimes struggles on that front and certainly does not always center women, especially as the series goes on.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don't have a sense of whether that drift, as you note, to cut women out of the story as it progresses is something that is coming naturally from her as a writer or something that was responding to, as you’ve hit on, the reading demographics of science fiction at that time. Because I do think this is a book that was read by men and boys in this time period, and that’s mostly anecdata, but it won a Hugo, or some of them.

Lleu: Harlan Ellison read at least Dragonflight, because he reviewed it. His review is bonkers.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not like only women were reading them, so it is possible that from a publishing slant she felt like shifting towards male protagonists was useful.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also do think it is important for me to remember — it’s possible this is more of a me problem, but I do have to remind myself of how different, the world she was writing in was.

Lleu: When she moved to Ireland, married women were not allowed to work in the public sector.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I do think, as much as I, as a woman who grew up in the late 20th century, I find this idea of, “Wow, I’m the only shiny special female character and everyone hates me and I’m alone, but I’m so sexy and cool and magical and powerful that I just convince everyone” — I find that kind of tired. But it’s fair to say, 50 years ago it wasn’t actually quite as tired. I still don’t think it's a great concept. I still think there’s, as you noted, a lot of white feminism happening there. But I do think it was a little more new.

Lleu: Thinking, frankly, back to Harlan Ellison’s review, where basically he’s extremely sexist about it.

Lleu: I’m wondering if maybe she didn’t want to get boxed in as a Woman Science Fiction Writer, who writes science fiction for women, about women, and so intentionally turned —

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also worth looking at the other stuff she was publishing, because in the ’70s and ’80s, most of her speculative fiction had male protagonists, so the Pern books were a little bit more of an outlier there, actually.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then as it moves into the ’90s, two things happen: one, and we’re going to talk about this more in our decades episode upcoming, so I’ll just cover it briefly, is that she starts co-writing a lot with other female authors. And I think some of it was, she was getting older, her health wasn’t always great, and so she was providing the concept and the storyboarding, kind of, and they were doing the actual writing portions of large chunks of it. And those books are overwhelmingly female protagonists.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, some of that might have been that this wasn’t the only place where she was coming up with protagonists. So maybe she kind of felt like, “Hey, it would be nice to write a boy every now and then.”

onlysunscreen: That development is really interesting and I do appreciate the reminder of the context, ’cause I think it is easy to start judging McCaffrey holding a higher bar, because — and I think this is also what makes the whole Pern series so captivating, or crazy-making — is she she starts with these ideas that feel really modern or fresh or feminist or radical, like, “what if the person who determined who is in charge of this whole special dragon world was the queen dragon, essential?” Wow, that’s great. And then works backwards from there to something that feels so much less so. And so it’s very easy to start being like, “You had so much promise! You had something so interesting here, so exciting here, and you backpedaled it or something, or you softened it.” And she does that with characters, too, where — I think you both have pointed this out in the past but — Menolly, in the books that center on her, is such a great protagonist. And then as soon as she’s not the main character, it feels like those aspects of her personality that were so well developed are set aside so she can just become Robinton and Sebell’s lady buddy, romantic partner, or whatever she is with Robinton.

Lleu: I’m honestly really bitter about that. She becomes a Masterharper, but then Sebell becomes the Masterharper and she’s just his assistant. Makes me so mad. Not that she would want to do spy stuff —

Lleu: — because she wants to play music, and that’s fine and I’m really happy for her. But also, I feel like she does not get the recognition that she deserves. Anyway.

onlysunscreen: And that just feels like it’s a pattern with other characters, too, especially female characters. It feels like there’s more consistency in the writing of the male characters. Maybe it’s because I care about them less? You’ve Menolly, but you also have Mirrim — in her first appearance she’s pretty fun; she’s this feisty kid. And then she just becomes the nag, basically —

onlysunscreen: — that everyone wishes wasn’t around, even though supposedly her and Menolly have this beautiful friendship. Even Menolly is kind of like, “Don’t mind Mirrim. She’s just the worst.” It’s a real bummer! When their relationship was set up as this really great thing that was fun to read about and kind of just let go —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, a hundred percent. And it’s also… This is something that shows up in other sci-fi and fantasy, where you have this nominal matriarchy, but somehow all of the matriarchy winds up where the women’s authority and power specifically comes through having sex with men. I’m thinking about R.A. Salvatore, Anne Bishop — it is a trap that I think a lot of authors fall into.

Lleu: Yes. The political authority stems from the queen dragon and the Weyrwoman, but the political authority is then almost exclusively vested in the Weyrleader.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because diegetically — sunscreen, so much of this is because Sean and Sorka specifically, the first two in-charge dragonrider people —

Tequila Mockingbird: — were really goddamn weird. She, for some reason, in her prequel, really commits to, you know all of these things about dragonrider culture that you thought had a complicated maybe genesis over decades or centuries or came from — nope, these are these two specific people and their marriage, and that’s why we're all like this.

Lleu: The reason that dragonriders don’t generally raise their own children, based on the prequel stories, is clearly modeled on Sean and Sorka’s disinterest in raising their own child, so they just pass him on to other people and then that becomes the model for how Weyrs work.

Tequila Mockingbird: Sorka’s like, “I could not possibly do anything other than love my dragon and also my husband. You don’t even understand. If I couldn't have time for my horse, the idea that I could have time for my human baby? Absurd.”

onlysunscreen: I mean, that’s honestly fascinating. The whole concept that it’s based on just the original couple, but also, I’m in the middle of Moreta right now, and I just read a part where she’s referring to Orlith as her “partner,” her “weyrmate.” She’s talking about her dragon like a romantic partner in some ways, and also like a life partner in other ways, and it’s so clear that that relationship is so much more — I mean, as it is throughout the whole series — than any romantic relationship that she has. A man could never compare, basically. And I love the idea that dragons replace men, and then the men replace children. So you can only have two types of people you care about.

Lleu: I’m thinking about Pern scholarship now, and I’d have to look back at the details of the article. But I’m thinking about, Patricia Monk has an article — the title is “The Future Imperfect of Conjugation: Images of Marriage in Science Fiction” — where, among other things, she reads the dragon-rider relationship as McCaffrey’s solution to the problem of marriage and heterosexual relationships, because having the dragon who is the perfect partner and fulfills all of your emotional needs takes the strain off of the relationship between humans. Because human partners not only don’t have to but also can’t provide everything that the dragons do. Which is kind of bonkers. Mary Brizzi also, in her Starmont Reader’s Guide to Anne McCaffrey, talks about the dragon-dragonrider relationship as a weird kind of Kierkegaardian, the dragon is the Absolute that we’re becoming close to — I don’t really buy Brizzi’s argument as much; Monk’s is a little more convincing, although also, I think, a little out there.

