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Tequila Mockingbird: Hello!
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: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I wasn’t alive in the ’80s.
Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I also was not alive in the ’80s, although I was, just barely, alive for the Soviet Union.
Tequila Mockingbird: And today we are doing another retrospective episode, this time looking at all of the books from Moreta to All the Weyrs of Pern. It’s mostly, but not entirely, an ’80s retrospective, because, to today’s point, the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed and All the Weyrs of Pern finished the Ninth Pass arc, in some ways, in the same year felt just a little too tidy to ignore.
Lleu: So, initially, we were a little bit like, “Uh, I don’t know how much we have to say about these books as a group,” because they’re so scattered. Got Moreta and Nerilka’s Story doing one thing. We have —
Tequila Mockingbird: Dragonsdawn nominally doing a similar thing but really doing a very different thing.
Lleu: And then we have Renegades redoing something from the ’70s and then, finally, All the Weyrs of Pern doing something new…
Tequila Mockingbird: Bad.
Lleu: And also in the middle we do have “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” which is there.
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s definitely a mixed bag, and that was honestly a lot of what my first response was looking back on these: “Huh. Moreta’s really good, and it’s all downhill from there, isn’t it?”
Lleu: It really is. I don’t really like Dragonsdawn that much, but, charitably, I would say it’s definitely the second-best of the books from this period
Tequila Mockingbird: I like Dragonsdawn very much, and I think it’s not very good. But yes, it’s definitely better than Renegades and Nerilka’s Story.
Lleu: I guess the question is, is it better than All the Weyrs of Pern?
Tequila Mockingbird: That one I think you could make an argument either way. I think the lows of Dragonsdawn are definitely lower.
Lleu: Yes.
Tequila Mockingbird: But I also think the highs are probably higher.
Lleu: Yeah, I would agree with that.
Tequila Mockingbird: Where All the Weyrs of Pern is just sort of tepid most of the way through.
Lleu: It really doesn’t seem like she knew where she was going. We talked in our last recap about the way that the end of The White Dragon really feels like it could have been the end of the series. Then you’d have Dragondrums published afterwards, but The White Dragon would be kind of the end. They know where they’re going. Jaxom’s come of age. Everything’s moving.
Tequila Mockingbird: You could have stopped there, and in some ways our question was, why didn’t you stop there? And I think a valid answer to that question is: Moreta.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: She had something to say about this world. She had something to say using these stories that I think is worth hearing. But then she kept going.
Lleu: Yeah, which sort raises the question, again: why? And I feel like the answer is probably that she wrote Moreta and then she was like, “Okay, now I have some more ideas, and I’m going to keep exploring those more ideas.” And…they’re bad, the ideas, it turns out, but…
Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s worthwhile to explore.
Lleu: Yeah. It seems like Moreta opened the door for her to kind of feel out, like, “Okay, I’m interested in the past and exploring. Now that I’ve set up this present where they’re rediscovering their history, I’m interested to look back and see what that history actually is.” And there’s something to be said for that. I think it works. I think Moreta is solidly the best, possibly of the whole series, and Dragonsdawn is the second best in this period, for all its many flaws.
Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they are both those history books or those prequel books that then can be juxtaposed with what we already know about the world-building. I don’t think Moreta really works unless you’ve read some Pern books and you know what’s going on in the Ninth Pass.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t know that I think Dragonsdawn really works unless you’ve read some Pern books, although apparently it does —
Lleu: Yeah, it’s very difficult for me to imagine what that would be like. Imagine reading Pern in chronological order — start with “The P.E.R.N.(c) Survey” and then read Dragonsdawn? That’s bonkers. But at least one person who follows us on Tumblr did start with Dragonsdawn, and apparently it worked for them, so…
Tequila Mockingbird: Humanity is a beautiful and intricate tapestry. We haven’t gotten there yet, but what’s interesting and valuable to me about Dragonseye is also the way it is in juxtaposition with later books. This is something I just enjoy in genre fiction, and I grew up on other authors who did that, and I think a lot of them learned it from her. We — we talked about this briefly in previous episodes, but this idea of “I’m going to set up a world, and then I’m going to jump around in the timeline pretty freely and tell stories from all different points along it.” I don’t know that that was pretty common before McCaffrey did it. And I feel like it has of taken off.
Lleu: The other thing that comes to mind is Asimov.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.
Lleu: But the Foundation prequel books are after Moreta, I’m pretty sure.
Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t know that this is necessarily a question of direct influence, because I do also think you’re getting a lot more poststructuralist literature; you’re getting postmodernist literature, this idea of —
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: — more experimental style is creeping into genre fiction.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s notable.
Lleu: Thinking about these books as being looking back at Pern’s history brings us very nicely to
Tequila Mockingbird: Right. “We have solved the problem of Thread.”
Lleu: Which then makes it interesting that, as we will see in future episodes, she went on and wrote two more books set afterwards where, actually Thread still goes on, but also wrote Dragonseye-slash-Red Star Rising and Masterharper of Pern, and then the Todd books are also prequels. So it kind of seems like she wrote herself out of a series. There’s not that much more you can do in the Ninth Pass that will genuinely live up to the premise of the series after All the Weyrs of Pern. Which seems like —
Tequila Mockingbird: A weird choice to make.
Lleu: — an odd choice. Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: In some ways, it’s kind of like killing Sherlock Holmes.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: That makes me wonder maybe if she wanted to be done with the Pern books.
Lleu: I mean, she killed her specialest little boy, Robinton.
Tequila Mockingbird: Right! And it does feel like All the Weyrs of Pern is meant to be an ending, To the point where we made the decision to include it in this episode instead of stopping in the ’80s.
Lleu: Yeah. It’s just kind of perplexing.
