Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #1: Dragonflight (1968)

Lleu: One of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s long-running and bestselling Dragonriders of Pern series—

Tequila Mockingbird: But the only one by us! I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I read many of these books in an enthusiastic frenzy when I was a tween, and… not a lot since. But I was an English major so I'm officially qualified to ramble at length about literature.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, I read some of these as a child; and some of them I technically read as a child, and then forgot, and then went back to as an adult. I have a Ph.D. in literature so I am… extremely qualified to talk about books.

Lleu: Today we’re talking about the very beginning of the series, Dragonflight. Sort of. Two sections of it were first published as short stories in magazines.

Tequila Mockingbird: And which two parts? Because when I was rereading it in preparation for this, I remember being like, wait a second, is this still part of “Weyr Search”? Because it’s like 80 pages, 100 and something pages, to get to that Part II.

Lleu: Yeah. No, “Weyr Search” is quite long, it’s been slightly edited. So, “Weyr Search” was originally published in 1967 in… I forget which magazine it was in. And then Part II was published I believe under the title “Dragon Rider”—I’m looking also at the publication information in my copy—in Analog.

Lleu: The magazine version of “Weyr Search” is significantly… no, it’s actually not that different. But it has had… it has a bunch of… some places where there’s, more, like, world-building detail—

Lleu: And some place where there’s less, because it seems that she hadn’t quite figured out all of the details just yet.

Lleu: —later today also, and also in the future, if we ever talk about other books.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, that’s… that is interesting because I do feel like I remember the end of Part II so clearly; it’s this incredibly specific iconic scene. It’s got the amazing “of course they can fly, that’s why they have wings!” One of the few moments where F’lar and Lessa’s relationship is actually compelling to me as a reader. And it’s on page, you know, 140-something of a 300 page book, right? It’s like halfway through. And so it does make a lot of sense if that was originally the button on a short story, that’s it’s such a like, ta-da! We’re done! Actually, no, there’s still an entire plot to go. And it does make me think about, I don’t know, the weirdness of publication in that era. In that, I will jump over now to an unrelated… but the Mercedes Lackey Arrows of the Queen trilogy was originally one book. She wrote it as a single book and then when she was trying to publish it, they were like, this could be a whole trilogy! Let’s just chop it up and make each part slightly longer.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I found myself thinking, Dragonflight could easily have been two books, right? You could have ended one where Part II ends on like, wow, we can fly a dragon! And then all of the time travel could have been a second, separate book.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, honestly? If you were publishing it today probably they’d be like, why is the “coming of age, Impressing a dragon, becoming a Weyrwoman” story and the “inventing time travel” story, the same story? You could totally milk that into two separate books.

Lleu: Yeah, it’s true, it’s a weird one. It’s just such a weird book in so many ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: So many ways. And one of those excellent books for which “speculative fiction” is truly necessary and useful, because there is debate about whether or not it is a science fiction or a fantasy book, and I know we disagree on this topic—

Tequila Mockingbird: —and if you want to make… state your case, or do you want me to state mine?

Lleu: I think the best way to state my case is just to read the introduction?

Lleu: “When is a legend, legend? Why is a myth a myth? How old and disused must a fact be for it to be relegated to the category ‘Fairy-tale’? And why do certain facts remain incontrovertible while others lose their validity to assume a shabby, unstable character?

Lleu: “Rukbat, in the Sagittarian sector, was a golden G-type star. It had five planets and one stray it had attracted and held in recent millenia. Its third planet was enveloped by air man could breathe, boasted water he could drink, and possessed a gravity that permitted man to walk confidently erect. Men discovered it and promptly colonized it. They did that to every habitable planet, and then—whether callously or through collapse of empire, the colonists never discovered and eventually forgot to ask—left the colonies to fend for themselves. When men first settled on Rukbat’s third world and named it Pern, they had taken little notice of the stranger-planet, swinging around its adopted primary in a wildly erratic elliptical orbit. Within a few generations they had forgotten its existence. The desperate path the wanderer pursued brought it close to its stepsister every two hundred (Terran) years at perihelion.

Lleu: “When the aspects were harmonious and the conjunction with its sister planet close enough, as it often was, the indigenous life of the wanderer sought to bridge the space gap to the more temperate hospitable planet.

Lleu: “It was during the frantic struggle to combat this menace dropping through Pern’s skies like silver threads that Pern’s tenuous contact with the mother planet was broken. Recollections of Earth receded further from Pernese history with each successive generation until memory of their origins degenerated past legend or myth, into oblivion.

Lleu: “To forestall the incursions of the dreadful Threads, the Pernese, with the ingenuity of their forgotten Terran forebears, developed a highly specialized variety of a life-form indigenous to their adopted planet. Such humans as had a high empathy rating and some innate telepathic ability were trained to use and preserve this unusual animal whose ability to teleport was of great value in the fierce struggle to keep Pern bare of Threads.

Lleu: “The winged, tailed, and fiery-breathed dragons (named for the Earth legend they resembled), their dragonmen, a breed apart, and the menace they battled, created a whole new group of legends and myths.

Lleu: “Once relieved of imminent danger, Pern settled into a more comfortable way of life. The descendants of heroes fell into disfavor, as the legends fell into disrepute.”

Lleu: Also, incredibly funny to describe Pernese society as “a more comfortable way of life,” but we can talk more about that later. Anyway, to me, first and foremost, this sets out the book’s kind of… key theoretical question: “When is a legend, legend? Why is a myth a myth?” This relationship between history, myth, and present reality, in a way that, with this science fictional context, feels very much like sci-fi. It’s trying to disentangle all of the myth from this actual knowable history. The whole book is about putting puzzles together and figuring out what’s real–

Tequila Mockingbird: Figuring out what really happened and what’s the story of what happened. And I absolutely agree that that is the project of the book in many ways. My argument on fantasy is in the same prologue that you just read. The words “innate telepathic ability.” Ain’t nobody got no innate telepathic abilities, ergo, this is not existing in a world that follows the laws of physics as we currently understand them, ergo, it’s fantasy.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s fantasy with spaceships, it’s fantasy set in the year 3000 on a future colony of Earth, sure! But it’s fantasy where people can be psychic.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, but then… that means that there’s no such thing as sci-fi in this period.