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially in Moreta, but more broadly, it is fair in some ways to read dragonriders as being involved in a hierarchical polyamory structure, where the dragon is your primary partner —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and you also have secondary and sometimes tertiary and quaternary, etc., partners, temporarily or for long term. But I think there’s also though something interesting in the way that a dragon replaces a child, in the sense that you are, for the first years of your dragon’s life, in a much more parental relationship with this baby creature. And then it grows up and is your — not equal, because they’re never quite human, but is providing that more mutual emotional support and validation and connection.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s a little bit unevenly presented, I would say, in that Moreta, specifically, and her relationship with Orlith is the paradigm.

Lleu: And every other dragon rider relationship that we see is a little bit off from that.

Lleu: Like, I don’t think we ever really get to see Ramoth providing Lessa with the kind of emotional support that Orlith provides Moreta. Or we certainly don’t see Mnementh providing that to F’lar. The closest maybe is Gadareth and T’lion in Dolphins of Pern. But — F’nor and Canth, maybe.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think, Jaxom and Ruth, we are supposed to see that as a more equal, emotional, supportive relationship.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, frankly, I think Ramoth’s kind of a bitch, and I love that for her. And that's okay. Sometimes you’re a woman who loves to do murder, and your perfect partner also loves to do murder.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you need to be in a stable romantic relationship, not, of course, with F’lar, but with Mnementh, who can constantly be flying behind Ramoth being like, “But actually, if we kill them all, it would be inconvenient.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s a waste — this is the fake good version of Pern that lives in my head, where Lessa and Ramoth get to do as much murder as they want, because I do think one of McCaffrey’s skills is, when I’m reading the books, I’m in it; I get really sucked in. While I am reading them, I’m like, “Yeah, Lessa should get to kill whoever she wants to kill.” That was the book that I needed when I was 11. I was such an angry child. So angry all the time.

Lleu: Things to unpack in how intensely I felt about the Menolly books, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: This is kind of what I am curious about with coming to it as an adult: do you find that you are relating to these characters? Because I do feel like my relationship to Lessa was a very 12-year-old relationship to Lessa; my relationship to Menolly was a very 12-year-old relationship to Menolly. And I’m not sure what it would be like to encounter these characters without that layer of nostalgia for my own tween self.

onlysunscreen: So I started the Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, and I was very much a Tamora Pierce reader as a as a kid —

onlysunscreen: Alanna was my favorite heroine of hers. This felt of a piece, in a way that, despite not reading it at all as a 12-year-old, I was in some ways relating to it, like, I can imagine reading this as a kid and being very team Menolly and feeling like, “Yeah, people don’t understand how special me and you are, Menolly!” I think that was really easy to put myself in that place, and I, I really enjoyed those books. There is obviously additional layer there of seeing some bigger picture things that I would not have picked up on as much as a 12-year-old who would probably have been a lot more like, “It’s great that Menolly is doing all this by herself! Me, too; I also want to just be out in the world by myself and that would be good actually.” But as an adult, I was much more concerned for Menolly’s safety throughout a lot more of the books. Much more angry at not just her parents but the whole entire Hold that was collectively lying, not to actively hurt her, but that was the result. I could feel myself as a 12-year-old reading them. The other ones were different. I knew vague facts about Pern…

Tequila Mockingbird: And was this solely from being friends with Lleu and the fact that he brings it up?

onlysunscreen: Yes. Yes, exactly. I had never encountered Pern outside of Lleu talking about it. But that gave me some context going in.

Lleu: The only ones that I really listened or read as a child, it was Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, Dolphins of Pern, and Masterharper of Pern, which just redoes Menolly’s plot for a third time, but with Robinton as the protagonist now.

Lleu: So I was even more closely able to be like, “Ah, yes, just like me.” And Dolphins of Pern, similarly, does involve a teenager going off to live in the wilderness by himself. And also, crucially, the two main protagonists are both teenagers. So the books that I felt the most that I felt strongest about were the ones where the protagonist was young.

Lleu: I definitely did at some point, but none of the original trilogy made a super strong impression on me?

Tequila Mockingbird: I definitely enjoyed the Harper Hall duology — let’s be real; nobody likes Dragondrums — but I was obsessed with Lessa. I read Dragonflight over and over and over again, and I was obsessed with Sorka. Menolly and Sorka were younger protagonists, and I do think, in a lot of ways, Lessa feels very young in Dragonflight, because it is a coming-of-age story.

Tequila Mockingbird: But for me, it was more about, as I said, I was so angry all the time, and getting to read a character who is also angry all the time was really valuable to me?

onlysunscreen: Yeah. I think that a few things characterized my relationship to the original trilogy, one of which was, I love reading about a traumatized, angry woman.

onlysunscreen: I will read basically anything with that pitch. So that was certainly one of the things that was appealing to me, or working for me. But I think, at the same time, I related to Lessa a little bit less and felt a little bit more protective of her? “Yes, let Lessa murder people; she deserves it. But also, has anyone ever checked in with Lessa?” is what I was thinking through a lot of that book. Can Lessa have a friend? Can Lessa not be in this very deeply fucked up sexual assault-y relationship with the worst man alive? That was a lot of what I was thinking about, not just because of being slightly older and having those topics be very front-of-mind, but also because Lleu had warned me that that was an element of the series and also just likes to talk about how wild Pern can be, and so I was primed for that.

onlysunscreen: But at the same time, I totally agree that Anne McCaffrey’s very good at drawing you in, and despite, again, so many warnings that I should not keep reading, I read stretches of these books so fast. I’ll finish them in a day and I’ll move on to the next one.

onlysunscreen: They get you! They really get you. So, it’s not like I was just reading like academically, but I think I was primed to think more about those elements and be really aware of them. But it still pulled me in. She still got me.

onlysunscreen: There’s two places that she loves so much, and she must constantly, it seems, return to how they are the best. And it’s Benden and Ruatha. We must always be learning about someone with -less- in their name and how they are actually the best ever, especially at being a feudal overlord of some sort. And then Benden, throughout the ages, also must be the best, even if it’s just in a subtle way where we have to be reminded, even so long ago that their wine was still the best wine and everyone can agree on that.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t drink, but people do have different tastes in alcohol. But not on Pern.