Tequila Mockingbird: And — this is a little bit of a jump to her as a writer — she doesn’t stop writing in the ’90s. She picks up in the ’90s, quite a lot.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And a lot of that comes from collaborations, where she’s not actually, I think, writing the prose but working collaboratively with another author to create a story and develop character beats, and so it’s possible that some of that is related to, maybe, her health, or her kind of feeling like, “Okay, I’m ready to be done” and then deciding, “Well, okay, but I can work in a different way and not be done. I still have ideas. I still have things I want to share.”
Lleu: Versus, in the ’80s, she mainly published Pern books. She published the first two Crystal Singer books also, but the third one was 1992. She published one standalone novel that I actually have never heard of — The Coelura? Soelura? — C-O-E-L-U-R-A — in 1983, the Dinosaur Planet sequel in 1984, and then three romance novels.
Tequila Mockingbird: To the point about how her production kind of exploded in the ’90s. I was like, “Yeah, she mostly just wrote Pern books,” but that’s actually more books than she wrote in Pern, if you add all those together.
Lleu: Yeah, but all over the place, right?
Tequila Mockingbird: Right.
Lleu: Pern is the thing that held her attention — which maybe is really all that it comes down to —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: — in terms of, why didn’t she just stop after The White Dragon, why didn’t she stop after All the Weyrs of Pern. ’Cause Pern, once it gets you, it doesn’t let you go, and that seems to have included her.
Tequila Mockingbird: The original brain worms are, in fact, hers.
Lleu: Yeah. So, on the one hand, I’m like, you could have stopped at any time and it would have been fine, but on the other hand…
Tequila Mockingbird: We could have stopped at any time.
Lleu: Yeah, and we’re still going.
Tequila Mockingbird: And here we are recording a podcast about it.
Lleu: So… Yeah. I don’t know what I can say that I haven’t already said in every single episode, but once Pern gets you, it’s got you. And it doesn’t always get you, but, if it does, you’re got forever.
Tequila Mockingbird: The other thing we wanted to talk about, in terms of a notable shift in how McCaffrey was writing and thinking about things in the ’70s vs. the ’80s is the difference between Kylara and Thella, as, I would say, the preeminent female villains. Avril would also get a note in there, but Kylara and Thella are, in fact, half-sisters. And Kylara is such a sexy, boring, “I’m evil and I want power, but when I say power, what I actually mean is I want to be sleeping with a powerful man and also get to be mean to people.”
Lleu: Yeah. As we said at that time, Kylara and Meron are together because Kylara’s like, “We’d make a good power couple.” But neither of them is getting any additional power out of this relationship; they’re getting the shock value of the two of them showing up together, arm in arm, at the Gather.
Tequila Mockingbird: And Meron’s getting fire lizard access.
Lleu: Kylara’s getting nothing out of this other than the ability to shock and dismay people and be like, “See? Fuck you. I don’t care what you think. I can do what I want.” Which…okay. Sure. Do what you want.
Tequila Mockingbird: And that, to me, is a very interesting shift, because Thella is very interested in literal power.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: She is very actively working to get herself political power and she is completely uninterested in a romance subplot.
Lleu: Yeah. Kylara is clearly responding to the constraints that are placed on women’s agency on Pern, right? She’s like, “Oh, thank god, they took me to the Weyr, so I was able to get out of that horrible arranged marriage that I didn’t want to be in.” But now all that she can do with that is…
Tequila Mockingbird: Choose her own arranged marriage.
Lleu: Yeah. Whereas Thella is also responding to that but opts for a much more material and, in some ways, radical-slash-revolutionary challenge to those structures by first presenting herself as a candidate for Lord Holder and then by being like, “Okay, no, I’m going to set myself up as Lady Holdless if you won’t let me be here.” The problem is that she’s a wild sexist caricature of the sadistic, evil woman with no emotions.
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not like she’s better, but it’s interesting that she’s different —
Lleu: Yeah, absolutely.
Tequila Mockingbird: — is, I think, my overall report on this. And I do feel like that specific, brutal, unfeminine, not romantic or not sexy “I’m just interested in power” is a very ’80s fear about women.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s “Oh, no, the woman in the workforce!” And, in some way, it’s “Do you think that Margaret Thatcher leveraged girl power?” They’re still awful —
Lleu: Right — Thella is a evil business executive walking into her Wall Street office with giant shoulder pads ready to fire 500 people.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yes! And that is very ’80s.
Lleu: It’s so ’80s.
Lleu: I also was thinking, in terms of sort of shifting gender politics, there’s also the differences between Lessa and Moreta.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: But I think they’re also, in some ways, the positive side of this coin.
Tequila Mockingbird: Moreta has a job!
Lleu: Right — Lessa’s constrained; she’s not allowed to have a job. And, finally, she’s able to break into the workforce and do things.
Lleu: And Moreta’s like, “Yeah, women can do anything; whatever. It’s fine.” The casualness of it — and we’ll talk more about the shifts in 1980s politics later, but there’s also something about, maybe, the difference between Moreta as 1983 and Thella —
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and in between you get Avril, who is in some ways the worst of both worlds.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Because she’s evil and sexy and also power hungry, and stupid.
Lleu: Again, she’s back in, like Kylara, she wants power, but in a way that doesn’t make sense.
Tequila Mockingbird: The basic idea makes sense, of, come to planet with jewels, steal jewels, leave planet. It’s just that everything she actually does to try and execute on that plan is incompetent. And it’s also her backup plan, because her initial plan was to seduce Paul Benden.
Lleu: And become Queen of Pern.
Tequila Mockingbird: Right.
