Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #10: Dragonsdawn (1988), part 2

Lleu: And welcome to 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 this was, regrettably, the book that I was probably the most obsessed with as a tween.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I read this maybe once as a child, and then a couple times as an adult, but it made very little impression on me.

Tequila Mockingbird: Today we’re continuing our discussion of Dragonsdawn, the prequel novel about the settlers who first colonized Pern. Note that, in addition to our standing disclaimers about sexual violence and homophobia, in this episode we will be discussing racism, cultural genocide, eugenics, and more.

Lleu: If you haven’t listened to the last episode, we recommend going back and listening to that before continuing on with this one.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s a two-parter, folks! Welcome back, and jumping back in, we are going to be trying to focus in this episode a little bit more on Dragonsdawn in context of the rest of the series, thinking more about the ways in which decisions that she made in Dragonsdawn ripple through the rest of the books or recontextualize things we learned in the previous books.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think one of the key elements is, it really puts in place — and we’ve talked about this before a couple of times — how feudalism was not an accident. They end up at feudalism, and it seems a little more like, “Oops, we just regressed to feudalism!” No, no, actually, you idiots were primed for feudalism the whole time.

Lleu: Yeah. The way the colony is structured is that the “charterers” who paid their way into the colony get large stakes and the contractors, who are paid employees, are being paid essentially in kind in smaller stakes.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so they are, in a lot of ways, not not indentured labor, right? They’re giving a certain number of years of their expertise in exchange for land.

Lleu: Yeah, ’cause the charterers get first choice of land, and then the contractors later get to choose theirs.

Lleu: So that already is setting up the inequalities in terms of land access that we see later on. But also, the idea was that every stake was going to be completely autonomous and what you do in your own stake is no one else’s business.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it seems like they had absolutely no thought given to: what if somebody engages in antisocial behavior that we need to deter for the rest of the community’s safety? They gave no thought to, what if someone is being harmful within their stake — like domestic violence, sexual assault, any kind of issues that you might, from a humanitarian perspective, want to intervene in?

Tequila Mockingbird: They have no central organization; they have no…anything, no guide rails set up, and so, when they do encounter both an external crisis and also dissension within their population, they really have no structure in place that everyone has agreed on to try and deal with it.

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s the thing: not having any kind of agreed upon response or consequence for negative social behavior does not prevent negative social behavior from arising; it just means that when it does arise you’re gonna be (a) responding emotionally rather than calmly and logically —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and (b) the people who are in power in the moment of the negative social behavior are going to set a consequence, rather than the community as a whole having any kind of say in the consequence.

Tequila Mockingbird: They haven’t signed up to a Charter/contract that says, “And if you do x, y will happen” and been able to give informed consent on that. It’s just five or six people in a room deciding, like, “Wow! This person really pissed us all off. What should we do to get back at them?”

Lleu: Yeah. And the thing is, they actually do have a magistrate and a few lawyers.

Lleu: But her job, Cherry Duff’s job, is that she’s gonna be the colony magistrate. But we’re explicitly told that they’re hoping that in the future they won’t need a replacement and they won’t need any more lawyers to replace the few who are part of the colony.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I’m just – I’m baffled, because even if you fully buy into this colonizing fantasy of a libertarian, manifest destiny wet dream, legal property rights are so key to that fantasy.

Tequila Mockingbird: You’re obsessed with what belongs to you and what doesn’t belong to you, and you don’t think that lawyers are going to be necessary?

Lleu: It’s bizarre. It truly seems like the colonists, and so, perhaps, by extension, McCaffrey put no thought into long-term development. There’s no indication that anyone has considered the fact that, hm, in the future there might be more people living on this planet.

Lleu: And they might not also all have access to land, or to the same amounts of land!

Tequila Mockingbird: And they didn’t actually sign on to the Charter. So, in two or three generations, they’re not going to be motivated to uphold the terms of the Charter in the way that “we” — the people who intentionally signed onto it — are.

Lleu: And, to be fair to McCaffrey, this is something that she thinks about in the future, because it does come up in Dragonseye, but they don’t have any better solutions in that book either.

Tequila Mockingbird: It feels like intellectual laziness in some ways, because she’s so good at thinking about the material elements of a society. She knows where the food comes from, and who is motivated to produce the food, financially, and how the food gets from one place to another. She’s thinking about clothing.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t love the way she’s thinking about it, but she’s thinking about gendered divisions of labor. She’s putting a lot of thought in, and so it seems like a weird lacuna not to have any thought about this.

Lleu: There are, I think, two conclusions that we can draw. One is — and I don’t think that this would be an accurate conclusion — that McCaffrey is herself a right-libertarian who is like, “Yeah, I want to bring back this kind of capitalist feudalism.”[1] I don’t think that’s a reasonable assessment. I think, however, that she did have precisely the same fantasy as all the colonists, and she just couldn’t see beyond. Because what happened in her life at the end of the ’70s[2] was that she got divorced, moved to Ireland because there were tax breaks, and then, once she had sold enough books that she had enough money to buy herself a house, she bought a horse ranch and started raising horses.