Lleu: I want so badly for there to be one character in Pern who’s like, “Actually, I really like Tillek wine.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Actually, word of god is that the reason that Benden wine is better is because they have vacuum-seal casks from the pre-descent into medieval technology era that they have just been keeping secret, because they don’t know what the fuck it is, but they know it’s weird and they don’t want anyone to take it away and mess up their wine, and that’s actually why.

onlysunscreen: I love to have truly unimaginable technology, and I only use it for wine, and I won’t tell anyone else about it.

Lleu: I feel like McCaffrey must just have herself had a very specific, idiosyncratic taste in wine that perhaps people gave her a hard time for sometimes, and she decided to give that characteristic to all of her characters.

Tequila Mockingbird: And apparently, independently, both Lleu and I gave you the same answer to that question, which is: Ruatha is special because they’re more Irish than everyone else is. And this is canon!

Tequila Mockingbird: When Pern is originally settled, it’s a whole bunch of different people, but our special protagonists are Irish. And it’s Sorka who ends up marrying Sean and becoming the first kind of Weyrwoman, and her parents found Ruatha Hold.

Lleu: Her father’s name is “Red” — that’s his nickname, anyway, ’cause he’s a redhead —

Lleu: So “Ruatha” is from the Irish rua, meaning “red-haired,” and áth, meaning “ford” — áth spelled A-T-H, with a acute on the A. The reason it’s “Ruatha” with the extra A on the end, I’m 100% sure, is because she knew that Dublin in Irish is called Baile Átha Cliath, which is “the town of the ford of the town of” — the Cliath part, I don’t know if it’s a personal name or a river name or a place name. Anyway. And she was like, “Oh, so átha means ‘ford.’” But átha means “of the ford.” So it’s wrong,[2] but it’s clearly rua-átha, “red ford.” And lo and behold, the short story from the ’90s that establishes this explicitly is titled —

Tequila Mockingbird: And literally they’re going out to set up a new Hold, and they have to cross a river, and they make a lampshade joke about it. And that’s it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. McCaffrey did move to Ireland on purpose. The impression that I receive is there’s this very special flavor of like Irish American that is just so obsessed with the version of Ireland that is in their head. And to be fair, she actually moved there. So she knew something about an actual version of Ireland. But that is kind of the vibe that I get.

Tequila Mockingbird: As far as I know, Paul Benden was not Irish. That one I think is more working backwards. Really, the reason that Ruatha and Benden have to be more special than everyone else is that Lessa has to be more special than everyone else, and she’s from Ruatha and she goes to Benden.

Lleu: Yeah, and I think the reason she goes to Benden is probably, she wants Benden Weyr to be in rough shape. And if they’re going to be in rough shape, they can’t just be chilling in the sun on the beach.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I also do think there’s something to the fact that Fort is the first Weyr and the biggest Weyr. And so Benden gets to feel like a little bit of an underdog.

Tequila Mockingbird: Like, “Oh, no, we’re the second one, but we’re actually better.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I also did have an extremely cursed thought about the dragon-rider relationship, thinking about that, first you're taking care of them and then — honestly, the parallel that comes to mind is the Twilight books? And the werewolves impressing on a baby who then grows up to be their perfect romantic and sexual partner. And the way that it’s not creepy at all actually, she promises.

Lleu: Yeah, ugh, unfortunately, I feel like that might, in fact, have been a Pern influence. We should apologize on McCaffrey’s behalf.

onlysunscreen: It’s even the same word, right? It’s “impress” both times. Yeah.

Lleu: Yeah, this is the thing about these books: once you read them, anything that came after Pern, you’re just like, oh, that’s Pern. That’s Pern. Eventually, it gets back to Pern. They’re just everywhere. Sometimes in little ways and sometimes in big ways and sometimes in weirdly specific ways. You got that from Anne McCaffrey. You can’t have come up with that on your own. It’s too specific.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although, the world is a beautiful place full of wondrous coincidences. But yeah, no, I don’t buy it.

onlysunscreen: Yeah. A media experience that I think about a lot is that I really loved Wayne’s World as a kid.

onlysunscreen: And then I watched The Graduate, and there is basically a shot-for-shot remake of the end of The Graduate in Wayne’s World. But I had watched Wayne’s World many times before I ever watched The Graduate.

onlysunscreen: And the feeling of, “Oh, this is the same thing as that. But it’s also where the thing that I’m familiar with came from” was so disorienting, and I got pretty close to that a few times reading Pern books.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think it’s worth thinking about the fact that McCaffrey was reading other people’s stuff as she was writing, was having an influence on other writers, and there was this intertextual relationship that she’s setting up not only between her own books, because she loves to write an interquel, but also it’s all going in, grist to the mill.

Lleu: Yeah. She was going to cons, involved with or at least interacting with, occasionally, fans, clearly in the broader science fiction milieu. Although, as we talked about, interestingly, I have never heard or seen anyone discuss her alongside Delany or Le Guin or Philip K. Dick or any of the other New Wave writers, in kind of a weird way. So she’s sort of siloed off, and maybe part of that is just because she’s writing very much popular fiction, in a way that the New Wave writers were not.

Tequila Mockingbird: Actually, sunscreen, would you say — they’re not good, but are they narratively satisfying?

Tequila Mockingbird: Do you feel like you could be done? You said you’re curious. You have all these questions, but do you feel like you need to know what is going to happen, or is it just more “what the fuck is going on here”?

onlysunscreen: I think that Dragonson and Dragonsinger, very narratively satisfying. That one’s easy.

onlysunscreen: I do think I’m motivated a little more by the “what the fuck is going on here” than the what’s going to happen. And maybe this is because I have too much extra information. But yeah, I kind of feel like it’s not that challenging for me to predict the broad strokes of what’s likely to happen.

onlysunscreen: Or to feel that the stakes of them aren’t as high as they are for the characters. They’ve shown me that they’re very good at dealing with Threadfall. It doesn’t seem like it’s fun, but I’m not like, “You really have to destroy the Red Star, clearly.” But it's more the, I know that a lot of the upcoming books do have more information about how Pernese society developed and, like, where all of their strange traditions came from. That’s much more compelling to me than what’s going to happen with Thread.