Lleu: Very goofy. But also, it makes sense in the abstract, right? But this is a context where the “come to planet” part of the process is a 15-year slog. This plan has gone on too long for it to be reasonable still.
Tequila Mockingbird: But I think you do see the groundwork for Thella, in that, as soon as Avril’s thwarted, she’s like, “Aha, I have to kill Sallah Telgar,” when that’s not actually helping her escape and in fact, is part of what dooms her.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: So this idea of, “Oh, an evil person, even if they have sort of an idea of why they’re evil and what they want to get out of being evil, as soon as they’re thwarted by a protagonist, will become obsessively fixated just on getting revenge —”
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: “— in a way that doesn’t actually align with their previous power-hungry nature.”
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Obviously with Avril there is a healthy dosing of racism that is also not really present with Kylara and Thella.
Lleu: Yes. Although, knowing as we know from All the Weyrs of Pern that they are direct descendants of Tarvi Andiyar —
Tequila Mockingbird: True.
Lleu: — does have me like, “Hm, well, it’s kind of still there, actually.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, yeah; fair.
Lleu: We’ve just moved from ambiguously West Asia to ambiguously South Asia as the source of our evil sexiness. That maybe brings us to the world in the ’80s, ’cause, oh, boy, were a lot of things going on in the ’80s in the world, unlike the ’70s, where nothing happened.
Tequila Mockingbird: Compared to today, where nothing happens, right?
Lleu: Absolutely nothing happens. We talked a bunch in our ’60s and ’70s recap about these books as Cold War fiction and, specifically, the earlier books as a reflection of the point in the Cold War where (a) nuclear annihilation seemed like it was something that could happen without warning at any time, any day, and (b) where it seemed like there was a serious possibility that the US might lose the, kind of, economic race against the Soviet Union. By the ’80s, neither of those things is really operative anymore. Obviously, there’s still the fear of nuclear annihilation — WarGames, which we mentioned last time is an 80s movie, although early ’80s — but certainly by the end of the ’80s, even before 1989, it, I think, was fairly clear that the Soviet Union was on its last legs economically. Nuclear war was no longer a clear and present danger in the same way. And I do think that that had an impact on the shape of Pern and how Pern is thinking about disasters, with maybe the exception of Dragonsdawn.
Tequila Mockingbird: Hm, but it’s also maybe worth pondering whether that is related to the decision to end Thread.
Lleu: Mm, yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: This feeling of, like, “Okay, maybe there are stories we can tell that aren’t about death that comes from the sky without warning at any moment. Maybe there are going to still be problems in the world after that’s been fixed, in fact.”
Lleu: Yeah. And I think that’s something that we definitely will come back to when we do a ’90s recap episode.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: Because, yeah, I do think that there’s a certain amount of — I said the end of history, Fukuyama, earlier, but truly All the Weyrs of Pern is like…that’s the end of history. And then she wanted to keep going, so it’s like, “Okay, well, what do you do after the end of history?” It turns out there are more problems still.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. What do you do after you’ve won the Cold War? Also, though, to that thought of an economic resolution, too, I feel like the ’80s is this very “Wow, capitalism is the answer to all the problems, right? Capitalism is just great!” And you do see, I think, both some bleed over into the way Pern is structured and the way she’s thinking about Dragonsdawn and the colonists coming to Pern.
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: And also, I think some pushback against that, and some, “Ugh, the technocrats,” and this idea of, “Oh, no, this unbridled development and war and the engine of economic everything” that they are trying to get away from, or that is somehow fundamentally evil.
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that shows up in All the Weyrs of Pern when they are so worried about technological development.
Lleu: Yeah. I’m thinking about Dragonsdawn, specifically, in an American political context. There is something interesting about the fact that its plot rests on everyone in the colony except a handful of dissenters like fucking Stev Kimmer realizing that “No, actually, continuing our hard commitment to frontier colonist libertarianism is not going to be effective. We need to transition to an extremely centralized government in order to solve this problem,” and then also the fact that where that centralized government ultimately leads is feudalism because they haven’t gotten rid of the underlying libertarian structure. There’s something interesting there about the negotiations of American politics and the increase in presidential power over time but then also the fact that it’s still premised on the way that the division of powers works out and the divide between the federal government and the states. There’s something there about —
Tequila Mockingbird: Hm.
Lleu: — the extent to which American politics are bound up in the constitution regardless of the ways that world political circumstances have changed radically since the 1790s.
Tequila Mockingbird: So much of Pern, I think, can be boiled down to questions about autonomy — about who has it and how they exercise it, in very micro ways and in very macro ways across this entire society. And I think it is noteworthy that in almost every case, it comes down on the side of: actually your autonomy is not necessarily valuable or worthwhile or the right answer.
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: Because both in the individual of “You surrender your autonomy to your dragon and your sexual autonomy to your relationship with your dragon” and in the broader scale of “We’re so obsessed with independence, but actually as soon as there’s an emergency, we should surrender our autonomy to the dragon riders and we should let F’lar and Lessa kind of run this whole planet, because that’s actually what we need to do.”
Lleu: Yeah. One of the things that is, I think, interesting and useful in All the Weyrs of Pern that I don’t think we really talked about in our episode on it is the way that it shows them developing new governance structures. The administration of Landing, with D’ram and Lytol and Robinton as representatives of the three branches of Pernese political organization — that’s new. That’s a novelty. Previously, the Crafts have always been individually independent and also collectively govern themselves.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: When they are voting to establish the Plasticcraft, they inform the Lord Holders, but this is a Craft decision that the Lord Holders have no say over.
Tequila Mockingbird: Right.
