Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #11: The Renegades of Pern (1989)

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 I must have read this one, ’cause I have it in paperback, and it’s a pretty beat up paperback, but I have no memory of it.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and, as far as I know, the first time I read this was in 2013. So today we’re talking about The Renegades of Pern, which was first published in 1989 and which is our return to the “main” (quote-unquote) timeline after three books that are set in the distant past.

Tequila Mockingbird: The plot is a little tricky to tell in a linear fashion, because, yet again, she’s running multiple different threads, but the two main arcs — one follows the girl who heard dragons who we met in the eponymous short story, Aramina, who is trying to escape from Thella, the “Lady Holdless,” who is attempting to kidnap her, first to use her skill in order to aid Thella’s plans and evade dragonriders and then is just pursuing Aramina sort of senselessly, out of vindictiveness, which we will discuss. Aramina is eventually rescued by Jayge, a young man who is part of the Lilcamp traders caravan, and they end up making a life for themselves in the South Continent, instead of returning Aramina to the Weyr, because she has decided that she doesn’t actually want to attempt to Impress a dragon. Completely unrelated to this plot, honestly, for most of the book, we also get a retelling of chunks of Dragondrums and The White Dragon but instead really zooming in and focusing on that Southern Continent plotline. So we get Piemur’s perspective and we get Toric’s perspective of Piemur arriving in Southern; his joining Southern Hold or being seconded to that; the theft of the egg, by the Oldtimers, from Benden Weyr; building the Cove Hold for Robinton; and then Jaxom retrieving Sharra after Toric has forbidden them to marry. We also get a little bit of Sharra’s point of view mixed in there, and then that plot line kind of continues, and we get, following directly from the end of The White Dragon, more information about the archaeological excavation at Southern Hold[1] of what we now know used to be Landing, the original settlement from the original colonists of Pern. So it’s kind of a grab bag, and the result is, it feels like three novellas that are all happening at the same time, rather than a novel, and this would work a lot better if more than one of those novellas was good.

Lleu: Yeah. The Thella, Jayge, and Aramina plot…it could be good, if it were condensed and if Thella’s motivations made sense and if it didn’t have atrocious politics, but unfortunately none of those things are true.

Tequila Mockingbird: It could be good if it was good, but instead, it isn’t.

Lleu: I assume that she did this because at this point it had been 11 years since The White Dragon?

Lleu: So she thought that she had to summarize it a little bit, so that it would be accessible to readers who didn’t remember The White Dragon or people who saw it on the best seller list, although it also begins with a little preface being like, “For readers who are unfamiliar with these books, this book might be pretty confusing. Here’s a brief summary of the world.” But it’s shorter than the one in Moreta, for some reason, so I’m not sure how accessible it would make the book.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I would think you would need more backstory. And that is a good point — what you forget when you’re reading them all back to back to back, that this book series spanned 40-something years of publication? So that’s fair, but also this additional point of view — it didn’t add anything to the story.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which was a shame. I felt like we knew all of this information; we weren’t getting a different perspective, in a sense of a perspective that changed our understanding of what happened, except maybe to make Toric more unpleasant?

Lleu: But we already knew that he was willing to effectively kidnap his own sister and force her to get married against her will, and we already had in The White Dragon an explicit comparison from Lessa of Toric to Fax, the conqueror who dies at the very beginning of Dragonflight and whose specter haunts the rest of the series in a variety of ways. So I don’t know that we needed to see in the minutiae of everyday experiences just how diabolical all of Toric’s plans are and how ambitious he is. We already knew that.

Tequila Mockingbird: What I would have wanted from that scene would have been something to complicate that, to make him more compelling, to understand, why is he so defensive of Sharra? Because I could imagine a scenario where we come into this being like, “Ugh, Toric’s such a jerk. He won’t let her marry who she wants to marry,” and then we get a really compelling, or sensitive perspective of, “Wait, actually, there’s a reason for that,” or “He’s overreacting,” or “He’s terrified of losing his family” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — something that would make him more sympathetic. And instead, it’s just, “Ah, yeah. I read this book already.”