Lleu: Mm. To a significant extent, that’s why I say don’t read the later books, because she’s just not as interested in the kinds of social changes that I’m interested in, I guess. She gets much more focused on the Red Star, specifically, and yeah, absolutely, as I said in the recap episode, the end of The White Dragon is perfectly narratively satisfying to me. Not Jaxom’s arc, but Pern’s arc, in that they’re acquiring information about history, they're doing stuff, they’re seeding the grubs all over the Northern Continent. Thread’s done. Thread’s no longer an issue. They’re still going to need dragons, and for people to be inside, but protecting agricultural land is no longer going to be an issue after this Pass. They’ve solved the biggest part of the Thread problem, fundamentally.

Lleu: And so I also don’t really feel the need to “and we’ve got to make sure that Thread never comes back ever again.” Why?

Tequila Mockingbird: The obvious answer to that would be, “Well, because dragons die fighting Thread, and that’s sad,” but they very deliberately refuse to actually let us feel sad about that.

Tequila Mockingbird: At any point. Either “Only one dragon died, but it’s okay. He was old.” Or, “Yeah, a couple of weyrlings do die in every batch; the dragons get a little down about it, and that sucks.” But it’s almost this deliberate refusal to allow there to be narrative grief in that space. And I do think that — to your point of, yeah, Thread sort of seems under control here. It’s a weather issue.

onlysunscreen: Yeah. There’s also just, as a reader, one of the things that’s appealing about Pern is —

onlysunscreen: And the motivation of the characters to make the dragons who are their psychic best friends less important is not that motivating to a reader. I like that the dragons are important and that they’re your psychic best friend. I’m happy everyone can retire or whatever, but it’s not a compelling story to me how we get to the place of dragon retirement. I don’t really want to read about the Weyrs becoming more like the Holds but with dragons.

Lleu: Yeah. Once you’ve established, “Yes, dragonriders are going to occupy land on the Southern Continent so we can support ourselves. Great.” Now you’ve solved not only the Thread problem but also the tithing problem. There’s truly nothing else for you to be worried about now. Why are you still worrying?

onlysunscreen: The thing you could worry about then is, how do we get dragonmen who are used to being heroic battle hero people to be farmers?

Tequila Mockingbird: She did write a book about that, in fact. And it isn’t good.

Lleu: She did write a book about that. Before we started talking, you mentioned to me a passage that I had forgotten about in Moreta, while the Weyrleaders are having their gathering at the butte.

Lleu: “‘We will fly Thread because that is the one service we can provide the sick in the Holds. They must not fear the incursions of Thread from without!’ S’ligar said in his deep gentle unhurried voice. ‘We have labored too long as a Craft to surrender Pern now to the ravages of Thread because of a menace we can’t see.’”

Lleu: And you were like, “dragonriders consider themselves a craft???” with three exclamation points. And I was like, “I forgot about that completely.” But that is where the series ends up. In Skies of Pern, there’s a big meteor that crashes into the ocean and causes a big tsunami, and the dragons help rescue people. Then the dragons are like, “Hm, what if we get really into astronomy and our Craft is protecting Pern from asteroids?”

onlysunscreen: You know, the professions: healing, music slash spycraft slash the news…

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It’s very dumb, but would it make you feel better if you knew that the way that they destroy Thread was time travel and telekinesis so that the dragons could physically, again, telekinetically throw the spaceship at the Red Star?

onlysunscreen: Mm. Time travel has been established. Is telekinesis something that I’m just forgetting was already in the books?

onlysunscreen: It’s great how dragons have every ability that is needed by the story in any particular moment.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it turns out that’s how they can fly, because of course their wings don’t actually support them, they say casually, 15 books in.

onlysunscreen: I just read a long passage about how flight works for a dragon whose wing is healing. I just read it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, that’s ’cause the dragons don’t believe in themselves.

Lleu: Yeah, that’s literally, explicitly what we are told. “Well, a dragon can carry as much as he thinks he can carry.” And the 2,500-year-old supercomputer that they’re talking to is like, “I can’t work with that. You need to give me numbers.” And then AIVAS is like, “Ah, no, they lift things with telekinesis.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But we didn’t find out this because we didn’t find this out because Sean hated carrying things because of his ego.

onlysunscreen: That does seem to actually be a cultural norm that was very successfully passed down. There’s so much about the politics of dragons carrying things. It seems like society would be a lot more functional if dragons just carried things a little more often.

Lleu: Yeah, honestly, if you’re looking for “what are dragons going to do after Thread?”

Lleu: Dragons are going to teleport building materials around the planet like they did to build Cove Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: And just think: you have instantaneous communication and transit in your otherwise medieval-era. This is the industrial revolution, and all you have to do is feed ’em some cows.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, another question for you, sunscreen, coming to this book. Do you feel like you have a sense of what the world of Pern is? Or do you think it is fundamentally unsatisfying or unexplained until you get to that prequel book, Dragonsdawn?

onlysunscreen: Huh. I think I would still have the questions, but I don’t think I would be, like, expecting to get an answer.

onlysunscreen: “This is a science fiction book about colonists from Earth and how they made dragons. And then a very long time later, all of these things happened.”

onlysunscreen: There is, I think, an implication that you’re going to get an explanation for some of this, or that it should make sense in some way, but I don’t think if I had read it totally cold I would have necessarily expected all of these things to have answers.

Tequila Mockingbird: I am also shaped by my own experience, in that I don’t think I read the introduction. I was a horrible gremlin child who skipped author’s notes, so my memory of it was thinking it was a fantasy book.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then kind of over the course of Dragonflight being like, “Wait a second, what?” And then getting to the Dragonquest and being like, “Ohh.”

onlysunscreen: Yeah, I found it pretty easy to forget about that introduction while reading.

Lleu: See, I’ve listened to Dragonsong and Dragonsinger so many times that I have Sally Darling saying “Rukbat, in the Sagittarian sector, was a golden G-type star” burned into my brain.

onlysunscreen: Yeah, it just doesn’t feel relevant during most of the action. I think it’s a fascinating choice to start it that way.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it does feel to me like the introduction is more about McCaffrey staking her position and letting the reader know that this is science fiction —

Tequila Mockingbird: — than it is really necessary to the internal experience of the story to know that.

onlysunscreen: You, the author, are saying, “There are reasons for these things that are happening, and there’s reasons that the society developed this way and it makes it, if anything, more confusing or frustrating when it feels like, well, yeah, sometimes there’s a reason and sometimes, uhh, the reason is just vibes. The reason is, Anne felt like this today.