Lleu: It’s just as a matter of courtesy. But also we can see the beginnings of moving beyond that or recognizing a need to move beyond that, that’s, at least certain things will require new forms of governance and administration that have not been practiced in the last 2,500 years. And I don’t know that the follow through on those in the ’90s is necessarily great or particularly coherently thought out, but there’s at least a gesture towards it in All the Weyrs of Pern.
Tequila Mockingbird: It does also make me think — when do Prince Charles and Diana get married? Because I wouldn’t be shocked if, living in Ireland, that was notable, culturally, and I feel like that’s the ’80s, because her wedding dress is so ’80s.
Lleu: They got married in 1981.
Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, so, I think there’s also maybe something to note about the way that monarchy in the UK was being both uplifted in this fairy-tale story — the young girl, the beautiful dress, the prince — and then crashes and burns and brings a lot of scrutiny of, “Hey, actually, this monarchy thing — is this going well?” The affair, the divorce, the drama of that.
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: And the way that that might have been influencing McCaffrey thinking about feudalism and —
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: — politics and…
Lleu: Yeah. I don’t know the full timeline. The divorce wasn’t until ’96, but —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: — you don’t get divorced unless there’s other stuff going on leading up to you getting divorced, so…
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: I don’t know exactly how that lines up with the ’80s. One of the questions that I posed in the ’60s and ’70s recap episode was to what extent we should think of McCaffrey also as an Irish writer and situate her in an Irish political context, and the more I read and think about this, the more I think, “No, this is pointless.” But I do think that in the context of the ’80s specifically, there probably is some relevant stuff, maybe less in terms of Ireland specifically than in terms of the UK and British politics, and in particular, as we were talking beforehand, the little note that I have down here is “Thella + Thatcher + terrorism.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, this specter of terrorism as this —
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: — easy political label for “someone who doesn’t like the establishment and is also scary and evil.”
Lleu: With or without any kind of definable political objectives or, kind of, meaningful ideology, which — I think it’s fair to say Thella has a definable political objective —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: — but only in a pretty vague way, and she’s not really actively pursuing being recognized as the Holder of this particular abandoned Hold.
Tequila Mockingbird: It sort of conflicts with her nominal ideology. She has this manifesto, but the actions she takes don’t really seem to align with it.
Lleu: Yeah, they’re always moving around; they have this notional base of operations that they return to for the winter, but otherwise, they’re out and about stealing and raiding and murdering people, etc.
Tequila Mockingbird: Because there is this idea on Pern that you can start a new Hold, right? You’re allowed to just go out there and, hypothetically, if you can hold it, it’s yours. Now, this is complicated by the fact that, by the Ninth Pass, most of the land is held by someone else, and you have to make a specific claim about, “You’re” — maybe — “in breach of your duties and you’re not holding this land.” But if Thella really is trying to say, “No, I deserve to be a Lord Holder,” and she’s being politically coherently, I feel like setting up a Hold and really holding it or going to the South Continent and really holding it are both more aligned with what she claims to want.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And more aligned with this idea of, “Hey, women can be Lord Holders.” Well, sure, maybe they could, but that’s not what you’re doing. You’re just murdering people.
Lleu: Yeah. We’re back at “Did Thella successfully utilize mobilize girl power when she murdered half of the Lilcamp train and killed all their animals and attempted to hunt down and assassinate Jayge, specifically?”
Tequila Mockingbird: We must conclude that, yes, she did.
Lleu: Apparently, yeah. But I think I’m also thinking, in particular, about Thatcher as the “Iron Lady.” Certainly feels, like, apropos for Thella.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: So there’s something, in spite of these books’ libertarian and I would say broadly fairly conservative outlook, if we want to read fella as a Thatcher analogue, there’s maybe a “conservative, but not like that” going on here.
Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. How much is Thatcher eugenicist? Pretty much, right?
Lleu: I think probably. I don’t know the specific details.
Tequila Mockingbird: There’s also perhaps a connection with the way that you have this overpopulation discourse back, and that I think a lot of the ’80s there is this idea of, “Oh, no! Overpopulation in Third World countries!” —
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: — that has this very racist, eugenicist slant that is definitely present in Pern and in the world-building of Pern.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Both subtextually in the narrative of the Ninth Pass and all these Holdless people and who can come to the South Continent, but also very blatantly in Dragonsdawn when you’re thinking both about who wants to come to Pern and who has to come to Pern, and the fact that they’re taking refugees, not all of whom are people of color, but many of whom are nomadic peoples of color, and then, as we discussed in our Dragonsdawn episode —
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: — disposing of them very quickly as soon as you arrive on the planet so that you don’t actually have to engage with that narratively.
Lleu: Yeah, but there is something — they’re…not to get back on my soapbox, but it’s all about land tenure. There is something there in terms of how Sean’s presence and the Connells’ presence is clearly a result of her spending time in Ireland so that she is aware of Irish Travellers as a marginalized population, and there is, I think, something in how she’s thinking about, “Oh, okay, the reason these people are leaving Earth is because there is no land left for them to move freely on. All land is occupied.” And I think that is in a kind of 1980s way, but there’s also — as I pointed to at the time — she’s recognized a genuine contradiction between the interests of settled populations and the interests of itinerant populations and the ways that settled populations target itinerant populations because of their different relationship to land and land use. And then, yeah, she gets them to Pern and immediately kills all of them except the white ones off, because she doesn’t want to actually have to deal with it. But it does then come back in Renegades: we’ve got the Lilcamps, and they’re moving, and then suddenly Thread is falling and they go back to the Hold and they’re like, “We need your help now.” And the Holder’s like, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t really have the resources for this.” And like two days ago, “We were best friends. And we’ve had like 20 years of profitable business exchange, cordial relationships: what gives?” And just, like, no, as soon as there’s a crisis, the settled population closes the doors. And in a context where, even when there is open land, which, there is still a fair amount of unoccupied, unprotected land in Pern, the problem is that it’s unprotected and you can’t just go there. Pern still has the problem, even though there’s open land, of, you can’t just go somewhere else, because you’ll die of Thread.