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, I’m not saying—again, I’m willing to say it is in many ways functionally science fiction. But to me, when sci-fi gets…on the spectrum of hard to soft sci-fi? This is liquid. Because we’re just saying that people are telepathic! In the same way that I would argue Anne McCaffrey’s The Rowan books are fantasy, because they fundamentally rest on this idea that we have these telekinetics who can fling space ships through the stars. And it’s like… well, that’s not possible, that’s fantasy!

Lleu: I don’t know, we’ve had this discussion in the past about other things, I’m thinking about superhero media—

Lleu: Which you generally regard as fantasy and I generally regard as sci-fi if there’s some kind of pseudoscientific explanation for it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I will give you pseudoscience on the dragons, right? On the teleporting and time traveling dragons! I will say, totally fair, they met those on this planet. On this planet these alien beings can teleport and time travel, and that’s science. But I feel that once you are positing that regular old humans have psychic abilities, you’re pushing it, and, and thus—

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think it’s interesting, though, the degree to which it is in dialogue with science fiction of the era, and the degree to which it wasn’t. Because she was doing some really interesting stuff with that, both in terms of… I think, the broader world-building, but also in terms of writing speculative fiction (science fiction, even, you know, ehh) with a female protagonist that was… not not interested in a romance subplot? And it is, you know, in the broader context, this is—oh gosh, three or four years, I think before you start to get bodice rippers? Before The Romance Novel—

Tequila Mockingbird: —as we currently understand it really takes off, and you do start to see this incredibly popular genre of erotica written by women for women… with terrible consent! And you could make a strong argument that this, in a lot of ways, presages — it’s kind of the forerunner of that. And I've got it somewhere in my notes, but I think it’s 1974 that The Flame and the Flower is published? And that’s kind of accepted as the first bodice ripper novel.

Lleu: Okay, something else that is crucial that I realized we forgot to mention. Anne McCaffrey was the first woman to win a Hugo award[1] and also the first woman to win a Nebula award, “Weyr Search,” the novella that became the first part of Dragonflight, won a Hugo in 1968 for best…whatever short fiction category it belongs to, actually. And the second section that was published, also in 1967 I think, won the Nebula. So it’s a landmark book, and worth reading as the first work by a woman to win either of what are, for better or for worse, regarded as the most important English-language speculative fiction prizes.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, three or four years after. And that really kicks off a whole bunch of literature following that. And it’s not that nothing came before that, but that’s the first one where you really start to see, like, mass market publication of stuff that is explicitly sexual and supposed to be sexually gratifying.

Tequila Mockingbird: And… it’s bad. I’ve tried reading some it, and, you know…

Lleu: One last thing about genre, I’m just going to pull up from one of our conversations over the years…

Lleu: —it’s quoting Harlan Ellison. I will grant, genre-wise, that there… So, first of all, I would say that the more specific genre of this book is planetary romance; it certainly has some significant continuities with various kinds of fantasy.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s all part of what’s fun and interesting about this book, is that it feels a lot more like a fantasy novel. I think that’s very deliberate on her part, right? Realistically you’ve got this, and we will discuss, kind of bullshit feudal, pseudo-medieval society—

Tequila Mockingbird: —with this very socially stratified, “You can become a dragonrider and escape your lowly upbringing” — except that you can’t, because they’re all obsessed with aristocracy — “and then you can save the world from the evil monsters by flying around on your dragon and breathing fire.” And part of what’s fun and interesting about this is that McCaffrey is layering this veneer of science fiction in a fun dramatic irony way.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where the reader knows that this is science fiction—or, I think it’s not, but the reader knows that there’s this gloss of “actually this is set in the far future and these are Earth colonists who have forgotten that,” but the characters don’t. And she puts all these little pings of dramatic irony in this book—

Tequila Mockingbird: These moments where they come across something and they’re like, wow, what could have possibly inscribed metal this cleanly? Huh, it’s a mystery. And you’re sitting there going like, oh, I know what that is!

Lleu: Yeah. Okay, I found what I was looking for, which is a bit from Harlan Ellison’s absolutely unhinged review of Dragonflight, which I would highly recommend as a reading experience.

Lleu: Among many other things in this review, Ellison describes Dragonflight as, quote, “an historical love novel of manners.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t know that it’s any of those things. Any individual one of those things.

Lleu: I think you could make a case for a novel of manners, it’s definitely—

Tequila Mockingbird: The societal structure and the way you are supposed to behave, yes.

Tequila Mockingbird: And her dragon loves her. And that’s explicitly, repeatedly, textually stated to be like, I guess putting up with this sexual and romantic relationship with this human man is worth it, because I get to also hang out with my dragon.

Lleu: Yeah. Historical: I am not a historian, but I don’t think there were dragons and dragonriders in… or any of this social structure, really, in real history, so…

Tequila Mockingbird: Uh, I don’t know, neither of us were history majors—

Tequila Mockingbird: So can we really say for sure? We should consult a historian and say, just, by the way, are we an Earth colony thousands of years in the future that then lost contact and then, like, dragons? And all of that, did that happen and we just forgot?

Lleu: —he says, “There are all too few guerrilla warriors in these days. If McCaffrey can keep from getting her skirts caught in the underbrush, she may be our next Che Guevera.”[3]

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is just… you know… all of the things that are happening in that sentence are different and none of them are good.