Lleu: The one Toric scene that I thought actually added something is when they’re redoing the theft of the queen egg from Benden Weyr —

Lleu: — because it drives home. How sharp the divide between Hold and Weyr is —

Lleu: — and ultimately how helpless the Holds are in the face of anything that dragonriders choose to do.

Lleu: Because Toric has been observing weird stuff going on at the Weyr, but was just like, “Huh! That’s kind of weird.” And then they find out that the egg has been stolen; he’s like, “Oh, shit! I know what they were doing.” But now all of the fire lizards are gone because dragons have breathed fire at them at Southern Hold, so they’re all hiding, and he’s like, “I can’t do anything right now, and I have information that needs to get to the Weyrleaders, because they need to know not only what happened, but also that I had nothing to do with it.”

Lleu: “Because if it does come down to the Weyrs fighting a battle on dragonback, I don’t want myself and my Hold and my Holders to be caught in the crossfire of that.” And I was like, “Oh, this is actually interesting.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Then we don’t engage with that at all in any meaningful way. Well, I guess we do, actually. We engage with that in the sense that at the very end, when Thella and her band of marauders have attacked Jayge and Aramina, and they’re calling for help from a dragonrider, and my instinct is, “Come on! You should help! They’re being attacked!” K’van’s like, “I’m really not supposed to get involved. I’m really not supposed to be inserting the Weyr into Hold politics in any way.” It seems a little harsh, and it seems that by standing back you are enabling this Hold on Hold violence, but I do understand why you would want to have a broad policy of “All the dragons fight is Thread.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “They don’t fight people. They don’t fight dragons. They fight Thread.” Because otherwise you’re really opening a door to horrific violence.

Lleu: The other thing that it drives home, which comes up more prominently in All the Weyrs of Pern, is the separation of powers —

Lleu: — which is something that has gotten increasingly slippery as the series has gone, but something that there’s still a lot of investment in from the main characters, so they’re trying to maintain at least the plausible semblance of this independence or autonomy of Hold, Craft, and Weyr in a time when the lines between these are becoming increasingly blurry as they start to move towards a more planetary government. So I think there’s also a certain amount of, “We have to draw the line somewhere, and the line that we’re drawing is helping with what others will see as petty intra-Hold conflicts.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I think that’s a little concealed from the reader, because we know Lessa and F’lar, for our sins, and we’ve been rooting for her, and we’ve been rooting for her to get what she wants and to be in charge, and so it sort of feels very natural to be like, “Yeah, everyone should be listening to Lessa. She should be in charge of all of this,” and to see the Benden Weyr’s coming to political ascendancy here as very natural, because we’ve spent multiple books following her as a protagonist. And I think you don’t quite notice, or it wasn’t as apparent to me, that actually, yeah, this is kind of making her queen of the entire planet in some ways, as it would be if it was an unrelated character, if it was a new character coming to this prominence.

Lleu: Yeah, in part, because, to their credit, Lessa and F’lar are at least somewhat self-effacing about it.

Lleu: They’re both convinced that they’re right, and that they know what’s best for Pern, but also are like, “We can’t —”

Lleu: “— we can’t just steamroll over everyone else; we have to at least give people a fair hearing, even if we then ultimately continue to disagree with them and proceed, as we originally planned.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I do also think it’s an interesting question how much Lessa and F’lar are aware of the elaborate propaganda machine that is supporting everything that they do and say and how much Robinton is just running that fully on his own without any input from them.

Tequila Mockingbird: Sometimes, when a guy likes a girl who has a dragon and a guy who has a dragon very much and thinks that they’re the right political leaders for a planet, he ruthlessly and shamelessly manipulates every single person on that planet into agreeing with everything they do or say. You know.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, no! What have we done? This was never our intention.