Tequila Mockingbird: And it showed up too in Decision at Doona and the other Doona books, because so much of that is this, I think, very neo-Malthusian terror of an overpopulated Earth and specifically this idea that an overpopulated Earth will destroy what is essentially human about humanity, and so there is, I think, a very romanticized validation of these nomadic populations, because it’s that same, “Oh, you gotta have fresh air and wilderness and you gotta wander and you need nature.” And that’s what Pern is —
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: — this unsettled land that we can really spread out in and exercise that very American frontier colonialist ideal in. She does not in any way want to actually engage with the contradictions in that.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And the original colonists in Dragonsdawn do not in any way seem to be aware of or thinking about the fact that eventually they will have spread out. Their descendants will, in fact, have “filled” — quote-unquote — Pern, and that this is not an ideology that is sustainable forever.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And then in the Ninth Pass that comes to fruition, and suddenly you do have this conflict
Lleu: Which is bonkers, because in “Rescue Run” we’re explicitly told that the expectation for new colonies is that within 50 years their population will go from 6,000 people to 500,000 people, which is an insanely high population growth rate. The Earth population growth rate from 1800 to to the present rather is less than 1%. From 6,000 to 500,000 is like a 6%, 7% growth rate. That doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t. But that’s how they were thinking about their colony, hypothetically — and yet they still somehow failed to foresee that eventually there would not be enough land for everyone to have their nice little gigantic stake.
Tequila Mockingbird: There’s something too about this escapist idea of, “Okay, Earth is not right anymore, and Alpha Centauri is not right anymore. Okay, we’re going to go to Pern. We’re going to find another one. And when it’s not running anymore, our descendants will find another planet,” and this rapaciousness.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Fundamentally there does actually need to be a limit on human expansion, and that doesn’t seem like something she’s interested in engaging with in any of her fiction, but especially not in Pern.
Lleu: Also that it’s premised on the idea that human population will always, inherently, be growing rapidly.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: Which is particularly striking in the context of discourses around immigration in the late 20th century in the US and the concern on the right that “birth rates for white people are going down, so we’re being kind of outbred by immigrants and people of color.” Well, possibly that’s because when people reach a certain standard of living, it’s no longer economically advantageous to have a bazillion children, because you don’t need to worry about your infant mortality rate and only two of your ten children surviving to adulthood to take care of you when you’re old, and also maybe you have a better social safety net and so now you’re not as worried about like, “Oh, my god, when I’m old, I need to have children who are going to be economically viable and able to take care of me,” because you have savings, you have access to your social security, and so you’re not living constantly on the edge in the in the way that made having many children, and so eventually the population expanding rapidly, advantageous.
Tequila Mockingbird: We do, in fact, no longer need to plow the back 40.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and I think there is also a link in that the ’80s is an era of rapaciousness in American pop culture and American politics and American economics and in American science fiction.
Lleu: Yeah. Now that we’re winning the Cold War.
Tequila Mockingbird: The future is limitless.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: We can win everything. We can go forever. We can go to the moon. We can keep going.
Lleu: Yeah. In terms of thinking about the ’80s specifically and thinking about gender politics, I was also thinking about the ’80s as a period of massive anti-feminist backlash, right? Something that we will talk about when we talk about the genre context is the increasing concern with the future of women’s rights and a sense for many people that they were under threat and they were not going to be around forever, such as they were at the time. I mean, the Equal Rights Amendment failed. So there’s a shift maybe, also, in terms of how she’s thinking about the status of women in the ’60s and ’70s as something where you have Lessa working her way into the professional class, and then you have Moreta as the pinnacle of that, and then two years later, we’ve got Nerilka, who’s back to, “Yeah, no, I’m happiest when I’m pregnant.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, I might even also say there’s Aramina.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Who doesn’t want to be Lessa, right? Who’s given narratively the opportunity to be Lessa. “You can hear dragons. You could be the next Weyrwoman.” And she’s like, “That sounds awful. I’m going to fake my own death, run away, and be a settler colonist housewife in the South Continent.”
Lleu: She’s doing the tradwife Instagram channel. Aramina would have an Instagram and she would be tradwifing on it.
Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s this specifically very Robinson Crusoe tradwife.
Lleu: Yes.
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s like, “Look at this beautiful baby cradle that I wove out of vines.”
Lleu: And the plastic netting that was over all of the old containers from 2,500 years ago.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: So there’s an interesting return to the domestic sphere after Moreta and Desdra as these extremely competent professional women with careers, lives, their own romantic interests that they pursue actively.
Tequila Mockingbird: And after Dragonsdawn, which does show Emily Boll and Sallah Telgar and Avril: these are all professional women with jobs who have been selected to go to the colony. And even within Dragonsdawn there is this slide into like, “Oh, and Emily’s weak and sick.” And Sallah gets married and has a bunch of kids and stops working, and then she has to go back to being a shuttle pilot and is like, “Gosh, it’s been a decade since I did this!”
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And you have this, even within Dragonsdawn, I think, tension between this idea of, yes, this is this future world in which women have all of these important jobs and in which Kitti Ping Young is the only biogeneticist that we have here, or xenogeneticist, I guess.
Lleu: But when it comes down to it, the natural state of affairs, then the one that we all aspire towards is one where women can just be housewives.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. But I think that is an interesting development and contrast with Decision at Doona, where you don’t even engage with the former. It’s just, the men have jobs, and they go to the planet to actually settle the planet, and then once they’ve built their houses and whatever, the women and children follow to cook dinner for them and live there.