Lleu: They’re just a lot. I mean, okay, the one thing I will say: Harlan Ellison really liked the book. Which is wild to me, I would not have expected that. And I think one of the things that he gets at and latches onto is what we talked about earlier: the fact that this was doing something that was genuinely, while being heavily in conversation with contemporary genre conventions, doing something that was quite different, in part by being focalized through a woman with agency, with all of these desires that she acts on.

Lleu: Without — well, yeah. Or that she at least attempts to act on. And whose agency is heavily circumscribed by the text, which is perhaps one of the reasons that Ellison liked it. But interestingly he likes Lessa and hates F’lar.

Lleu: Should we maybe summarize the plot of the book, belatedly, for people who haven’t read it?

Tequila Mockingbird: If you haven’t read it, don’t read it. We’re gonna talk about that later, but. Yes. It opens with our protagonist, Lessa, who has been on a ten year path to getting revenge for her horribly murdered family. And her strategy has been to make her Hold, which is sort of a feudal fiefdom, as unpleasant and unprofitable for its conqueror as possible, by sabotaging it at every turn as… disguised as a servant.

Lleu: So at the same time, the last remaining queen dragon, the last remaining fertile female dragon, has just laid a clutch of eggs. Her rider is dead, so the queen dragon is presumably also not long for this world, and so the last few remaining dragonriders are off looking for a new group of people to present as candidates. And in particular, a new group of women to present as candidates for the queen egg.

Lleu: The last queen egg. So this will make or break the survival of dragons as a species. All of the stuff that was in the prologue about this alien organism, it’s been 400 some years since the last time the planet came close. Many people no longer believe in this organism, but the other protagonist, F’lar, is a true believer and so is like, “I need to find the best possible rider for this queen dragon because we need to recover, we need to rebuild, we need to be prepared.” So he has chosen to Search through the Holds that have been conquered by the person who conquered Lessa’s Hold, and that—

Tequila Mockingbird: This brings him into her orbit and she immediately, which I love in a protagonist, decides: I see, I can ruthlessly manipulate this to my own advantage. So she uses her psychic—

Tequila Mockingbird: —powers (ahem, fantasy novel, ahem) to manipulate the situation to make him and Fax, I think, arguably, like, angrier. Because her plan is to get this complete stranger to challenge Fax to a duel and kill him—

Tequila Mockingbird: —sorry, yes. Challenge Fax to a duel and kill him, at which point she will regain her rightful place as the Holder of her home. And this actually works really well for her? She does in fact manage to get him to duel and murder Fax. What she doesn’t count on is that Fax’s wife goes into labor in the middle of this and has a baby boy, who is then supposed to inherit. And she’s like, “No, you know, this was my cunning plan!” And he’s like, “Uh, excuse me, why do you care about this little podunk nonsense, you could be a dragonrider instead!” Ah…

Lleu: And she’s like… huh. Okay. Goes with him, does in fact—spoiler alert—succeed in Impressing the last queen dragon, and then—

Tequila Mockingbird: And then there’s a very weird two year time jump, which makes a lot more sense when you know that this was originally two separate short stories.

Lleu: Yes. So, we jump two years into the future. Lessa has learned how to read and write, she’s been taught aspects of the history and things… but she’s been taught by the current leader of the dragon community, the Weyr, who doesn’t really believe that Thread, the alien organism, will come back. And Lessa is increasingly, kind of, chafing under this sort of strict control of her life–

Tequila Mockingbird: And even, they’re not letting her learn how to fly on the dragon. They're like, well, you don’t need to fly on the dragon. You just need to sit here and she just needs to have eggs, basically. She only needs to provide fertility for the Weyr, nothing else.

Lleu: Yeah. So at this point Lessa takes it into her head once again to start messing around with politics, and attempting to kind of push the Weyr situation into a crisis, so that F’lar, who she thinks will be better equipped to lead the Weyr, can take charge.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s very much not super into F’lar at that point; it’s just she thinks, I don’t know what he’s waiting around on his coup for; if he’s not getting his act together I’ll have my own coup. She’s a woman who likes to coup!

Lleu: So, Lessa is messing around, and the result of all of her interventions is that she…

Tequila Mockingbird: Kicks off a conflict between the Holds, which are the people who don’t have dragons, and the dragonriders, because she basically… convinces some people to start just stealing food from the Hold.

Lleu: All of the Hold Lords show up and are like, “We’re no longer gonna send our tithes to the Weyr, it’s an anachronism, you should work for a living like honest people,” etc. And F’lar circumvents this by—oh my god we skipped the mating flight.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, this is clearly unimportant to the narrative. By kidnapping a bunch of people, usually women, I think all of their wives, specifically—

Tequila Mockingbird: And being like, well, we actually have teleporting dragons, so. Don’t fuck with us. Yes, and in between, in order for F’lar to become in charge and able to do that, Lessa’s dragon, Ramoth, goes into a mating flight. And when that happens, in the world of the Dragonriders of Pern… and there is a psychic link between the dragon and the dragonrider — this is I think pretty standard, although I’m not sure how many people had done it before she did?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because it has become such a staple of this particular… not even genre, but… flavor of magical animal companion story, but she might have been the one to kick it off. And clearly it was one that people responded to, like—

Tequila Mockingbird: Everyone was like, I love that, we’re gonna keep that. You are psychically linked to your dragon, and so when your dragon has sex, you are…well, debatably inescapably mentally connected with that, and so you just have sex with whoever’s close to you/the person that your dragon’s sexual partner dragon is bonded to.

Tequila Mockingbird: Slash, it’s very textually uncertain because she sets one thing up and then goes back and undoes it and redoes it a couple of times—

Tequila Mockingbird: In the context of that mating flight, F’lar and Lessa have dubiously consensual sex.