Lleu: And so, of course, she thinks that it’s good, and the narrative is explicit and repeated that this is good. This is a good model of society. This is how society should ideally work. And she’s also clearly on some level aware that there are problems with this, because they do, once Thread falls, immediately have to be like, “Oh, okay, actually, we do need some kind of central organization. There’s this emergency powers section of the Charter; I guess we’ll invoke that?” But also then she still doesn’t seem to see the result as…

Lleu: This is an extension of feudalism, effectively: they’ve made everything into Paul Benden and Emily Boll’s stake, where they can make these executive decisions for the whole planet, but also but they’re still like, “Of course, you’re all still autonomous, of course, blah blah blah blah blah.” Well…

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, it’s the same fallacy of, “Well, if you have a good person in charge, it’s fine.” And you can even — I don’t love it, but — you can make that decision in the short term, because you know Paul Benden and Emily Boll, and within the text they are good people. But you can’t just run a society for 2,500 years like that, because that’s not always going to be true.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is honestly, in a broader context, a problem that a lot of fantasy literature has always had, with this return to a pseudomedieval aesthetic or world-building concept, where you want your characters to be the king or the queen, because that’s an interesting way to exercise power in the story and give them narrative agency and it’s fun and shiny to write about, but then you’re sort of backed into the corner of defending monarchism.

Tequila Mockingbird: And some fantasy literature tries to write their way out of that with magic. I’m thinking of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books, where she makes textual that, actually, the magic horses decide whether or not you’re gonna be a good monarch, so the fact that they have a monarchy is fine, because if someone isn’t morally justified in holding and exercising feudal, monarchic power, they just won’t. And I don’t think that that kind of magical thinking — literally and figuratively — is absent from Pern.

Lleu: Absolutely not. If anything, the thing that is most surprising about Pern’s political world-building, now that we’ve seen Dragonsdawn and how things began, is that it took until the Eighth Interval, until Fax, for someone to decide, “Huh, we’ve already got all these feudal lords. I might as well just be a king.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. “Why not?” I feel like there is a lot of second-half-of-the-20th-century American thinking and engaging with the idea of utopia.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is where we do start to see Star Trek as this science fiction utopia. But we’re also seeing communes that are trying to enact a utopia in America, and I think often they fall prey to exactly the same problem, where, well, if they’re not a cult to start with, they don’t actually think through “what are we gonna do when something goes wrong?” Because their solution is, well, nothing will ever go wrong. We’ll just always agree about everything, and it will be fine.

Lleu: Yeah. There was just a — well, frankly, I thought somewhat underwhelming, but — mildly interesting article about the reception of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s work more broadly among the far right and essentially arguing that, given that these books have become, and that the fantasy genre more generally has become, this zone of struggle that’s claimed by elements on the right, that makes it all the more urgent for there to be a real, Marxist engagement with this that’s not just dismissing it out of hand and highlighting some ambiguities in Tolkien’s work.[3]

Lleu: Anyway, I wanted more from it than it was, but one of the things it talks about, it’s precisely this element of the reception of Tolkien, where, on the one hand, you have hippies, who are liberal, free love, all of these things, and, on the other hand, you have Italian fascists who are setting up quote-unquote “hobbit camps” —

Lleu: — to inculcate people in their values. So I don’t want to horseshoe theory this, but also hippies weren’t actually really that far left in many cases.

Lleu: And it does demonstrate precisely that problem of, if you have no structure then you have no way of dealing with problems and with people who will take advantage of informal structures that develop.

Tequila Mockingbird: There is something to the fact that white liberals and leftists often are very unaware of racism, and so they don’t set up those guide rails and don’t make their communities safe for people of color, because they’re just, “Oh, well, that won’t be a problem! We don’t need to worry about that.” And then —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that often is the downfall of many communities that are trying to be inclusive.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think of the seventies as being very much the era of communes. This is coming in the ’80s, but many of the Pern books are born in that era.

Lleu: Yeah. It would, I think, definitely be productive to juxtapose this book with, on the one hand, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed —

Lleu: — which is trying to think about informal power structures and how they develop and how we can prevent them from developing and what it means to attempt to build a utopia, in a much more critical and much more kind of conscientiously anarchist way than the libertarianism that we see here. And, on the other hand, perhaps, Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton, which is a response to Le Guin.

Lleu: So, The Dispossessed, subtitled “an ambiguous utopia”; Trouble on Triton, subtitled “an ambiguous heterotopia,” so distancing itself from a stance one way or the other on “Is this a utopia?” But one of the things that it’s thinking about is this question of political organization, and it presents, among other things, the most unhinged political system I have ever heard anyone conceive of — which, to be fair, characters in the book are like, “That makes no sense” — which is, everyone who votes in elections in the outer planets, all of the parties that are participating in the election govern simultaneously, and each individual person is governed by the tax, education, social security benefits policies of whatever party they voted for.

Lleu: Yeah. So, it’s something that people were very much thinking about, and I think there is a way in which Dragonsdawn is in continuity with those earlier “utopian” texts, but also maybe informed — this is totally me ust spitballing off the top of my head, thoughts that I had 5 seconds ago —

Lleu: — to juxtapose it with the strong response to the Reagan presidency by American speculative fiction writers in the mid-’80s. There’s a whole bunch of things published between, like, 1983 and 1986, let’s say, all of which are in various ways reflecting on, “What if the Christian right got everything they wanted?”

Lleu: Or, “What if the Reagan presidency is right and gay love really is the end of the world? What does that mean for gay people?” Things like that. I should say gay sex, specifically, in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Anyway, there’s also maybe something there, especially if we think of these books as Cold War texts, and we talked in at least one of the other episodes about the symbolism of, like, “Ah, we have to defeat the evil Red Star that’s going to —”

Lleu: “— destroy all of our hard-earned property and labor!” Oh, okay, so this is just classic anti-communist allegory. But there’s a certain ambiguity of it here. On the one hand, this is the purest form of that, because we’ve got our libertarian colonists who are all going to stake out their pioneer homesteads, and then the Red star comes and wants to destroy all of that.

Lleu: But, on the other hand, it becomes clear very quickly once Thread arrives that actually this pioneer mentality is not necessarily adaptive. There are things about it that we’re going to need to change, and one of those is this idea of autonomy. We need to centralize; we need to come together. And I don’t think they do a very good job of doing that, or at least a problematic job, I would say, of doing that. But there is this…

Lleu: Yeah. I wouldn’t say it undermines its own libertarian politics, but there’s at least some friction there.