Lleu: And we should be fair that there do continue to be professional women in the rest of the series, for all that their characterization leaves much to be desired. We do have, in Renegades and All the Weyrs of Pern, Jancis, who’s promoted to Mastersmith in the few hours between the end of Renegades and the beginning of All the Weyrs of Pern.
Tequila Mockingbird: They were so excited about finding AIVAS that they were like, “God damn it, woman, you’re a Mastersmith!”
Lleu: And we have Mirrim, who gets to learn some genetics; we have Sharra getting to do genetic manipulation and expand on her training as a Healer. But they’re all in the background, and they’re all married. We almost never get to see…
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, Mirrim’s not literally married, but she’s dragon-married.
Lleu: Yeah. We get to see them doing things, but we get to see them doing things in montage, right? Or we get to see them doing things with their spouses, or we get to see them commiserating with their spouses about how much work AIVAS is making them do. But then it’s like, “Okay, yes, and then Sharra and Jaxom flopped down into bed and talked for five minutes about how much work they were doing and then they fell asleep.”
Tequila Mockingbird: And then we get three chapters about Jaxom and Piemur actually doing the work on the spaceship in detail. Yeah.
Lleu: And then we get another two pages of, like, “And then Sharra and Mirrim and company’s experiments worked!” Okay. Great.
Tequila Mockingbird: We talked about this in our episode, but you could have written All the Weyrs of Pern as Mirrim’s book.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And it would have been in many ways a more prototypical Pern book like it would have been much more like Dragonflight and Dragonsong and Moreta. It could have been that, and instead she chose not to do that anymore.
Lleu: If she was committed to Jaxom, which it seems like she was, it could even have been Jaxom and Mirrim’s book, but having us move back and forth between them and show…
Tequila Mockingbird: Two sides of the project.
Lleu: Yeah. Would have been more interesting, I think, than what it was, and would have, perhaps, given it some slightly less regressive gender politics. Another big thing that’s relevant to Pern in the ’80s that we talked about when we talked about Moreta is AIDS and the AIDS crisis, and the way that that — and some other things coming out of ’70s political activism — really catapulted queer people and especially gay men into the public consciousness. And I don’t know how much I have to say about this in part because the gay characters become so much less prominent in the rest of the books in this period after Moreta. There’s the weird lesbian subtext going on in Nerilka’s Story that probably wasn’t intentional, but maybe, who knows what’s going on with that, and then there are green rider characters who are important, or who do important things even if they’re not like really that significant narratively —
Tequila Mockingbird: Fleshed out as characters yeah
Lleu: — in All the Weyrs of Pern, and there are some passing references to the possibility of gay people in Dragonsdawn, but no follow-up on that, and then that leads into, as we will talk about, Dragonseye, which is possibly the most homophobic book in the series, weirdly, despite having the most gay character POV time. I don’t really know what to do with this, but —
Tequila Mockingbird: It is worth noting that this is all happening in the broader political context of the ’80s.
Lleu: Yeah. I don’t want to read too much into it necessarily, but there is, I think, something in that we had Moreta as this moment right at the beginning of the AIDS crisis where gay people get to be front and center and homophobia gets to be explicitly criticized on the page, and then they’re gone. Especially in the context of — and we’re going to very cleverly pivot now to talking about the genre context — that this is also a period where you start getting a lot more queer people in science fiction. Obviously, there have been some earlier. We talked a little bit in the ’60s and ’70s episode about Le Guin. I don’t know if I talked as much about Samuel R. Delany in that, but certainly he’s come up regularly throughout the series because I’m obsessed with him, but also because I think he’s relevant. And he was writing a novel about the AIDS crisis at the same time that Moreta was published. He, in 1984, published a book that is responding to the question of, like, okay, in the context of 1980s Reagan-era political discourse in the US and the AIDS crisis, what if gay sex really is the end of the world? What do we do in that context? But then also you have people like Mercedes Lackey, who we’ve also talked about repeatedly, and Lois McMaster Bujold, who we’ve also talked about repeatedly. So straight women writing now more frequently gay men, especially. You have Elizabeth Lynn writing fantasy with a bunch of queer people, but also A Different Light, which inspired the name of the oldest LGBTQ bookstore, is named after her novel in, I think, 1978, sci-fi novel with about two men in love. Lynn is herself a lesbian; some of her other books also include lesbians as well as gay men. So there’s a shift in this period where queerness is becoming more…mainstream, I guess, I would say, as a topic.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and I think especially in more mainstream science fiction/fantasy literature —
Lleu: Yes.
Tequila Mockingbird: — where it’s not as much of a niche topic. You’ve also got — unfortunately, I feel like I can’t speak to this much, because I haven’t read any of it — but Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover is sort of contemporaneous with Pern all the way back from the ’60s and ’70s, but I feel like the ’80s is when it…takes off more? I don’t know.
Lleu: I also don’t know.
Tequila Mockingbird: But I want to put a pin in that, and if you do know, O gentle listener, please let us know.
Lleu: Yeah. That maybe brings us to some of the influences and interinfluences. We talked a little bit in the ’60s and ’70s episode about the way that Pern lays the groundwork for things like the Vorkosigan Saga that are similarly kind of interested in a particular world and are following that over an extended period of time, jumping back and forth between timeframes, rather than being the kind of epic fantasy that also was developing during this period where we’re following our hero on his journey. I also recently read the first book of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, and I said to people at the time, like, “Hm. Reading this book makes me wish that I had read the Gormenghast books beforehand, ’cause I feel like they would have been relevant. But, on the other hand, I have read Pern, and also I’ve read The Locked Tomb.”