Lleu: And because F’lar’s dragon mated with Lessa’s dragon, the last queen, F’lar becomes the Weyrleader, which lets him do the whole, all of his little political machinations, finally. Then they spend another year attempting to determine whether Thread is coming back. And then, surprise, it does!

Tequila Mockingbird: What? You mean the rest of the book isn’t: “Nevermind, it’s all fine”?

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re fighting the Thread, and this becomes really crucial, that Lessa has accidentally discovered that dragons can not only teleport; they can time travel! Mostly because she didn’t know that she couldn’t do it, so she did it by accident—

Tequila Mockingbird: She was picturing her home in childhood, and then ends up going back to her home when she was 11 instead of her home right now.

Lleu: Yeah. After some other plot stuff going back and forth, they come to a point where they’re like, we can’t, like, we don’t have enough dragons. We cannot protect an entire planet with 150 people—

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s when it becomes crucial that, wait a second, there used to be all of these other Weyrs full of dragons, and they all mysteriously vanished at the same time 400 years ago? What could have happened? And of course, the answer is that Lessa went back in time and was like, “Hey guys, you want to come to the future and keep fighting Thread?” And they were all like, “Yeah, we’re really bored.”

Lleu: It is. Yeah. But later books, I will say, are a little bit more cohesive.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. Again, you can tell that this was two short stories and then she kept going—

Tequila Mockingbird: And sometimes even a trilogy of books that she meant to be a trilogy of books the whole time!

Lleu: Well, I don’t know if she necessarily meant the Harper Hall books to be a trilogy the whole time; Dragondrums is really doing something completely different.

Lleu: We’ll get there, we’ll get there someday, maybe. Going through the plot summary maybe suggests an order in which we can talk about things. First, the political and social structure, ’cause that’s… there’s a lot to talk about.

Lleu: Second, sexual politics. ’Cause also, there’s so much to talk about—

Lleu: And third maybe some of the later plot stuff and, sort of, the composition of the book as a whole.

Lleu: The thing that makes many people, other than the fact that there are dragons, the thing that makes many people read these books as fantasy, or at least read the early books as fantasy, is the social structure of the world. So this is a distant space future where they have re-established—

Lleu: It’s a little more complex than that; there’s some corporate elements, in that there’s a separate, politically independent guild system. And also, obviously the Weyrs have a distinct status, also, that’s not really reflective of real-world feudalism. Maybe you could argue that they’re sort of the Church—

Tequila Mockingbird: Everyone goes there for their gay sex, which is historically quite true.

Lleu: —I don’t think, on the whole. But the first section in particular is focused, first and foremost, on life in Holds.

Tequila Mockingbird: It was interesting to me on the re-read to see how much she’s really leaning into… a sort of, I would say, stereotypical or sort of thinly described… you all know what it’s like! There are platters of meat on trestle tables and the women are getting slapped across the face, and there are dirty rushes on the floor, and flickering glows! Except then she sneaks in this little moment of, wait, these aren’t candles, these are glow-bugs!

Tequila Mockingbird: So there’s a cool, like, medieval aesthetic but little sci-fi touches. It is interesting, I hadn’t really also remembered how much Lessa, specifically, but the world more broadly, is obsessed with bloodline. They repeatedly are talking about: she’s not some serving drudge, she’s of The Blood! And The Blood is capitalized.

Tequila Mockingbird: So that you know that we’re talking about, you know! And there’s repeated thoughts about, you know, well, Holdbred versus Weyrbred, and this idea of, do we want dragonriders to come from… the peasantry! Or do we want to keep it in the family? In a way that’s really interesting?

Lleu: —deconstruct, yeah. It’s definitely still a very hierarchical—even at the end, after they’ve gone through a bunch of substantial political and social upheavals, Pernese society remains extremely hierarchical. But—

Lleu: Hierarchical, in a like… yeah. It’s truly, it’s… it’s a lot. We’ll talk a lot more about that with Dragonquest.

Lleu: But, but, there is a significantly increased amount of social mobility and much less emphasis on this kind of purity of Blood, as the series goes on.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think… to me it feels like — and I’m not sure that this is completely accurate ’cause I really haven’t read all of them in publication order, ever, so maybe as we do this I will gather more information on this topic — but the degree to which it feels like, as she went on in this series and started writing the prequels, because she does end up covering, not extensively but in some depth the original settlers of Pern, it feels like maybe she updated some of the world-building because it no longer really made sense? And I think when you go back, there are some things that seem to get retconned or ditched, because she’s thinking about, “Now that I’ve actually established Paul Benden as a character, does it seem likely that this would happen, or that would happen,” you know.

Lleu: The other thing is, well, I don’t wanna jump ahead of what will be one of the last episodes, if we ever get to Red Star Rising, or Dragonseye—

Lleu: But there’s also, she puts some more thought into how this system came to be, in a way that… in some ways I think, wow, yeah, this is an accurate assessment of how this would come to be, from the starting point that you show us. And also, at the same time, I’m like… this makes no sense at all, Anne.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you can very clearly tell, right, that she’s always working towards… and you can see this, I think, in all of the things that come after it and are patterned after it, right? Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series, Elizabeth… Bear I think? Iskryne series.[4] There’s some specific thing people are getting, there’s an id response that people are getting to the “I am psychically bound to have sex with somebody and it’s, while we’re doing it, a real fun time,” or really intense, or really, you know, and so you’re getting there… by whatever means are narratively necessary, right? The plot requires it. It’s not happening by accident, she’s not thinking like, “Oh, if you have these dragons, what social and sexual politics would naturally arise?” She’s thinking, “How can I effectively, convincingly get to the social and sexual politics that I want to talk about?”