Lleu: See, for me, that load-bearing for how the series works as a whole, because it tells you, “There’s a reason that this is all like this.” And even if you don’t find out what the answer is, or if the answer is weird, it means that you can’t take it for granted in the way that you could take, for example, the pseudo-medieval setting of the Earthsea books, which are contemporary with this, for granted, or the like pseudo-Bronze Age setting of ’60s sword and sorcery. It forces you to be like, “No, I have to think about this as science fiction, as something that has happened for reasons over a long period of time.”

onlysunscreen: Right. It kind of prompts you to not completely suspend your disbelief —

onlysunscreen: — and accept the premise as-is, because you know that there’s more behind it.

Lleu: Yeah, and I don’t think she always succeeds in addressing the more or in showing the process effectively. For me, I would say the only thing that I feel like I really get from Dragonsdawn is, the reason Pern’s politics are like this is because the colonists were all libertarians.

Lleu: — who want to have a ranch. But once you know that, it’s like, “Oh, everything else makes sense now.” For me, that’s the key. And everything else in Dragonsdawn is just cosmetic details.

Tequila Mockingbird: Very important horse girl-related cosmetic details. Gosh.

Tequila Mockingbird: Looping all the way back to you as a little tween, imagining yourself and —

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s really rough for me personally to imagine myself on Pern, because the only job that I would actually want to do would be Harper. And I can’t sing or play an instrument. I’m so unmusical. And it’s really unfair of her to say that all of the teachers have to also be musicians.

Lleu: Yeah, it’s funny. Harper Hall sounded very appealing to me, but also I was really into C’gan’s title being “Weyrsinger.” I was like, “I want to be that.”

onlysunscreen: Maybe it’s just because I started with the Menolly books, but that’s the immediate gut reaction I have. The Weyrs are appealing in that they’re not as repressive and authoritarian as the Holds. I think Craft feels like the way to go. The Weyrs feel kind of exhausting to me. There’s so much ego going on in the Weyrs all the time, and I just feel that I would be very annoyed.

Lleu: That is kind of the flip-side of the Weyr, is, I think being an attractive, amiable dog-man with my giant psychic lizard-cat would probably be pretty tiring. Especially ’cause they’re all jocks.

Lleu: — even M’leng, who’s the effeminate green rider love interest character in Dragonseye — he’s still a jock. They’re all jocks. I don’t know if I could do that.

Lleu: Knowing who I am as a person. I don’t know if I have the stamina to do Threadfall. The upside is that if I were a green rider, we know from Dragonseye that greens don’t have the stamina, and so they get cycled in and out during Threadfall. So maybe I could manage that okay.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also, we did the math, and the orgies are just constant.

Tequila Mockingbird: I — even if one felt a greater degree of sexual attraction than I do, that just seems exhausting.

onlysunscreen: Yeah, it’s possible my asexuality is also playing a role here, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: I guess the dragon in some way fixes that, ’cause you don’t have to be sexually attracted to anyone. The dragon takes the wheel.

Lleu: Right. Again, as we know, you’re not even really in your own body while it’s happening. It’s just happening to you.

Lleu: It does seem like you then kind of wake up and have to deal with the consequences, which it does seem like could be tiring.

Tequila Mockingbird: How much lube is the Weyr going through, and where do they get it? Is this numbweed? What is actually going on here? We do know that their form of birth control is just, go between and you spontaneously abort the baby. It’s fine. I have so many questions.

onlysunscreen: I, too, have so many questions. The logistics of the Weyr sexuality is fascinating to me. I do think I am fixated on the way sexuality is written in the books, especially for the queen dragonriders. To me, reading the descriptions of Lessa and Brekke — you can read it a few different ways, right? It could be, “what if I was allowed to have sex with these hot, dangerous men but no one could blame me for it because it wasn’t my fault?” But you could also read it the way that I lean towards, which is, “What if the complications of whether or not I’m interested in having sex, what my sexuality is, whether I’m sexually attracted to this person —”

onlysunscreen: “— what if all of that very tiring nonsense was just taken off the table, and I simply did not have to deal with it, and my sexual relationship with my partner was —”

onlysunscreen: Yeah! “Was just completely removed as a question? Everyone knows that when the dragons have sex, we’ll have sex that's going to happen. And I don’t have to do anything about it.” That is a very different kind of fantasy, question mark, than the more romance, “Oh, taken by the force of emotion!” It’s more like, what if that chore was removed from my plate?

Lleu: That’s a fascinating perspective. We talked about free love and whatnot, but also the culture of dating, and especially writing these books during the period when she’s preparing to divorce her husband. It kind of is like, “What if I could have a partner and not have to go through any of the work that finding a partner and sustaining a relationship and especially a sexual relationship entails, and it just happened for me?”

Tequila Mockingbird: I agree that that is an intriguing angle and one I had not really considered. Yeah, the temptation to psychoanalyze McCaffrey is powerful, but —

onlysunscreen: And this is the problem with the fantasy of having a relationship that just appears or is maintained via an external force, is, that does not actually continue to be the case. F’lar requires so much managing from Lessa; it makes me deeply weary to read about.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Moreta and Sh’gall, too. It’s just, like, “Oh, no…”

Lleu: Yeah. Again, not to psychoanalyze, but I kind of have to psychoanalyze — what if there were this entity that you have to take care of and it’s trapping you into this relationship that you don’t really want with this man that you don’t really like? Hm…

Tequila Mockingbird: How did you feel about motherhood, Anne McCaffrey? Oh, we don’t raise the ba- — oh, we don’t have time for that. Absolutely. We can’t. We have to love our dragons. We can’t raise children. Got it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And what about the abandoned child with severe disabilities? Would you have called that Camo was Robinton’s son?

onlysunscreen: Absolutely not. When I was informed of this, my theory was that Anne wrote Camo, and then Anne was like, “I kind of like Camo more than I expected, and/or other people like Camo more than I expected. I’ll reward him by making him related to Robinton!”

Lleu: Yeah. What’s better than being related to the specialest little boy?

onlysunscreen: Yeah, I think Robinton’s entire energy with everybody is pretty defined by wistful sexual tension.