Tequila Mockingbird: And really, that’s all you need.
Lleu: I feel like, between those things, I kind of have a grasp on what this book is doing.
Tequila Mockingbird: You can back-reason.
Lleu: I mentioned in the Q&A episode that there’s some specific things in The Book of the New Sun that were flagging to me as like, “Ah, that’s from Pern,” and one of them is — I don’t know how much you or our listeners know about this, but the main character is Severian, who is a journeyman torturer, and he gets exiled from his guild because he has shown mercy to one of their quote-unquote “clients,” i.e., the people that they’re supposed to torture, by, after they used a particularly horrible torture mechanism on her, giving her a knife so that she could put herself out of her misery early. But the effect of this particular torture is that it like unleashes all of your self-hatred, to the point where her body is actively trying to murder her and she has to exert her will to let herself breathe, to stop her arm from reaching up to choke her. And I was like, “Hm!” When I first got to that passage, I was like, “Oh, that’s from Pern; that’s Leri.” And then I was like, “No, no, no; the timeline’s wrong. This is 1980. Moreta’s 1983. Leri’s body reflexively ceasing to breathe, if anything, is from this.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: And I don’t know that I necessarily would want to come out strongly and be like, “Yeah; McCaffrey just borrowed that image from Gene Wolfe.” But Pern’s setting, I feel like, and success maybe helps open the door to some other of this kind of far-future science fantasy things. I’m also thinking about, the third of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books was published in 1983 after a, like, 20-year gap from the last one, and it does make me wonder: hm, how much of that is because The White Dragon —
Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.
Lleu: — became a bestseller in 1978 and suddenly it was like, “Oh, there is a market for this kind of stuff still.”
Tequila Mockingbird: I do think of the ’80s as, I was saying, when in a lot of ways science fiction takes off in pop culture. Obviously it’s happening in the ’70s — obviously a lot of things that get started in the ’70s and continue into the ’80s and I think for me mentally get tagged as ’80s things were, for example, Star Wars. New Hope is in the ’70s and then Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are in the ’80s. Alien is in the ’70s, and then Aliens and all of the subs- — you know, apparently we’re getting a new one in a few years. But I think of them as ’80s movies, even though that’s not technically fair.
Lleu: Yeah. So we were debating, earlier than this ’cause I was like, “I don’t know. I feel like most people would say that the peak of sci-fi is in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s.” But I was thinking specifically about books, and I think you’re absolutely right in terms of popular culture more generally and especially visual media, that this is the period where science fiction becomes way more mainstream. We’ve got Terminator, we’ve got Aliens, we’ve got the Star Wars sequels, the Star Trek movies are churning them out. Star Trek is back on TV again in 1987. We’ve got Blade Runner. All of these things that now are classics of science fiction media.
Tequila Mockingbird: And also all of these things that I think are getting remixed over and over in later science fiction media.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Right? We’ve turned the corner on cyberpunk. We’ve turned the corner on dieselpunk. And these science fiction aesthetics — Mad Max 2: Road Warrior is ’80s. And that, I think, is a very powerful visual concept that continues to influence science fiction.
Lleu: Yeah. We can also see the like extremely strong influence of 1980s politics on much of this visual media. I’m thinking about obviously Terminator, specifically —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah…
Lleu: — and the gender and racial politics of that, and fantasy, too, Conan the Barbarian, of course. Makes me insane every time I think about that movie. I guess my question is, how much is that informing or shaping Pern directly versus how much is that indirectly affecting Pern by virtue of shaping the genre context of science fiction?
Tequila Mockingbird: What I think is most interesting about that is the way that science fiction and fantasy are becoming very visually distinct —
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: — and that Pern doesn’t fit into that at all. ’Cause it still has this incredibly fantasy aesthetic.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And going back, Moreta absolutely, Nerilka even turns the dial up, and in some ways, it’s almost more Regency vibes, with the arranged marriages, sisters, and all of that.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: But Dragonsdawn actually does have more of a science fiction flavor — and when we say that we mean the technology levels.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And so as Pern regains the technology, there’s more of those peppers of, “Ooh, we have an artificial intelligence. Ooh, we have spaceships. Ooh, we’re in space. We’re in free fall in All the Weyrs of Pern, and we’re working out how to do that.” And it feels in some ways like reasserting its sci-fi cred —
Lleu: Yeah…
Tequila Mockingbird: — as these two genres have diversified and split up more and as the science fiction genre has become more aesthetically specific and technologically involved. You’re not seeing as much of the sort of Le Guin-style science fiction that’s more about social technology. If it doesn’t have laser guns, can it really be sci-fi in the ’80s?
Lleu: Interesting. Because you mentioned Le Guin, I’m thinking tangentially also about — one of the other things that we were thinking about in terms of ’80s sci-fi is that there are a lot more women now, and many of them are people who started writing in the mid to late ’70s, like C.J. Cherryh, but also Bujold, Suzette Hayden Elgin, Octavia Butler, but that the ’80s is where some of the books that they’re best known for are from. Vorkosigan Saga gets started in ’86. Downbelow Station, which I think is the first, is ’81.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, that’s the first of the Company War books.
Lleu: And the Xenogenesis trilogy is the ’80s. Wild Seed is the ’80s. Elgin’s Native Tongue is 1984. So the ’80s is when women kind of “make it” in science fiction writing in a different way, it seemed to us. And, again, not that there weren’t early women writing sci-fi earlier, ’cause there obviously were: Judith Merril; Le Guin, obviously; McCaffrey.
Tequila Mockingbird: Bradley.
Lleu: But that —
Tequila Mockingbird: They were in a boys club in a way that, in the ’80s, I think it’s not entirely fair to say that anymore.