Tequila Mockingbird: And there’s also the fact that part of what they have to do is centralize all of the resources.

Lleu: Yeah, they’re moving directly into a centrally-planned economy, which they were for the first two years, but that’s because they were establishing everything and transporting stuff to the surface, and most people were living in Landing, so it made sense to just have all the resources be in Landing. And so now they have to figure out how to reestablish that.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also the fact that you can just go to Stores and request anything that you need is a very communist concept.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the idea is that they’re using that up and that then those resources will never be replenished, right? It’s for higher-tech things that, once they break, or once they’re worn out, are not going to be replaced, and everyone’s going to be responsible for making their own, but it’s designed to scaffold everybody’s, as you say, establishment of their stakes and transporting everything to the surface and that process, and then when Thread falls they reassess that, and Joel Liliencamp ends up in charge of all of their material resources, and in our next episode we’ll meet one of his descendants, so there’s a cool thread there that gets set up. And this is also, I think, a good place to talk about all of those callbacks, and the way that she’s very clearly enjoying the opportunity to just slide in and give people names of Holds that we already know about and have those little moments of like, “Oh, okay. Bart Lemos. I know that he’s going to be important, or I know that he’s gonna do something interesting.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But that it also ends up coming back to bite her a little bit, because she’s locked in. She has the major Holds already set at this point for, what, 20 years when she writes this book?

Tequila Mockingbird: So then she’s coming back, and she’s, again, trying hypothetically — and we talked about this in the previous Dragonsdawn episode — to diversify her cast and write characters of color, and it’s both bad because her inherent handling of it is pretty racist, but also it leaves you with this dangling question of, like, okay, Kenjo Fusaiyuki is a hero, and why isn’t there a Fusaiyuki Hold?

Tequila Mockingbird: Why isn’t that one of the names that has kind of come down in Pernese history? What about Ongola? Why doesn’t he get a Hold.

Lleu: Yeah, who, actually, I did want to mention in the first part of this episode and I forgot. I think Ongola’s actually a really interesting character, (a) because he’s interesting and engaging and has this central status in the narrative, and also he is Black.

Lleu: And I think he’s actually the most sort of successful attempt at “This is a kind of post-racial, diverse future.” Okay, yeah!

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Except then he’s erased from the narrative, right? Paul Benden, Emily Boll, all of these other white colonists go down in Pernese history, and he doesn’t.

Lleu: Exactly. Yeah. And then the Holds that we do know are named after people who are implicitly not white are: Bitra, for some reason; Nabol, Nabhi Nabol, N-A-B-H-I, implicitly South Asian —

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s worth pointing out that both of those characters are not great people.

Tequila Mockingbird: In Dragonsdawn we learn that Nabol was, I don’t know, a henchman.. He was just greedy and —

Tequila Mockingbird: — wanted to get collect the gemstones that Bitra had stolen that were scattered in the atmosphere after her ship blew up, and that dooms him and Bart Lamos, because they have volunteered to go up and try and collect more probe data on the Red Star, and they end up burning up on reentry.

Tequila Mockingbird: And Bitra, obviously, is the villain of the book. So, on one hand, it’s an interesting and compelling choice, I think, to have some of those founding Hold names end up being non-heroic characters. I think that’s cool —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that you come back and, like, “Oh, okay, I meet Avril Bitra. I’m assuming she’s gonna be great, ’cause we know Bitra Hold exists,” and then subverting that. But it is definitely not an accident, or maybe it is an accident that reveals unintentional racism on her point, that both of those characters of color who have Holds named after them are bad people.

Lleu: Yeah. And the other thing is like, there’s a case to be made for Nabhi Nabol.

Lleu: He does die attempting — mostly — to do something good for the colony. So I can see why someone would be like, “Yeah. Hero.” Fine.

Lleu: There’s simply no explanation for Bitra, and I have to say that it does feel like there’s a kind of corruption of blood thing going on —

Lleu: — except for the fact that no one at Bitra Hold can possibly be genetically related to Avril Bitra, in that everything that we see about Bitra Hold later on is, “Ugh, yeah. Bitrans. They’re horrible. All they care about is gambling and cheating people out of their money.”

Lleu: — the horrible authoritarian Hold that locks people up on a whim, silences dissent, and kidnaps people, and everything else. So, of course, their founder must also have been bad.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. And it’s…it’s very stupid. And it is also, I think, a little confusing even within the narrative. Nabol and Lemos die nobly trying to help the colony; I see why then you’re like, “Oh, we should name something after them.” But why on earth would anyone want to name something after Avril Bitra, because she seems universally disliked?

Tequila Mockingbird: The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern, which was written by Jody Lynn Nye based on conversations she had with Anne McCaffrey — so I don’t hold it as completely canonical, because I personally feel like if it’s not in the text, you don’t get to count it, but gives us at least an indication of McCaffrey’s intentions — says that Bitra hold was specifically founded by dissenters who didn’t like Paul Benden or didn’t like the the centralized government or the community and maybe thought that Avril Bitra was actually right or that her legacy was being misrepresented in some way, but that still just seems weird.

Lleu: Especially because, truly, with the exception of her handful of minions and Stev Kimmer, who is also kind of one of her minions but is the only one of them who survives —

Lleu: So who are these “dissenters”? How did they reach this conclusion?