Tequila Mockingbird: And so, there’s inevitably some shoe-horning. And again, it’s not as explicitly broken down in Dragonflight. Dragonflight is very much occupied with Lessa specifically and F’lar specifically. You get some vague suggestions of the fact that, eww, she doesn’t like R’gul, so Hath is not gonna fly Ramoth. But it’s not really breaking down the actual, how is this all working, because Lessa doesn’t know. And because it’s different than it is in all other contexts, because she’s the only queen dragon there! Kylara is… there.

Tequila Mockingbird: And there is some, “Oh, and I don’t like Kylara flirting with F’lar.” But mostly this is a romance about Lessa and F’lar.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s what it’s really focusing on. And later books are where she starts to think about, okay how would this affect life, relationships, and the social dynamics of the Weyr and all of that shit.

Lleu: Yeah. Two things that I wanted to flag. One, just following up on this, is that two years after this book was published, she did divorce her husband and move to Ireland immediately. So, just something to think about—

Lleu: —in terms of how she was thinking about the structure of romantic relationships at this point in time. Two, the other thing, going back to the social structure, is something else that I think it’s important to keep in mind, is that our first introduction to the structure of Pernese society and Hold life in particular, is one of Fax’s conquered Holds—

Lleu: —and in particular, Fax’s conquered Hold that Lessa has spent the last ten years systematically ruining.

Lleu: But at the same time, it is kind of treated as representative. And even when F’lar is visiting one of Fax’s other Holds–

Lleu: They’re like, more productive, but they’re still, they’re living under—

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think it’s fair to say that Pern’s society changed pretty dramatically in the 400 year Interval, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: And so they are repeatedly talking about the fact that like, oh, so much of the social convention has changed, people aren’t staying inside anymore, they’re building outside housing, they’re letting grass grow, and all of this sort of stuff.

Lleu: Yeah. And also, later books reveal that there have in fact been some substantial social changes even just over the last, like, 40 years—

Lleu: Especially in terms of the status of women. She doesn’t really explain why that happens.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think. Okay. I think there is a narrative impulse, and it’s one I understand, to play with that very specific, pseudo-European medieval feudal vibe of gender inequality, because it gives you this very interesting playing ground where you have people with power and you have people with status, and you have people with status who don’t have power.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because that lets you tell some interesting stories. Now, that doesn't necessarily have to look like the very specific flavor of patriarchy that medieval Europe… may not have actually ever had but that contemporary fantasy writers have decided that they did.

Tequila Mockingbird: But that’s sort of an easy template to fall into, when playing with those toys. I do notice, Lois McMaster Bujold’s got the entire Vorkosigan series, and she’s actually doing something not dissimilar structurally, in terms of, she also has: far future colony, separates from Earth, regresses back to feudalism and sexism in some very specific ways. Ableism is really more what she’s focusing on, but the sexism is also very much there and the patriarchy is very much there. As a like, “Oh, I guess when faced with overwhelming hardship, people just… do revert to that!” And it’s like… I don’t actually know that that’s a thesis that I want to hold about the human condition? But it seems like one that these authors are interested in presupposing.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do suspect, right, Bujold definitely read Pern? She’s writing in the ’80s, it would be surprising to me if this was not an influence on her.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it is interesting that you have these fantasy, or science-fiction worlds that are: “And of course this is what would happen!”

Lleu: Yeah, it’s… yeah. Which is, something, one of the things that I think is interesting about the later Pern books is that, once you see the initial settlers, you’re like… okay, yes, of course this would happen, but of course this would happen because of this specific group of people and the way they have chosen to structure their society. Not, in fact, because of anything inevitable in human nature, or whatever.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do wonder whether McCaffrey knew that going in, or whether she was just, as I said, “I wanna play in this id-fic, id-space of sexy evil feudalism, and it’s all so dramatic.” And then later, as she developed as a writer, to be fair—

Tequila Mockingbird: —was like… “Oh, okay, how would that… let’s, let’s kind of put some guide rails around that,” so as to say that the ultimate human instinct and condition is not violent, you know, feudalism. Maybe.

Lleu: Yeah. I mean, we’ll talk about this more in the future, but I think she did attempt to put more thought into it. I’m still not sure that she recognized that she was showing us a specific social configuration and not an inevitable arc of human nature.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, goodie! I was hoping we’d get to that part. Yeah, it is interesting that you do get the word rape.

Tequila Mockingbird: You specifically get F’lar reminiscing about their first sexual encounter and being like… well. Yanno. Darn.

Lleu: Well, actually, so. You get F’lar reminiscing about their first sexual encounter twice. Once, the morning after, and F’lar’s lying in bed and being like, yeah. That was really good, she shouldn’t have any regrets about that, I'm really good at sex.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then, several chapters later, you get… and I’m, I will just read the paragraph, ’cause I do think it’s interesting and valuable.

Tequila Mockingbird: “He caught her arm and felt her body tense. He set his teeth, wishing, as he had a hundred times since Ramoth rose in her first mating flight, that Lessa had not been a virgin, too.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “He had not thought to control his dragon-incited emotions, and Lessa's first sexual experience had been violent. It had surprised him to be first, considering that her adolescent years had been spent drudging for lascivious warders and soldier-types. Evidently no one had bothered to penetrate the curtain of rags and the coat of filth she had carefully maintained as a disguise. He had been a considerate and gentle bedmate ever since, but, unless Ramoth and Mnementh were involved, he might as well call it rape. Yet he knew someday, somehow, he would coax her into responding wholeheartedly to his lovemaking. He had a certain pride in his skill, and he was in a position to persevere.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Let’s start with that assumption that, as someone who was… cosplaying? Disguising herself as a serving drudge for a decade, she would inevitably have come to the unwanted sexual attention of multiple, higher status men in the household, and have no effective way of resisting that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that, I think, is part and parcel of this pseudo-medieval feudal culture that she has set up. And, to be fair, specifically that Fax has set up in his Holds—

Tequila Mockingbird: —because we see that Fax is himself sexually aggressive and predatory. His wife is not happy about the fact that she’s married to him and he is violent towards her, and also has all of these other women that he is just… housing in the same set of rooms as his wife, and are his sexual partners, again, whether or not by their own choice is a little ambiguous.