Lleu: It is emotionally affecting, although it’s a little bit undercut by the Bible quote that kills me.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, yeah. We don’t believe in religion, except for the Bible, which is good literature.

Lleu: It’s the greatest book humanity ever produced, according to the 2,500-year-old supercomputer.

Tequila Mockingbird: The supercomputer knows about everything. That’s why he’s qualified to have opinions.

Lleu: As the supercomputer and Robinton die at the same time — Robinton dies and the supercomputer shuts itself down forever. Sort of. It’s complicated. Anyway —

onlysunscreen: I can’t decide if this makes me more or less likely to read it!

Lleu: All irrelevant. What I want to talk about is that — we see this in The Dolphins of Pern, but we see this from the perspective of people who live in an outlying hold on the Southern Continent, whose son has been studying at the school at Landing and so interacted with AIVAS and has seen Robinton. They’ve all met Robinton, but it’s not like they’re super close to Robinton. And when the news that Masterharper Robinton has died is circulating, everyone at the Hold — not just the Holders who have had some personal relationship with him — is losing their minds. The whole Hold shuts down for the day. Everyone’s like sobbing. All of the kids are like, “We need to eat, but the adults are not making food. What do we do?” And I’m just like…this makes no sense. They would not react this way. Sorry, but they wouldn’t. They would not be breaking down in tears and all of the adults sitting on the steps just in shock. That wouldn’t happen. But because Robinton is the specialest little boy…

Tequila Mockingbird: Honestly, it feels more like, “Where were you when JFK got assassinated?” The energy. It’s like, he’s an elderly man who died of old age. Come on.

onlysunscreen: He seemed to be clearly dying from books that I have read, so…

Lleu: Right, he’s on the Southern Continent in the first place because he had a major health crisis and almost died and is there to recover.

Tequila Mockingbird: To be fair, I did cry when Leonard Nimoy died, and I’ve never met Leonard Nimoy.

Lleu: I feel like that’s different in a context where there is mass media.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, he is, in some sense, the mass media of Pern. It’s just not mass. It’s the limited media. And it’s like if BTS died and that’s the emotional reaction they’re having.

onlysunscreen: It does kind of feel like Anne McCaffrey’s like, “I’ve decided I really like this character. I’ve decided everyone really likes this character. I’ve decided that everyone definitely feels very emotionally attached to this character, even though there’s no logical reason for that to be the case, because both I and my protagonists like this character.”

Lleu: That moment where Masterharper Robinton is described as “famously impartial” — one of the most partisan people on the entire planet, more so than Lessa and F’lar.

Tequila Mockingbird: But, crucially, he does write the propaganda. And according to the propaganda, he’s famously impartial. That's why they didn’t say “impartial.” They said “famously impartial.”

onlysunscreen: Are you ready for rapid-fire — not very rapid-fire — questions about Pern?

Lleu: People are always asking this. I think we have a relatively good answer to this one. In the Weyrs, you need names to indicate who your parents are so that you know who you're related to during all of the orgies. So that’s a good answer. The bad answer is what’s actually in the books, which is, in Dragonsdawn, someone decides to name their child by squishing two names together. They’re like, “It's a new name. We need to break with the traditions and get rid of the old names.”

onlysunscreen: What’s with the apostrophes in the names of the dragonriders?

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s because dragons are impatient. The dragons are like, Human names are dumb and also long. We’re in a hurry. We’re communicating telepathically. We’re just going to shorten them.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, there were longer names that also got chopped. F’lar’s name was not “Falar.”

Lleu: Yeah, it was Fallarnon. That’s what gets me, is the inconsistency of, why was “Fallarnon” shortened to “F’lar” and “Famanoran” shortened to F’nor — or “Famanóran,” depending on whose pronunciation you’re using — but “Felessan” is not shortened to “F’les”?

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, “F’lessan” is just dumb. We must accept this.

Lleu: Yes. But also then you get, as sunscreen pointed out earlier today, “F’neldril” is the weyrlingmaster at Fort Weyr in Moreta?

Tequila Mockingbird: Extradiegetically, I think she just wanted a cool apostrophe aesthetic for her sci-fi world and then she back-explained it that way.

onlysunscreen: Yeah. Am I misremembering that it’s also referred to as an honorific?

Tequila Mockingbird: Specifically, it’s because women are intimidating and the dragons would not dare to shorten their names.

onlysunscreen: Dear god. Okay. And that’s why the queen riders also don’t.

onlysunscreen: Infuriating. Great. Why did they name Jaxom after his horrible rapist father?

Tequila Mockingbird: When they name him, they don’t know that his dad is dead or deposed, so it’s possible that the midwife gave him that name on the assumption that Fax was a tyrant in charge, and if you didn’t name the baby after him, he would be mad about it.

Lleu: Oh, my god, you’re right. I forgot the midwife is the one who names him.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because Gemma’s dead, or dying, and Fax isn’t really interested.

onlysunscreen: Why does no one ever talk about the fire lizard mating flights?

Lleu: This actually does come up in Dragonsdawn; the first time it happens, we hear about it from the perspective of the biologists who’ve been studying them. And they’ve been coworkers for a long time; they’d never really considered the possibility of anything more, and then suddenly they’re having sex, and then afterwards they’re like, “Oh, my god, what just happened? But also, maybe we’re in love now?” But it is very much like, “Oh, oops.” I mean, one thing I think is interesting that is not explored at all in this series is, a lot of dragon riders have fire lizards.

Tequila Mockingbird: How do they manage to fit yet more sex into the orgy schedule?

Lleu: Yeah, first of all. And second of all, let’s have F’nor’s perspective on this as someone whose dragon is male but whose fire lizard is female.

Lleu: You could do so much more interesting stuff with gender than McCaffrey does in these books. Even as she’s doing a lot of very weird stuff with gender, she could do even more.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also true that Sebell and Menolly is very fade to black.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that is a situation where like Sebell has a female fire lizard and Menolly has the male fire lizard.

Lleu: Yeah, and as I have said in the past and will undoubtedly say again, I think the only conclusion we can draw from this is that Sebell was getting pegged during the mating flight.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I am so there with you emotionally, but I do have to ask, does this mean that he carries a strap with him at all times?

Tequila Mockingbird: They were just on a boat. They were not in any way anticipating that this would happen.

onlysunscreen: Menolly has so many fire lizards that she just has to be prepared at all times.