Lleu: — observed of the end of Dragonquest when Meron is like, “Isn’t it obvious? Robinton’s hopelessly in love with Lessa!” and the book treats this as if this is some major point of drama, for some reason —

Lleu: — my friend pointed out that, actually, if you look at the interpersonal relationships, it seems much more reasonable to think that Robinton is hopelessly in love with F’lar.

Tequila Mockingbird: You’re not wrong. So. Things we want to talk about include, but are not limited to: Anne, why? As always, the eternal question, maybe we should make T-shirts, because so much of this book is not necessary. So much of this book is not beneficial. What is she driving at? Why did she want to tell this story?

Lleu: And in particular, why are the plotlines that we don’t think are very good — so the Thella-Jayge-Aramina plot and the retelling of Dragondrums and The White Dragon — why are those paired with the archaeology plot that continues directly from The White Dragon, which is good?

Lleu: It’s interesting; it’s engaging. It’s a little abrupt. It does have a classic Anne McCaffrey two-year time skip. She loves those, for some reason.

Tequila Mockingbird: Just the right amount of time to skip. I can imagine a version of this book that has a much tighter focus on the archaeology plot, that continues basically from where The White Dragon left off, or retells a little bit of the end of The White Dragon and then really delves into the archaeology and gives it its narrative due. And it seems like she didn’t want to do that, or she didn’t think people would want to read that?

Lleu: I think you could even do that while also integrating some of the broader political context, because the excavations are happening in the Southern Continent, and The White Dragon ends with the borders of Toric’s Hold, Southern Hold, being formally established —

Lleu: One, because Jaxom has just kidnapped Sharra and is like, “You can’t stop me from marrying her,” and, two, because F’lar and Lessa know how big the Southern Continent is, and Toric does not.

Lleu: Which becomes a major point of contention in All the Weyrs of Pern and Dolphins of Pern. And I think you could integrate that into this, because the excavations are happening in Southern, and it’s this Northern intervention in Southern, which previously, up until very recently —

Tequila Mockingbird: Honestly, you could also put in the Thella plotline and make it better, because what’s so frustrating about the Thella plotline is, she starts out as a moderately compelling villain. She has goals: she wants to take over the world — a little cliché, sure, but fine. She wants to establish her own Hold. She’s denied this because of her gender, and I’m not not rooting for that. I’m like, “Yeah, sure go be cool bandit lady. Take your own Hold.”

Lleu: Yeah, she’s kind of Lessa that could have been, if Lessa had the opportunity to Hold instead of going to the Weyr.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, and if Lessa had been denied what she wanted instead of given a pathway to it.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think that, if R’gul had stayed Weyrleader of Benden, Lessa wouldn’t have been up for “Fuck this. I’m taking Ramoth and I’m flying away and starting my own Weyr.”

Lleu: Right, yeah. Go to Fort — near Ruatha, so that’s a nice bonus. Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, Thella starts out not bad, and, okay, she’s ruthless in pursuing her goals — she’s villainous, cool, fine. But the problem is that when she’s thwarted by Jayge and Aramina and really, frankly, more by Benden, and Asgenar’s forest troops, because Jayge truly, literally, only gives her directions. He does not do anything to her, and she just fixates sort of monomaniacally on destroying their lives and torturing them and killing them instead of accomplishing any of her goals, in a way that doesn’t make sense. So it would be much more interesting to me if Thella, first thwarted, is like, “Okay, never mind, I’m going to go to Southern. There’s all this open land.” And that then brings her accidentally —

Tequila Mockingbird: — back into contact with our main plot, or even with Aramina. That could have happened, and it would have been a more, to me, interesting narrative than just, okay, the switch has been flipped, and now Thella will viciously persecute Aramina and Jayge and allow nothing, not even common sense and logic, to get in her way. Because…why?