Lleu: Yeah. I mean, something else that is maybe at work there is some classic Orientalism.

Tequila Mockingbird: —with the serial numbers filed off, and with all understanding of… actual social politics…ummm…

Lleu: Yeah. One thing that strikes me about that in particular is the disconnect, precisely here, between the assumed pseudo-medieval social structure, and the world-building and character building that she has done in the first part. Which, after reading the first section, it’s obvious that this would never have happened, because Lessa can influence people’s emotions. And if she noticed that someone were sexually interested in her, she would either… direct them to someone else, or just murder them—

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, she can also specifically “blur” herself, as in make her physical appearance look different to other people. She repeatedly is making herself look ugly by psychically messing with other people in that first scene.

Lleu: Yeah, so she is doing a combination of holding, adjusting her posture and kind of, forcing people to look away from her, to only notice her in a specific way that she wants.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it specifically says at one point when F’lar notices that she’s doing it, that—

Tequila Mockingbird: —she tries to “pull the illusion of ugliness” and he, it doesn’t work because now he knows she’s doing it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And because he’s a dragonrider, with presumably some psychic abilities of his own. (Ahem, fantasy novel, ahem.)

Lleu: So, but this does not occur to F’lar. Which seems weird, because her psychic presence that he felt in the Hold was… the thing that attracted him to her.

Tequila Mockingbird: So that seems a little bit to me like… laziness, narratively.

Tequila Mockingbird: You know, it is convenient for F’lar to have assumed that to, again, achieve that very specific sexual context that McCaffrey wants from this first encounter.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because, and in a lot of ways I think it’s… following a similar pattern to the arranged marriage in romance? This idea of—and I think this is… fundamental in a lot of ways to contemporary romance story, whether sexually explicit or not—of: these two characters don’t want to fall in love at the beginning. Because if they wanted to fall in love and then they just fell in love, that would be boring.

Tequila Mockingbird: So we can either say, they want to fall in love but circumstances are preventing them from falling in love; you might call that the Sense and Sensibility model. Or we can say, they don’t want to fall in love, and we are going to force them into proximity so that they can, kind of against their will, fall in love with each other—

Tequila Mockingbird: Which you could call the Pride and Prejudice model. Obviously you have stories in which that’s like, “Oh no the next door neighbor’s hot!” But you also have stories where it’s like, “I am married to this person and having sex with them against my will and we are going to gradually fall in love with each other over the course of the story.” And it’s very clear, to me at least, that that’s the kind of story McCaffrey wants to tell!

Lleu: Yeah. Absolutely. There’s also, it seems to me, an extent to which this tells us something about F’lar, also. Which, to be fair to McCaffrey, is very important for the first three-quarters of the novel’s plot. Which is that F’lar doesn’t really regard Lessa as—

Lleu: F’lar sees Lessa as a convenient tool and at this point, a prop for his political power within, in the Weyr and, more generally, on Pern. On the one hand, I think this particular passage is really just, McCaffrey didn’t quite think to put the pieces together of the way she set up Lessa’s character in the first section—

Lleu: —and what F’lar is thinking right now. But it also is not unreflective of F’lar’s personality for him to not have considered this.

Lleu: To not have considered that, oh, Lessa, even when she was hiding for ten years, Lessa did have some agency that she was constantly exercising to protect herself.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then you also get to the second part of this, which implies that they’re still having sex?

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is fascinating to me, because it does kinda feel like she hates his guts at this point.

Tequila Mockingbird: But you also get the line of like, “unless Ramoth and Mnementh were involved, he might as well call it rape.”

Lleu: —can, kind of, smooth things over, because Ramoth and Mnementh do…

Lleu: Sometimes mating flights are purely a passing convenience, but in this case Ramoth and Mnementh do have a close emotional bond. This does imply, in a way that isn’t necessarily followed through on in later books, that—

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, I’m not clear on whether it’s implying that the dragons are just generally vibing, or whether that means that Ramoth and Mnementh are ongoingly having sex, in a way that spills over to F’lar and Lessa.

Tequila Mockingbird: I know that, do we know whether or not dragons can have sex outside of mating flights? I think so?

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s also, the question of how sentient dragons are is… you know, slightly fluctuating over the course of… and I think we’re supposed to think of them as essentially like, cognitive, having thoughts but not necessarily entirely people?

Lleu: —is something that we learn later. And that was intentionally done because if they did they wouldn’t want to fight Thread because they would remember what it felt like to be wounded by Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s, there’s a cognition but it is not necessarily a human cognition.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right? Ramoth is already pregnant at this point in the story.

Tequila Mockingbird: But there are definitely animals who just have recreational—dolphins, you know, have fun.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so I would believe either that this is Ramoth and Mnementh sending good vibes, or just when they get frisky Lessa and F’lar also have sex, and that otherwise she’s very resistant to the idea of having sex.

Lleu: Yeah, I think the possibility here is open to either. I can’t think of a case in any of the later books where there’s an indication of dragons having recreational sex, or like, being sexually active outside of the confines of a mating flight, or in very close proximity to one—

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I think we see, if I recall correctly, and you know, we’ll get there, there’s an implication of the bond going in the other direction with fire lizards?

Tequila Mockingbird: Where, in Dragonsdawn, I think when Sean and Sorka are gettin’ down, the fire lizards get all excitable and also get flirty with each other?

Tequila Mockingbird: But also the fire lizards are very much not a human intelligence, right?

Lleu: We may have to bracket this; I haven’t read Dragonsdawn since, like, 2014.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, then why were you not obsessively rereading Dragonsdawn? Which is horses, and dragons, and a bad, bad romance, all of which tidied in a beautiful little bow.