Tequila Mockingbird: Another interesting little connection point is, we do finally get some closure on that weird plate of metal that we first encountered in Dragonflight, where it says, “My father, as he was doodling, came up with this, fire-breathing dragons to fight back” and all of this, and in Dragonflight it functions in a really fun way as a easter egg for us as the reader. We know that “doodling” is not the present tense of “dying”; we know that actually this is a hint towards the technologically advanced past that the characters have forgotten. And Dragonsdawn is where McCaffrey ends up placing that little touchstone point, although it’s very clear that she didn’t know everything going in when she wrote Dragonflight, right, she was not conceiving of Ted Tubberman then.

Tequila Mockingbird: So she ends up writing Ted Tubberman’s subplot to line up with that. But that’s a fun little point where we come back and connect to something we’d already engaged with in the beginning of the series.

Lleu: …of the colony, and his daughter dies in the first Threadfall, which we will come back to in a moment. He is consumed by grief and starts conducting all of these experiments and ends up launching a rescue beacon into space, despite the rest of the colony voting not to do so, and then is shunned, legally, by the rest of the colony, because that’s the only solution that they can think of. It’s literally four people brainstorming, and Cherry Duff is like, “How are we gonna punish Ted Tubberman?” and Emily Boll’s like, “Hmm. Shunning. Religious communities used to use it. It’s very effective.”

Lleu: Aah! Hate that. Anyway, so he’s doing experiments, and he has been doing something with these grubs that he’s seeded around his house, and it’s discovered, eventually, that they have been eating Thread, and they find this plate that is engraved with his eureka moment.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is the thing that puts together that plate, and also we get a hint in Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, that grubs are actually related to Thread, and that’s why they can consume Thread when nothing else can.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that that’s the Eureka moment that he had, basically. I think Ted Tubberman brings into focus a lot of the different things we’re discussing: the fallacy of their government structure, or lack thereof; the connections that we get to later plots; and also brings into focus a really interesting element of Pernese culture, which is their utter incapacity to engage with or deal with grief in any way.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because Ted Tubberman’s daughter dies in the first Threadfall, and he’s devastated by this, because he’s a loving parent. But it’s deliberately placed in contrast with, Joel Liliencamp also loses two children in the first Threadfall, and he doesn’t seem to fall into this all-consuming grief.

Lleu: Yeah, essentially, he’s like, “Ope, just gotta power through, I guess.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think there’s something interesting to discuss about the ways in which these people are kind of coming out of a war zone and have been brought abruptly back into a war zone —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and that that is a coping mechanism that many people have for getting through war zones.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s fascinating and resonates with the rest of the book series that the broad community explicitly does not empathize with Ted’s grief.

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re discussing, basically, what to do about Thread and how to respond, and Cabot Francis Carter — a wonderful little Canadian, but of course all Canadian culture is gone, as all other cultures are — he’s talking about, you know, what are our plans, and Ted Tubberman says, “We’re all gonna die,” basically. “We can’t get off this planet. We’re doomed.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Damnfool loud mouth charterer,’ Sean murmured to Sorka. ‘He knew this was a one-way trip, only now everything’s not running smooth enough for him. It has to be someone’s fault.’ Sean snorted his contempt.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘I don’t look at our situation as hopeless, Tubberman,’ Cabot began, his trained voice drowning the murmurs in a firm, confident, and determined tone. ‘Far from it! I prefer to think positively. I see this as a challenge to our ingenuity, to our adaptability.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Mankind has survived more dangerous environments than Pern. We’ve got a problem, and we must cope with it. We must solve it to survive. And survive we will!’”

Tequila Mockingbird: In the specific context, it’s about the decision of whether or not to send an emergency beacon back towards Earth and the Federated Sentient Planets and ask for help, and I agree that that specific decision is a nuanced one; basically, they’re saying, if Earth comes to help us, they’re gonna take the planet back into their control. We’ll owe them money. And they talk about specific examples of previous colonies that have been kind of wiped out by that.

Tequila Mockingbird: So there’s a capitalist dystopian element to that, and I also think it feeds into this very American westward expansion, like, “No, we must be rugged individualists! We can’t possibly ask for help. We have to be completely self reliant!”

Tequila Mockingbird: So there’s an interesting discussion to be had there about whether that’s valuable or whether that’s important. Here, the the quote we get is:

Tequila Mockingbird: “To send for help seemed not only a rejection of Sallah’s sacrifice but a cowardly admission of failure when they had not exhausted the ingenuity and resourcefulness of their community.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Eugh. But, in this broader context, Ted is grieving, and nobody else seems to be interested in engaging with that, or sympathizing with the fact that he’s legitimately upset, for a good reason.

Lleu: Yeah. Everyone’s response to this is, like, “Ugh, Ted’s so annoying. He’s complaining again; he’s crying in public all the time.” Yeah, ’cause his daughter just got eaten alive!

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s no empathy from his community, and this feeds into something I think we’ve seen in other books, where you get to be sad if your dragon dies, because then you immediately die as well, or you seek to die.

Tequila Mockingbird: And if you don’t die when your dragon dies, you’re almost held in contempt for that.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s a weird — we’ll get to Giron in Renegades, but — Lytol in the first series, there’s kind of this weird like, “Oh, he didn’t die when his dragon did, and that’s a little odd and a little unnatural.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And so, thinking, too, about Nerilka and Alessan’s decision that he wants to die because Moreta is dead, it almost feels like, if you’re not suicidal about it you can’t have cared that much?

Tequila Mockingbird: Those are your only two options: to be driven to suicidal despair or to be completely fine. And there’s nothing in between…?

Lleu: It’s even what we see with Lessa and Brekke. We’re told explicitly, Brekke is not actively suicidal, because she’s Craftbred, and she would never do that, because Craft people don’t commit suicide, I guess.