Lleu: Yeah. It definitely seems like there’s a shift in that and a increasing attention, maybe, to women as a viable market for and audience for science fiction.
Tequila Mockingbird: I do think Ripley in Alien is important in sci-fi.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s 70s, but that’s late ’70s. And that influences, I think, a lot of what we see in the ’80s.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And even to the point of like, Leia doesn’t get to do much in A New Hope. She gets to jump into a garbage chute and be good with a gun, and she gets to be snarky, and she gets to be tortured, and she gets to hand them shiny prizes at the end and say, “Good job, boys! You saved us.”
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And in Empire Strikes Back, and especially in Return of the Jedi, she gets to do stuff. She does get put in the sexy evil bikini, but she gets to be in disguise as a bounty hunter beforehand and she gets to strangle Jabba after.
Lleu: Yeah, even Terminator, for all its unhinged gender politics does end with Sarah Connor being like, “Alright, now I’m driving off into the desert to be a survivalist and make sure that my son is ready to fight in the future, and I’m going to fight to protect him.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah!
Lleu: And it’s in this very 1980s American kind of way where I’m going to drive off into the desert and be a survivalist.
Tequila Mockingbird: Diversity win: girls get to drive off into the desert and be survivalists.
Lleu: Right. Moreta’s like, McCaffrey is participating in that. And then Nerilka’s Story is like, “No, she’s not. I take it back.”
Tequila Mockingbird: She tried. She dipped her toe in the water participating in that and then was like, “Mm, it’s not for me.”
Lleu: Even Dragonsdawn is like, “And Sallah is there!” And then it’s like, “Mm, but also, Sallah is there, euh…and Avril’s…uh…Avril’s there…and…Sorka’s there!”
Tequila Mockingbird: Sorka is goddamn there, and I will fight anyone who is cranky about it.
Lleu: I don’t know. She also is…the Wife.
Tequila Mockingbird: That’s very hurtful, Lleu. Very hurtful to me.
Lleu: I’m sorry.
Tequila Mockingbird: I can’t say it’s unfair, but it is very hurtful. She’s the Horse Girl.
Lleu: She is the Horse Girl. I would say she starts off as the Horse Girl and then she becomes the Wife.
Tequila Mockingbird: It’s true, and it is fair to say that Sorka gets to do the most interesting and fun things, in a lot of ways, before the time jump.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: She’s exploring, she’s finding fire lizards — she’s really participating in that, in a way where structurally and narratively, she takes more of a back seat because everything that she does post-the time jump, she does together with Sean.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And Sallah dies.
Lleu: Well, Sallah first tradwifes herself.
Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, and then dies. This is what will happen, girls. If you quit your job to get married, you’ll die in a spaceship of blood loss due to your foot injury. This is known.
Lleu: I’m just back to the heterosexuality thing, ’cause on the one hand the ’60s and ’70s books are so…
Tequila Mockingbird: I love that phrasing.
Lleu: …heterosexuality is something that happens to you, and you don’t want to be there when it happens, and fortunately your dragon means you don’t have to be there when it happens. But then the ’80s books are like, “Actually, heterosexuality is good and you want to be there for it,” but also in a very weird way, like, “And then you’ll die.”
Tequila Mockingbird: Death is inevitable.
Lleu: Heterosexuality is something that happens that you want to be there for for a period ranging from three days to eight years, and then you die. Uh. What?
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: There is something to the fact that we don’t really get to see these relationships develop —
Lleu: Mm.
Tequila Mockingbird: — as much in the past, because we’re only there for one book.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And there is The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall, which we’ll get to, where we do see Sean and Sorka as married adults and a couple.
Lleu: Mhm.
Tequila Mockingbird: But other than that, Lessa and F’lar are really what we get in terms of, you get married and your story doesn’t end.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Because Aramina very decisively says, “No, thank you. My story is over. I’m getting married.” And then when she’s dragged kicking and streaming back into the narrative, it doesn’t go well in The Dolphins of Pern.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And Sharra and Jancis’s stories kind of end when they get married, as much as they had one.
Lleu: It’s bold to imply that Jancis has had a story —
Tequila Mockingbird: Right.
Lleu: — before that, but yes.
Tequila Mockingbird: I guess Menolly we do get to see in Renegades, and in All the Weyrs of Pern, but she doesn’t do much.
Lleu: What she does is take care of Robinton and sing.
Tequila Mockingbird: And take care of her kids.
Lleu: Which is the same things that she does when she shows up in Dolphins of Pern, too —
Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.
Lleu: — is be pregnant and sick and sing some songs and take care of her son.
Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s notable that Lessa is still a driving political force on Pern in All the Weyrs of Pern, even though she does very much get sidelined from the finale in favor of Jaxom getting to be the specialest little boy.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: And get sidelined very specifically in a underhanded, kind of date-rapey way by F’lar knocking up her dragon.
Lleu: Yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: Well, Mnementh literally, but F’lar synecdochally?.
Lleu: Metonymically, I think, yeah.
Tequila Mockingbird: He’s poking holes in the condoms.
Lleu: And as we’ll see in the ’90s, it kills me that the takeaway for all of the male characters is, like, “Oh, we got to make sure Lessa doesn’t do something crazy!” I thought we were past this. It’s been thirty years both out-of-world and in-world. Why is this still the framing?
Lleu: But we will talk about that when we get there in the future.
Tequila Mockingbird: We’ll get to it. Yeah.
Lleu: Thanks for joining us; we will be back in the future with the rest of the Chronicles of Pern stories, so get psyched? Question mark. For those.
Tequila Mockingbird: Hey, I mean, I was very fond of them when I was 14.
Lleu: I don’t think I ever read them, so…
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.