Lleu: I think Menolly just sent one of them off for one, right? Send off the Aunties and Uncle and they’ll bring you back a strap.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. Thank you. ’Cause I don’t want to know what kind of strap-on you could jerry-rig on a boat. Think of Sebell’s health. Okay, cool.

onlysunscreen: Well, relatedly, when everyone was getting all excited about getting the first fire lizards, first off Menolly’s fire lizards presumably had the first mating flight before other people had fire lizards, so what the hell happened there? And then Robinton talks about his fire lizard having a mating fight, and then also when they’re first all getting fire lizards, despite being people who seem to understand what’s going on at Weyrs, all the Harpers are like, “I really want a queen.” Do you? Have you considered the implications of that?

Lleu: Questions that are not addressed at all in this series when people imply things. Menolly is like, “Yeah, Beauty’s had multiple clutches. She doesn’t always tell me where they are.” Uh-huh? What? And then like Robinson being like, “Yes, Zair being in a mating fight stirred up feelings I thought were long gone like.” So did you and Lord Groghe hook up? What happened there?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I think we have to assume that that is what happened.

Lleu: ’Cause it presumably wasn’t Menolly, and it presumably also wasn’t Sebell, otherwise Sebell would know that Kimi was about to mate. So it has to have been Merga.

Tequila Mockingbird: They had a wonderful night and this is why Lord Groghe is supporting Harper Hall’s political ambitions.

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s actually pro-AIVAS specifically because Robinton and he had a very magical experience together. That’s actually why everyone is so sad when Robinton died, ’cause he was getting around.

onlysunscreen: When the fire lizards start to become much more prominent in the Holds, why does this not cause intense social upheaval for places that are very sexually controlled up until that point.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think we are supposed to assume that the reason that Sebell and Menolly ended up, oops, was (a) they were alone together on a boat; there were no way to redirect that; and (b) they had latent feelings for each other.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think we are actually supposed to assume that a fire lizard mating flight is as compulsory or as overwhelming as a dragon’s.

Lleu: I don’t know if I 100% agree with that, but I do think that it’s certainly unlike queen mating fights at the Weyr, where not only are the two people whose dragons are having sex having sex, but also everyone else is super psychically horny. I think we are probably supposed to understand that with fire lizards, everything is just slightly less.

Tequila Mockingbird: Also the multiple bonds does have that question of, what happens to Menolly if Rocky flies Beauty?

Tequila Mockingbird: But also also, what happens if your fire lizard flies or is flown by a wild fire lizard?

Tequila Mockingbird: Ultimately the narrative’s saying, don’t worry about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think I will take that for myself to mean that it is a less overwhelming compulsion.

Lleu: ’Cause I’m also thinking about, Piemur, especially because Piemur’s, what, 14 when he impresses Farli?

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s funny to me, because, yes, obviously all of this sexual compulsive behavior is weird and unrealistic. But to me, reading it, it doesn’t honestly feel that much more unrealistic than the concept of sexual attraction. ’Cause the message that I received from the broader culture is, “Oh, you just feel overwhelmingly attracted to people.” And I’m like, “Fascinating. Can’t relate.” Part of my brain thinking about this is like, “Skill issue. I could have a fire lizard and it would be in a mating fight and I’d be like, ‘Wow, okay, have fun with that, guys. I will be reading a book.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s true. This is the real reason I do not want to live in Pern. The orgies I could overcome, but the lack of books would be killer.

Lleu: That’s why I would be interested to live in Pern specifically at the end of the Ninth Pass. I want to see what kind of novels Canth will write.

onlysunscreen: Even if the fire lizards don’t require such compulsory sex as dragons, there are still suddenly a bunch of fire lizards in a bunch of Holds that previously were very sexually controlled, and now, at minimum, a bunch of people are getting urges.

Lleu: Don’t worry about it. She clearly is thinking about the impact of fire lizards, but she’s thinking about the impact of fire lizards specifically as giving people a sense of what it’s like to be so intimately connected to a dragon, and not about any of the ways that that connection impacts the rhythm of people’s lives.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause it also doesn’t seem like she’s really thinking about the fact that everyone would now have access to teleportation of small objects.

Tequila Mockingbird: But you really have cracked your world-building wide open, and you’re not interested in that part of it.

Lleu: So the answer is, I think objectively it would have a significant impact on Hold sexual culture, but McCaffrey doesn’t think about it, so we don’t get any indication of what that impact actually looks like. Even later on when people are really anti-technology, I don’t think people object to fire lizards. Which, you might think, if people were in the middle of this kind of mass conservative reaction, that people might be a little bit concerned about, like, “Fire lizards are destroying our youth’s morals!” But it doesn’t come up.

onlysunscreen: That just seems…interesting, given that so much of the differences in the sexual politics between Weyrs and Holds is explicitly because of mating flights.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s a degree to which McCaffrey doesn’t want to challenge that. She does want the Weyrs to be noticeably distinct from the Holds.

Tequila Mockingbird: As we have come back to multiple times, she is not actually interested in getting rid of this pseudo-medieval culture.

Tequila Mockingbird: The mechanization and the proto-industrialization that we see will ultimately undermine a feudal structure, but she’s not worried about that.

onlysunscreen: Do you each think that we're supposed to believe that dragons are infallible?

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think we're supposed to think that they are infallible, but I do think we are supposed to think that they have very good instincts.

Lleu: Actually, I kind of think we are supposed to think dragons are infallible.

Tequila Mockingbird: — but I don’t think we're supposed to believe that dragons can be malicious.

Tequila Mockingbird: And sometimes that gets them killed. And I think it’s implied that the rider is also at fault, because the rider’s role is to prevent dragons from panicking or from going between without a clear vision of where they’re going, etc., etc.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think it’s a worthwhile distinction that we don’t ever see fire lizards accidentally going between and coming out in solid rock or going between and not coming back.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it seems like part of the enhancement of dragons, whether deliberately or accidentally, did build in that weakness.

Lleu: Unlike dragons, who have to learn by being actively instructed by people, including by their human rider, fire lizards just know —

Lleu: — because they have access to the knowledge of how to do it immediately, whereas dragons have to teach each other how to do it.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is the problem that comes with becoming hundreds of times larger than you were previously.