Lleu: But also, it kind of seems like Lessa’s response is, like, “Well, if she were, then fine, but because she’s not, then what’s she complaining about? Why is she just lying there? She’s got to get up and do stuff.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s just…ahhh. It, in a lot of ways, to me, feels like this very white, American, Protestant emotional dysfunction.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I don’t think that that’s something McCaffrey is intentionally putting into this narrative. I think that’s something that, perhaps, is McCaffrey’s perspective, or that is leaking into this narrative, ’cause it really doesn’t seem self-aware.

Tequila Mockingbird: So many questions. Anne, why? And, uh, all we can do is have a podcast about it, unfortunately.

Lleu: Yeah. So, one last thing, following from the eureka plate, that I wanted to note is that we’ve had over the course of the series, now, at several points there have been references to the oldest records at the Harper Hall. When mankind first came to Pern, he established a good Hold in the South, but found it necessary to move North to shield. And I was like, “Okay, eventually, they’re gonna fill in that the last word is ‘volcanoes,’ right, ’cause they’re going to dormant volcanoes, or dead volcanoes, for the Weyrs.” They move north to shield volcanoes, because they needed good, solid —

Lleu: — now geologically stable rock. And I was like, “Okay, this is the book where they say that, right?” And it’s not.

Tequila Mockingbird: We do get some cool sequences, and part of what I enjoyed about this book was that we get to see them exploring the caves that are going to become Fort Hold and Benden Weyr, eventually. And you get, again, that sort of fun dramatic irony. They’re like, “Wow, these cave systems are so amazing!” And you get to see these seeds being planted that later come to fruition. It’s what’s fun about prequels, and I do love a good prequel. I think, in a lot of ways, this is a very good prequel, because it plays on the emotional beats and the arcs that are later developing and sets the scene in some fun ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: The other thing that I think you pointed out that I thought was fun, ’cause I hadn’t really thought about it, was the way that Weyr independence, or Weyr isolation from Hold and Craft social structures, actually a lot of it probably just springs from the fact that Sean Connell is kind of prickly and doesn’t want to be put in charge of carrying objects on his dragon.

Lleu: Yeah, we’re told repeatedly, “Oh, yeah, the Weyrs live apart because they don’t have time or energy for agriculture or other things.” And it’s like, well…

Tequila Mockingbird: But they also have a support staff that is three times the size of the Weyr, and that support staff could also just be larger and grow some food.

Lleu: Yeah, or the dragons could do things. The dragons spend a lot of time —

Lleu: — carrying objects back and forth, sometimes carrying people back and forth.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s interesting that even when proposes that as an idea of, like, “Oh, we should have a dragonrider stationed at every Hold so that they can communicate with us urgently,” it’s like, “The dragons don’t do that. That’s below them. That’s not appropriate for dragons.”

Lleu: And it seems clear to me from this book that all of that is just because Sean personally doesn’t like having to do that and thinks it’s beneath him.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s funny, and it is logically consistent with his personality, right: he is very proud; he is very independent.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t know how much she was thinking about it as “this, and therefore the rest of the books,” and how much it was just in the same vein as the rest of the books, this through-line of proud, independent dragonriders who wanna be on their own and wanna do it by themselves. But it is funny.

Lleu: The other thing is that it makes it clear that, in a much more obvious way, I think, than some of the other aspects of Pern’s feudalism, the structure and status of Weyrs, specifically, was not an inevitable development from the colony’s libertarianism.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also the Horse Girl energy of this book does, to me, resonate all throughout the series, because the fundamental Horse Girl story is about, only I have this bond with this powerful and mysterious and enigmatic creature. It only trusts me. I understand it better than everybody else, and as a result I can save the farm, or win the race, or the day, or, etc. And it’s fun in this book to see Sean and Sorka, very textually, as horse-obsessed kids. The bribe that Sean is offered to tell the rest of the colony where the fire lizards are and how to find them is that they will bioengineer him a replacement for the pony that he had to leave behind on Earth when they came. So the horse breeding and horse care — they’re both vet students — is a large part of what brings Sean and Sorka together, and then there is specifically a passage in the book where they both realize, like, “Oh, now that we have dragons. We don’t really ride our horses anymore. We don’t really have the emotional time and energy to give to those relationships with our horses, both because we’re so devoted to our dragons and also because the horses are scared of dragons, right, so they can’t cohabitate easily.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is an interesting transition point that, to me, highlighted the degree to which all of these books are about that same Horse Girl energy of, like, “Ah, I’m special. I’ve Impressed a dragon, and the dragon only loves me, and we can do this special thing together.” But it’s also McCaffrey, as you say, was a Horse Girl herself, moved to Ireland, got a ranch, started breeding horses. But it’s funny, because that’s also the Sean-Sorka romance plot, where he is the Horse, and she’s the Horse Girl. He’s brooding and sullen and reserved and wild, and she’s the only one who understands him and can talk to him and can coax him into civilization and community, and they have this very special bond, and he comes to love and trust only her. Which both is very much in line with the rest of this narrative but also does have a unpleasant undertone —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because Sean is an Irish Traveller and because his culture is inherently dismissed as less civilized than hers in the narrative.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Some of the same ugliness that is perhaps present in Wuthering Heights, you could say, and this image, which in a lot of ways does inform the gothic hero. We could have a whole other podcast talking about race and the gothic and British literature in the 19th century.

Lleu: I don’t know that we specifically could have that, because I don’t know nearly as much about it as you do, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: Fair. I wrote my undergraduate thesis partially on it, so I could have a whole separate podc- — but I don’t have time. Suffice to say that there’s something going on there, and it’s not great.

Lleu: Yeah. We just have a few other things, I think, left. So, one is, the eugenics are back.