Lleu: Well, by the time I was reading anything beyond the Harper Hall trilogy I was–

Lleu: The other thing I wanted to flag here is that F’lar does very much like, “Hmm, if only Lessa had been raped as a teenager, then it would have been better,” which…

Tequila Mockingbird: I think… I don’t know that he’s really thinking that through—

Lleu: —putting enough thought into it to realize what he’s saying, but also… god I hate F’lar. He’s so bad. He’s—

Lleu: I hate F’lar not just as a person but also because I don’t really think he’s that interesting.

Lleu: A, in terms of, F’lar is a true believer that Thread will return. Oh, look, Thread returns! F’lar has this vision for how the planet should be reorganized in order to make fighting Thread work. Oh, what a coincidence, it works out perfectly! The only person who escapes F’lar’s control is Lessa, and in spite of that, the novel is really entirely about F’lar figuring out how to discipline Lessa and get her to do more or less what he wants. And even when she does her time travel journey to the past—

Lleu: Still, as soon as she gets back, Lessa has, in a moment of distress in the past, is like, “Oh F’lar’s gonna be so angry, he’s gonna shake me”—

Tequila Mockingbird: And the text clearly wants us to think it’s kinda romantic.

Tequila Mockingbird: The way that he grabs her by the shoulders and violently shakes her to indicate that she has disobeyed him.

Lleu: —Lessa returns to the present with thousands of other dragonriders from the past and the first thing F’lar does is grab her shoulders and shake her. And all that she can do is turn to the dragonriders she’s met in the past, and be like, “See, I told you he’d shake me.” And F’lar’s like, “What the fuck is going on?”

Tequila Mockingbird: I think it’s interesting because in a lot of ways F’lar is just the narrative, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s the narrative anthropomorphized, because his job is to exist in the narrative so that there’s someone to tell Lessa what’s going on and propel the story forward by being ready to fight the Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right? He doesn’t actually have a great deal of personality beyond being the driving force of the plot.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think, also, we can talk about the way that their relationship evolves in later books and the way that both of their characters—well, his character changes in later books—

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think fundamentally in this book he’s more of a narrative prop than a fully realized human character. Yes, the way that their relationship goes is… bad, and he treats her poorly and disregards her agency repeatedly, and so does the narrative. But also, the narrative subjectively; the experience of reading the narrative, it is satisfying to see him gradually fall in love with her, because that’s the way this kind of narrative is supposed to go.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right? It’s this like, oh, they don’t like each other at first, and she gradually becomes more and more jealous of him, and more and more like, “Well, I don’t like him but he’s not allowed to flirt with anyone else!” And eventually him, you know, grabbing her and shaking her. I remember reading that at ten, and being like, yay! He’s finally figured out how awesome she is. He gets it! And that’s the vindication of the narrative for Lessa; is, on one hand, yes, everyone is constantly trying to control her and make her stop being… a violent, murdering, just, ’cause left to her own devices she would kill everyone she didn’t like—

Tequila Mockingbird: But there is the satisfaction of, she gets to be right! She gets to kill Fax, she gets to fly. Yes, queen dragons can fly, and by the end it’s like, not only that, they can fight Thread! This mic drop satisfaction—

Tequila Mockingbird: —of eventually getting F’lar to the point where he is, in a lot of ways, enabling her, and letting her do what she wants to do.

Tequila Mockingbird: Is that a healthy relationship dynamic of coercion and manipulation? Yeesss we love that! No.

Lleu: Well, you say that as if it were a joke, but this is one of the most common ways that this novel, and Lessa and F’lar’s relationship more generally, is read in scholarship on Pern—

Lleu: —is as a model for that, whereas I see it largely as being, and this as being in many ways the continuing arc of the relationship, as F’lar, kind of, taming Lessa.

Lleu: Effectively, many people do in fact read it as this is a model for a healthy heterosexual relationship because Lessa eventually teaches/forces F’lar into seeing her as a real person with agency and her own desires who needs to be regarded as an equal partner.

Lleu: I just don’t think she ever actually succeeds in convincing F’lar to treat her as an equal partner, is the problem.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well. She’s not participating as an equal partner. And I think this loops back around to status versus power and The Patriarchy ™, but she’s not engaging with him in a, “Hey we are straightforward partners and I’m gonna honestly tell you what I want and trust that you’re gonna,” because, to be fair, she has no reason to, right? She shouldn’t do that because he’s not gonna listen to her—

Tequila Mockingbird: —so instead she’s constantly manipulating him, both with literal psychic energy powers and also just with information control and with using her ability to talk to other dragons and talk to other dragonriders behind his back and act as if she’s not doing that. And, to my memory, this continues on in later books, she’s never not puppet-mastering the world around her, or trying to.

Lleu: Yes, that’s true. The problem is that in later books F’lar is more and more conscious of it, and so makes more and more of an effort to be like, “Hmm, I’ve gotta stop Lessa from messing around with this situation the way she always does!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, and it’s just this… And this is one thing that I’ve gotta give it to Anne McCaffrey, when you close the book you’re like, yikes, you know. But when I’m actually reading it, when I’m in the story, I’m so compelled by Lessa. She’s so satisfying and fun, and I want her to crush all of her enemies viciously. And maybe that says more about me than it does about the text. But I feel like she’s a really successful, messy and unpleasant protagonist.

Tequila Mockingbird: And she never gets, she’s in some ways as you say, tamed, made to behave in more socially acceptable ways, or figures out better avenues for getting what she wants. But her instinct never stops being like, I don’t like someone, let’s just murder them. Or let’s incite mob violence against them because they made me mad because they told me no.

Lleu: I agree. The other thing that I find extremely compelling, that’s already present in this, though I think it becomes more prominent in some of the later books. Is how in spite of the thin veneer of world-building in the first section, as the book goes on, I have never, or rarely, encountered another series that is so attentive to the material organization of society.