Tequila Mockingbird: All over that. Bam, bam, bam. You think there are thousands? No, there are 28 dolphins, flat. They’re just all over the place.

Lleu: Sorry, wait, this is core world-building information about Pern. Dolphins on Pern are sentient —

Lleu: — and capable of communicating with humans. So initially there was close collaboration between humans and dolphins, but during the chaos of the plague at Fort Hold right after they crossed to the Northern Continent, the dolphineers all died, and there were just not enough peoplea and people were too preoccupied with other things, and so they stopped staying in regular contact with dolphins. But for 2,500 years, dolphins have been teaching each other the working vocabulary in English. So when I say, could a dolphin Impress a dragon, this is not an academic question. This is a real question that is relevant to the Pern world-building.

onlysunscreen: The thing about Pern is that you could have made all of that up and I still kind of have to believe you. Anything could be true.

Lleu: So the plot of Dolphins of Pern is that two boys and then young men who first get really into dolphins and interacting with dolphins. And Readis’s parents and especially his mother don’t want him to do that, and so he has to run away to live in the wilderness.

Tequila Mockingbird: Every so often she needed a new reason for people to run away and a new species of special magic friends to run away with.

onlysunscreen: Yeah. She gets tired of her existing animal companions and then has to create a new one —

onlysunscreen: — which requires rapidly escalatingly unhinged world-building to justify.

Tequila Mockingbird: Just wait till you get to the psychic cheetahs. No, don’t. Don’t read those.

Lleu: So, the person who genetically engineered the grubs also genetically engineered a bunch of cheetahs to be extremely intelligent and maybe psychic.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then they killed him, which I think is proof that they were psychic. And they fled into the wilderness.

Lleu: More felines show up, but later on, they seem to be more like lions. Don’t know what’s going on with that.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think in Dragonsdawn, specifically, they know that he has cheetahs, but they’re not sure what else he has.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s possible that there were also lions that escaped from Tubberman.

onlysunscreen: I think a final question is, had Anne McCaffrey said anything about how much these things were planned in advance?

Tequila Mockingbird: I find it hard to believe that when she was writing Dragonflight, she was like, “Oh, yes, and this is going to resolve with the supercomputer telling the dragons to teleport the engines of spaceships onto the Red Star and blow them up. Using time travel.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think that she was planning the time travel thing when she wrote “Weyr Search.” I do think that a lot of this evolved as she was going. And I think you can see the way that things get retconned and adjusted over the course of, as we have said multiple times, a 30-plus-year series, you know? I think she added the dolphins in Dragonsdawn and then you get the sloppy, “Oh, and nobody ever noticed. It’s fine.”

onlysunscreen: It certainly has a seat-of-your-pants quality when you’re reading it.

Tequila Mockingbird: But she is in some ways a very prescient science fiction writer. She wrote a short fiction about gestational surrogacy 20 or 30 years before that was actually a thing. So, sometimes she had her finger on the pulse of history. Maybe we, too, could be having weird psychic dolphin friends at some point.

Lleu: If the trade-off is we get libertarian feudalism, I don’t want dolphin friends.

Tequila Mockingbird: No, I think the implication is that dolphineers select that ride on purpose. I would definitely want my psychic animal friend to be kind of evil. They can love me unconditionally, but we’re going to commit crimes.

Lleu: And, to be fair, Readis and T’lion do commit crimes with their intelligent, speaking dolphin friends. We’ll talk about this when we talk about Dolphins of Pern.

Lleu: My Dolphins of Pern thesis is that Readis and T’lion are actually only chaotic when they are not together. When they are together, they’re very organized and the chaos cancels out.

onlysunscreen: And the beautiful thing is, because it’s Pern, I don’t know if you’re talking about two human beings or a human being and a psychic dolphin.

Lleu: Readis absolutely could be a dolphin’s name. Except that the dolphins are all named normal human Earth names, like “Teresa.” Or, rather, Dolphins are named shortened versions of normal Earth names.

Tequila Mockingbird: See, now I would like to read the version of Dolphins of Pern where Readis is a dolphin.

onlysunscreen: Here’s a compelling reason for me not to read Dolphins of Pern, because that can be the good fake version of it that lives in my head, is that the main character is a dolphin.

Tequila Mockingbird: See, you get it. You don’t need to read more books in this series. You understand the strategies now.

Lleu: So here’s a juxtaposition. So, on the one hand, “Atlanta” is one of the names of the early dolphins. And then in the far future, there are dolphins named “Alta” —

Lleu: — which is clearly a far-future abbreviated version of “Atlanta.”

Tequila Mockingbird: McCaffrey’s thesis is very clearly that as we progress forward as a species thousands of years, we will hate syllables and also sexual agency for women. It’s possible that actually multisyllabic words are what has given sexual agency to women. We just don’t know.

Lleu: One of the dolphins is named “Tursi,” which is from Tursiops, the genus for bottlenose dolphins.

onlysunscreen: I take it all back. Anne McCaffrey’s world-building is flawless.

Tequila Mockingbird: Happy New Year to everybody, and as we move forward into 2025, I have a book recommendation that has nothing to do with Pern. It’s just a good story that I read in 2024. I read a short story the other day called “Inside the House of Wisdom,” by Tamara Masri. It's heartbreaking; she’s a Palestinian author. But it was also really good, and I recommend it.

Lleu: I’ll break from my trend and do a really new book. I read Kim Sung-il’s Blood of the Old Kings, translated by Anton Hur, which is first in an epic fantasy trilogy, although it’s pretty short for an epic fantasy novel, thankfully. It’s doing really interesting things thinking about empire and what it means to struggle against empire in a way that is not reducible to “We’ve got to go kill the emperor!”

onlysunscreen: A book that I will happily recommend that is even another book that was brought to my attention by Lleu is Fire Logic and the rest of the Elemental Logic series, by Laurie J. Marks. They care a lot about violence and community and colonialism and sexuality and agency and lots of the things that Anne McCaffrey tantalizingly almost cares about enough for me, but not quite.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is good, because it’s important to assert that we do have good taste in books. These are exceptions.

onlysunscreen: I can vouch for that. And, to be clear, you did tell me not to read these books.

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.

[2] In fairness, we should note that in Dragonflight the name of the Hold vacillates between “Ruatha” (incorrect Irish) and “Ruath” (still incorrect, because the possessing noun should follow the head noun, but less incorrect because áth “ford” is at least in the right case).