Lleu: But in a weirder way. Where some of the later series books are much more like, “Well, obviously disabled people are worthless, and of course people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are used as menial labor, because they can’t do anything else.” There’s a really weird but interesting through-line in this book where Paul Benden has several prosthetic fingers, and he, as a as a sort of nervous habit he constantly is rubbing them against each other or touching them or is otherwise hyperconscious of this, in a way that, on the one hand, I think, is probably simply realistic, right?

Lleu: — clunky and not really necessarily doing what disabled people actually want them to do and are more doing what abled people want to see.[5]

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it specifically says, textually, he has sensation, and they look no different than his regular fingers, but he knows, or he keeps thinking about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which in itself has a little flavor of ableism to it, but is also just, yeah, an interesting preoccupation for him and the narrative to continue to have.

Lleu: It would be one thing if it were brought up once as, like, “Oh, yeah, and then he moved his fingers, and he was like, ‘Hm, I wonder, am I hearing the prosthetics in my jointsmake little clicking noises?’” Which is one of the things that he thinks about. I would expect that as sort of a one-time thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: It also is connected to that, like, “Oh, the Nathi War.” He explicitly lost his fingers in the war, so.

Lleu: Yeah, but it’s brought up repeatedly. It is his nervous habit, but also it’s his nervous habit that the text is constantly pointing our attention back to, in a way that I’m not really sure what to do with.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; I think some of it might just be reminding us that we’re in the science fiction world, just keeping us in that technofuture space.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I think there is that tension between this idea of, they wanted to have a low-technology life, and then that kind of screws them over. When Thread falls, a lot of the problem is that they didn’t bring things that would allow them to respond as effectively as they know that they could be responding.

Tequila Mockingbird: So a lot of the kind of internal crisis is driven by them saying, like, “Oh, we don’t have these resources. We don’t have more power packs. We don’t have any kind of atmospheric flight capability, really, that was designed for that. We don’t have any kind of combat capability.” And so I think that tension is intentionally continually present in the narrative.

Lleu: Which also then raises a question that does come up repeatedly in later books about medical knowledge —

Lleu: — and then eugenics. If Paul Benden has these prosthetic fingers, what about people in the future when they’ve established a low-tech agrarian lifestyle?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And it seems to be, again, this lack of forethought? Where there’s this idea of, “Oh, well, clearly no one will be born needing a prosthetic, or will have any kind of agricultural accident that results in needing a prosthetic or significant high-tech medical intervention. It will just be fine forever.” Even stuff like vaccination — we have later information that right after moving north there’s a significant plague in Fort Hold, because everyone’s crowded together and so disease transmission is an issue. But at that point you’re only ten-something years out of Landing on this planet. Are you telling me you didn’t bring any materials for an actual viral cure instead of just symptom management? You just deliberately were like, this will be fine?

Tequila Mockingbird: And we do get some hints in later books that, yeah, maybe they did do that on purpose, and maybe there was that explicit eugenicist intention or design in this colony of, “Yeah, people are going to die of diseases, because we are deliberately not bringing medical technology, but that’s good or fine, because the weak will die, or —”

Lleu: Right. “The strong survived,” is explicitly what AIVAS says in All the Weyrs of Pern, which…whoa, boy.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I know we’ve been bringing up All the Weyrs of Pern a lot, but it is very much, I think, in close dialogue —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because part of what we see here is, even though AIVAS is not really a character in Dragonsdawn, the stage being set for that —

Tequila Mockingbird: — with the information that oh, they can’t move the Yokohama beacon connection, so they can’t take it with them when they leave Landing. They’ll have to just fortify the building and come back for it later. And we know that “later” ends up meaning 2,500 years later.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it does seem like both the colony specifically and McCaffrey’s conception of this scientifically, technologically advanced future is implicitly a eugenicist worldview.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which, is, yikes, unpleasant to realize, but also, to your point about how there’s a very strong, I would say, implication, rather than textual statement, that all of the drudges — question mark? — are people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, or, just, all of the people with intellectual or developmental disabilities in Pe-, on Pern, become drudges.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t really know if that part is clear, but it seems odd in contrast to this intentional world building statement of, like, “Oh, we don’t have to worry about that in the future! It’s all good.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s like…that’s good? Like, that’s your plan, is to have people with disabilities and then just shunt them into servitude and the lowest strata of society with no real rights? And that’s what you wanted.

Lleu: There are a lot of things about this book that suggests that they’ve just never thought about the possibility of any kind of exploitation, which is so funny, because so much of their resistance to seeking help, for example, is because the “technocrats” and the “syndicates” are this capitalist dystopia that would exploit them severely if they asked for help. But there are things like, as we mentioned, the autonomy of stakes, meaning that there’s no mechanism for dealing with, say, domestic violence, but also the way that they implement the shunning is that Ted Tubberman, specifically, is shunned, but in principle the rest of his family is not shunned, but also, if everyone’s shunning Ted Tubberman, that means no one can go to Ted Tubberman’s stake, which means no one can talk to his family, so when, finally, he is killed by some of his creations, his wife calls for help and has to be like, “Don’t hang up! It’s me! It’s not Ted!”

Lleu: And people are like, “Oh, Mary, we haven’t heard from you in, like, six months! It’s so good to talk to you!” Six months!?

Lleu: The structure of the world is built to lead inevitably, whether this was McCaffrey’s intentional plan or not, to the kind of exploitation that rests on an entire caste of servants who are disabled and so relegated to the lowest rung of society.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I don’t actually think that that is surprising, because I think there are always people who are like, “Well, obviously exploitation is evil, but I don’t have to worry about that, because I’m a good person!”

Tequila Mockingbird: “And so, therefore, I can never, accidentally or unintentionally commit acts of harm.”