Lleu: One of the things that I think is so interesting about this series as a whole, and that’s already apparent in Dragonflight, is her attention in particular to food and food production.

Lleu: Almost every time that you see characters eating, you know where the food came from. You know who grew it, you know how it got there, you know who cooked the food—

Lleu: —at the Hold, you know how much food they have. And they’re talking and discussing, like, “Hmm, we need more food supplies, what are our options for getting more food?” In a way that I think is really, really interesting, and ultimately is in some ways, I would say, the downfall of the series because she gets more and more interested—

Lleu: —in the big structures and less and less interested in the characters and, you know, maintaining a compelling story. But…

Tequila Mockingbird: For those of us who really liked Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain and The Boxcar Children—the first book before they were inexplicably rescued from their boxcar—it does feed into that very satisfying, like, how can we survive in the wilderness, what is permitting us to continue this society? What are the logistical underpinnings of this?

Lleu: And it also makes the book really interesting to think about from a, I have to say it, from a more Marxist perspective, because she’s thinking about the political economy of Pern.

Lleu: In a way so few other, even sci-fi writers are doing, and certainly very few fantasy writers. Especially, well, fantasy didn’t, wasn’t really—

Lleu: —wasn’t really existing at this point in time. But, anyway. For all that we’ve been very negative about the books, there is also a bunch of stuff that’s really interesting about Dragonflight.

Lleu: Yeah. I still would not recommend reading the whole series. I do think Dragonflight, specifically, is worth reading for its like, because—

Lleu: —for its, kind of, historical import. And because it’s a good, engaging novel, and it stands alone pretty well.

Tequila Mockingbird: To your point about the logistics there are contemporary writers who aren’t bothering to put this thinking in—

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s something that frequently makes me get a little twitchy. I was thinking about The Goblin Emperor, by Kathleen[5] Addison.

Tequila Mockingbird: Ah, well, I had a good time. I enjoyed the experience of reading it. But any time that you actually try and think about the world-building of it, and she said in interviews, like, I very deliberately didn’t, like, want, worry about it, I just had fun and didn’t bother to think it through! And it’s like, yeah, it shows! Because you have a grain and wheat dependent agrarian society that does not have commercial beef consumption, but they have milk. And I’m like, so where is this milk coming from? Why do you have milk and not beef?

Tequila Mockingbird: And they’re wearing underwear separates in a pre-industrial laundry capacity society, with heavily brocaded and embroidered, expensive clothing. And I’m like, no one has ever done that. Because that means that those clothes would have to be washed every time you wear them. Even emperors didn’t do that, because it was so much easier to just wear an undergarment that covered all of your body and wash that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Like, there’s just no reason, and it’s little stuff! But stuff that pings in a, like, “Oh this wouldn’t work; this doesn’t make sense.” And I will say, yeah, I think Pern… there are still moments of that—

Tequila Mockingbird: —but most of those are about, like, the social technologies of interpersonal interaction. And not about the material realities of food production and shelter and all of that.

Lleu: So our last recurring feature, if we do in fact continue this into a series, is recommending better books you should read instead of Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: If you’re interested in stories about ugly and violent revenge involving magic and power fantasy and the messy ways in which society can turn in on itself, I would like to recommend Blood Debts, by Terry J. Benton-Walker. Which is a—here, I’ll give a little: “30 years a go, a young woman was murdered, a family was lynched, and New Orleans saw the greatest magical massacre in its history. In the days that followed, a throne was stolen from a queen. On the anniversary of these brutal events, Clement and Christina Trudeau, the 16 year old twin heirs to the powerful magical dethroned family, are mourning their father,” dot dot dot.

Lleu: My recommendation, is ironically, despite the fact that I do think this is science fiction, a fantasy series. I would recommend Samuel Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon, which is four books. First book, Tales of Nevèrÿon, published in 1978, the last book, Return to Nevèrÿon, published in 1987. They are systematic deconstruction of the sword and sorcery genre, set in a kind of ambiguously Bronze Age, or pre-Bronze Age past. And they are exploring many of the same kinds of questions that McCaffrey is interested in, in terms of power, gender, sex and sexuality, and also the, kind of, material structures of society, how societies are organized. Delany’s especially interested in urban life, in a way that McCaffrey really isn’t, but nonetheless. And, in particular, the second book Neveryóna, the one novel in the series, does begin with a, kind of, homage to Lessa’s first flight on Ramoth. Explicitly, the book is dedicated to McCaffrey.

Lleu: I love them, Delany is an incredible writer. The prose is just absolutely exquisite. And it’s very different from Pern, but also if you are interested in the ways that Pern is attentive to power, social structures, all these things, I think the Return to Nevèrÿon series could scratch some of that itch in a different but adjacent way.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I would also like to offer, if you’re interested in, again, violent revenge stories with complicated romantic relationships in which power dynamics are going back and forth at fast clip, I would like to recommend… the English title is The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage. I’m gonna attempt the Mandarin with sincere apologies to everyone who speaks it: 重生之将门毒后. It is available on novelupdates and it involves a woman who was the Empress and was bitterly betrayed by her husband and dies, who is reborn into her 14-year-old body, so it also has time travel, and sets about to systematically destroy everyone who betrayed her in her first life.

Tequila Mockingbird: In closing, please remember that if you are violently kidnapped from your home and told that you can fly on a dragon, make sure to check all the small print and ask detailed questions first, before getting onto the dragon and flying off with a stranger.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even if you just convinced him, psychically, to murder the guy you’ve been trying to murder for a decade.

Lleu: To be fair, it would have caused significant problems for Lessa if she had tried to stay. I think she ultimately made the right choice, but she probably could have made a more informed choice.

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

[1] Incorrect: she was the first to win a Hugo for fiction.