Lleu: Well, like, everyone who interacts with Camo favorably in Dragonsinger.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. But also just, I think that is, unfortunately, a very human dichotomy to draw in your own brain. There are good people and bad people, and I’m a good person, so I don’t actually have to examine my own actions.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which works out great. I also would like to talk about the drift from Earth language to Pern language.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is fun, because it’s, I think, just a great world-building element of the books in general, but it’s cool to be on Pern but not using the weird little Pernese words for all of the flora and fauna.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this actually does help us figure out which of those neologisms are referring to alien organisms and which are Earth animals that just the names have drifted in 2,000 years. ’Cause I thought that spiderclaws were just crabs, but apparently we learn here that, no, a spider claw is an alien organism that’s vaguely similar to a crab.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause everything is a beast. We have land-beasts, milch-beasts, burden-beasts, dray-beasts, runner-beasts, and herd-beasts, which we sort of assume from what we get in this book are referring to horses, cattle, sheep and goats. Although I’m not exactly sure how to assign quite all of those. Is a burden beast a donkey? Is that an oxen? I think an oxen is a dray-beast.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I can only assume that a burden-beast would be a donkey? But I don’t know. Maybe they’ve got camels. We don’t know.

Lleu: Well, the other thing is, the cover of Nerilka’s Story features an animal that looks kind of like maybe a llama or an alpaca.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm, and I could see that being a land-beast or a herd-beast. We know that they have llamas.

Lleu: But they’re not mentioned in Dragonsdawn, as far as I can remember.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, no, we don’t get that shoutout. We know that they have goats, cows, pigs — so that’s a question; what did they call pig in the future? — horses, chickens, geese, and ducks. And we’re also told that a lot of the chickens, geese, and ducks don’t survive the first Threadfall —

Tequila Mockingbird: — where a lot of the other larger mammals do, because they’re under shelter.

Lleu: Yeah. We also know that coffee, for some reason, doesn’t survive well on planets other than Earth, which is to say, it has not survived on any planet other than Earth, so that’s why they start drinking this local bark concoction, which they call “klah,” for reasons that are not explained.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it also does become clear that the sweetness that they’ve been talking about, “sweeting,” “sweetroot,” is not honey, because bees also don’t make it on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then I think we don’t really get a lot of other information — other than about the dolphins, which we’ll talk about in a moment — but I wanted to briefly just talk about, why do we think she made this decision broadly across the series? ’Cause I think it’s fun. It did really disappoint me at 12 when I realized that runner-beasts were horses and not, sort of, ostrich creatures, ’cause that’s what I had definitely been imagining. It’s a cool world-building, gimmick, but I think I question whether it actually makes sense?

Tequila Mockingbird: Some things I totally see the logic of language drifts. It’s been 2,500 years; that happens. But the fact that they’re all obsessed with horses, and they completely lose the word “horse” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and all of the words for tack? It’s “mouth-ropes” instead of “reins,” “toehold strap” instead of “stirrup” — that just doesn’t make sense to me.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because “toehold strap” is harder to say than “stirrup.”

Lleu: Yeah, I do think that this is just a place where she was really committed to the pseudomedieval, feudal aesthetic, and was trying to make things alien, and then unintentionally shot herself in the foot with that, and was like, “Well…”

Tequila Mockingbird: I would have been so much more interested if it had been an interesting pidgin, or the language convergence.

Lleu: Yeah! Well, if we had some indication that anyone on the colony spoke a language other than English, besides —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. That could have been really cool, or — maybe it’s the plague. Everyone dies of the plague, and no one knows the words for anything, and so they just make up new ones.

Lleu: — but the other possibility that occurs to me is that it’s something like, they start distinguishing these animals purely by function.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is also interesting to see the place-name drift, because when these colonists arrive on Pern at first, they’re naming almost everything after Earth places.

Tequila Mockingbird: We have Honshu, we have Mexico, we have Araby, all of these, in some cases, interestingly dated name choices. Malay Stake, all of that. And by the time we get to even, I think, the Sixth Pass, all of that is gone.

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s only on the South Continent; everything on the North Continent is just named after someone who has been on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we will learn more about the story of the name of Ruatha in a short story.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause that’s another moment of: how did they forget that? This book makes textual that there are dolphins who can communicate with humans and special humans who have been given genetic enhancements to be able to better communicate with the dolphins. And they just don’t remember that?

Tequila Mockingbird: What? Even if you — and I think the logic is apparently that they’re all supposed to have died in a plague, all of the dolphineers, and so, you know, “Oops, oh, well.” But you would still know that it was possible to communicate with them, and there’s no reason I can think of that a society would completely forget that there is another sapient species on their planet with them, especially when a bunch of them are living in Sea Holds and are out on ships all the time, and we do know that they are aware that shipfish are really smart and will rescue people and lead people to good fishing. And we never spontaneously, over 2,500 years, rediscovered communication?

Lleu: Well, and it continues to be kind of silly in All the Weyrs of Pern —

Lleu: — and then we just sort of ignore the history of it when we get to Dolphins of Pern. But Dolphins of Pern is fun.

Lleu: The one last thing I wanted to briefly talk about was the way the first Threadfall scene goes, ’cause there’s kind of two first Threadfalls in this.

Lleu: One is the actual first Threadfall, when everyone dies, which in many ways evokes the beginning of Renegades, as we’ll talk about, which starts, among other things, with the Lilcamp caravan being destroyed, or nearly destroyed, by Threadfall. So it’s a very similar scene here of people who are unprepared for something, although in this case it’s something that they could never have imagined, rather than something that they are aware of but think is just a children’s story.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think she is a very effective science fiction horror writer in that way of, the tension is great. It’s scary. It’s building. You’re watching the scene of the fire lizard coaxing the small child, like, dragging the small child back in, and the mom being like, “That’s so weird!” And then the kid’s like, “Can I go back out to play?” And she’s like, “Sure. Not sure what’s up with the fire lizard.” And you have a lot of tension as a reader there, in a way that I think is very effective.

Lleu: It felt to me, similarly to Moreta’s death scene, like she couldn’t quite trust that the readers were going to be sufficiently conscious of what was coming?

Lleu: And so she was like, “I have to put in all of this extra dramatic irony, just to be like, ‘They had so many warning signs and they ignored them!’” I’m like, yeah, I know. That’s the whole point of the book, is that they had no idea. Just show me them having no idea and it’ll be fine. I didn’t need all of this extra stuff layered on top of it. To me it felt a little bit…mm.

Lleu: Yeah. Unnecessary. It felt distracting. I would rather that it got more quickly to the point. Like, I think, having one of the things, rather than having the panorama of like, “Yeah —”

Lleu: “— out in the fields the fire lizards were like herding sheep back towards the barns, and the woman whose child is playing outside, and then this other thing and this other thing.” I’m like, just get to the point. Show me one of these, sure. But I didn’t need five of this scene —

Lleu: — in order for it to have the emotional impact that it’s gonna have, or that it’s intended to have, was my feeling.

Tequila Mockingbird: Interesting. It gets pretty quickly — it’s only like two pages.

Lleu: — and it was long enough that it made me go, “Eh, you could have just done this in a paragraph instead.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. But I do think it’s effectively spooky, and the scene of Sean and Sorka frantically riding on the horse, trying to outrun Threadfall — very reminiscent of Menolly in Dragonsong —

Tequila Mockingbird: — then sheltering under the ledge in the water with the Thread falling into the lake and the horses treading water next to — it’s a cool scene.

Lleu: Yeah, I think the actual description of Threadfall itself is very well done. I just thought the lead-up to it was a little too heavy-handed

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. Okay. So you get that first one, and it is, to me, fun and interesting to see, okay, here’s the very first time that Thread falls on humans on Pern and, wow, ’cause this does, inevitably, set up, okay, all the rest of these books, all the rest of this purpose, the dragons’ existence, is all coming out of this experience.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then the book closes with another very triumphant scene of the first time that the dragonriders actually fight Thread in the air above Fort Hold, and that also reminds me very much of the finale of Dragonflight, when all of the Weyrs have come forward in time, and they’re finally like, all right, here we are, all of these dragonriders ready to fight Thread wherever it is.

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that I think does tie this book into the rest of the series nicely, and in a way that I did find enjoyable.

Lleu: Agreed. I don’t know; I was a little distracted in that scene, because I was listening to the audio book, and Dick Hill decided to give a bunch of characters accents for some reason.

Lleu: Yeah. And part of the scene does involve Pierre running into the room where Emily is recovering from the accident that she was in and, in Dick Hall’s reading, is like “Émilie! Émilie! Ze dragons!” And I was like, you’ve ruined it. This was supposed to be, like, the triumphant scene, and all I can think is, “Émilie! Émilie! Ze dragons!” forever, now.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, on that note, if giving two whole episodes to this book made you think, “Well, actually, maybe this one I should read” — no. Don’t. Don’t read this book. Instead, maybe check out Mary Anne Mohanraj’s The Stars Change if you are looking for a story about a community in space dealing with crisis and the ways that that can fracture or bring people closer together, and the way that it fundamentally changes a society. It’s a really cool novella, but there’s also an artistic, sort of graphic novel component, and I think it’s worth your time. Alternatively, if what seemed compelling was the portion at the beginning of this book, where we have our young protagonists exploring a new planet together and discovering fire lizards and being a little mini-slice of a mini middle grade novel, I would recommend O.T. Nelson’s The Girl Who Owned a City, which was published in 1975 and I think is the originator of the trope of “one day all of the adults die of a mysterious plague, and only those under the age of 12 or 13 are left to try and exist in the world that they have left behind.” So it does follow our protagonist, Lisa, as she tries to reorganize society at a lower technological level and ends up sort of recreating a medieval city state in a Chicago high school.

Lleu: My recommendation is Sofia Samatar’s novella “Fallow,” which is published in her short story collection Tender — which I would recommend in general; it’s very good. All of her writing is very good; she’s, in my opinion, the greatest living fantasy author. “Fallow” in particular is a science fiction story, which she’s also very good at, about a planet colonized by a community of Mennonites, who decided that, in the grand scheme of things, the short-term deviation of taking a colony ship to another planet where they could live the kind of low-technology, agrarian lifestyle that they wanted was preferable to getting slowly but surely absorbed or assimilated into the industrial society that they hated. So if you’re interested in a story about an agrarian space colony that is dysfunctional in a variety of ways, and what it does when it encounters some kind of political crisis due to an outside force that challenges the fundamental premises of the community, you might like “Fallow.”

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

[1] This is obviously a contradiction in terms, but it highlights continuities between libertarian “anarcho-capitalism” and the social structures of feudalism that are clearly at work in Pern (and, for that matter, in reality).

[3] Robert T. Tally, jr.’s “Tolkien’s Deplorable Cultus.”

[4] This is Lleu betraying his ignorance of geology: in fact they are moving to shield, a large area of exposed, tectonically stable rock; in Lleu’s defense, it is a bit confusing that “shield” (tectonically stable) and “shield volcano” (not tectonically stable) are referred to with the same word.

[5] Lleu encourages everyone to read Jillian Weise’s essay “Common Cyborg,” not least because it mentions McCaffrey directly (specifically The Ship Who Sang).