Lleu: Yeah. It also would have avoided the ideological pitfalls of the plot —

Lleu: — because this is published just at the tail end of the Cold War, but a classic piece of Cold War science fiction, in that the way that Thella has been recruiting people is using the language of communist revolutionaries. She’s like, “I’m the Lady Holdless. If we all pool our resources and work together, then we can overthrow this corrupt order and establish ourselves and make a good life for everyone.” And what she actually wants to do is achieve supreme power just for herself, and as soon as she’s thwarted she becomes comically evil. So she’s a caricature of actual communist revolutionaries, in the classic, “Oh, well, there’s a real political issue here, but also the person who’s mad about this political issue wants to murder babies, so now we don’t have to deal with the issue, because we’ve stopped them. So we’ve solved the problem.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It definitely reminded me a lot of Killmonger, in the “Oh, no, he’s right. Quick, make him unnecessarily and irrationally evil.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because Thella’s right in the sense — well. If Thella had genuinely wanted to overthrow the established political order, whe would be very right, and the beginning of this book is a more searing indictment of every Pernese social structure and of the self-justification within this world-building, I think both diegetically and extradiegetically, that you need this authoritarian, feudal, patriarchal order in order to protect people from Threadfall. Because what we see, over and over again, is people, being kicked out of their Holds, kicked out of their homes, denied shelter, denied support, because they are not providing those in power with enough luxury, or enough obsequious obedience. We see people genuinely getting exiled from a community because of violent or antisocial behavior, which loops right back around to Dragonsdawn and the “We didn’t actually plan for any antisocial behavior, and so, when it happens, we have no recourse for it.”

Lleu: — staking someone out outside during Threadfall as execution, which…

Tequila Mockingbird: If this is actually representative of Pernese culture, there should be a violent revolution, and all of the Lord Holders should be overthrown. But then the book doesn’t seem to really want to commit to that. Thella’s evil, but actually Larad and Asgenar are good Lord Holders.

Lleu: Right, and we’ve had several books reminding us that Larad and Asgenar in particular, but also a couple others, are good Lord holders, and so she’s locked herself into a situation where either she has to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a “good” feudal lord or there are good feudal lords and the problem is just bad feudal lords.

Tequila Mockingbird: Once you really, actually engage with this, it’s so obvious that, no, there are no good feudal lords and, actually, this whole structure is bad. It’s actually bad! It’s not a few bad apples, it’s, this structure inherently leads to evil and violence and inequality.

Tequila Mockingbird: No, because America has to be right and the USSR has to be wrong.

Lleu: Yeah, so it’s a deeply frustrating book, because the opening 25 pages are really powerful, and then the follow up is a joke. A bad joke.

Tequila Mockingbird: So there is a good book hypothetically hiding in this bad book that could have been written, except that Anne McCaffrey didn’t do that. And it really drove home to me the fact that she’s not good at writing antagonists. Mostly the antagonist of the books is Thread, and that’s good, because, when she tries to write villainous characters, they’re so irrational. I can’t think of a good and compelling reason why any of her antagonist characters have behaved the way they did, other than, “Well, they’re ontologically evil.” Kylar? Just evil. Meron? Just evil. Thella? Just evil.

Lleu: Toric is maybe the closest, but he still has some things which, like, “Oh, you’re just petty and spiteful for no reason. Okay.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Every time someone wants something, Toric’s like, “Actually, I want the opposite of that. For reasons.” Ted Tubberman, I guess, is motivated by grief?

Lleu: Well, grief and how callously he’s treated by the rest of the colony. Oh, my god!

Lleu: Ted Tubberman did nothing wrong. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, yes. I do think that the “bioengineering slightly too smart felines and then setting them loose to murder people,” maybe less than ideal.

Lleu: I think that was a mistake, but I don’t think that was a, like, “did something wrong” in the same way as some of the other characters.

Tequila Mockingbird: Who else is a narrative villain? Even — why is Dunca mean to Menolly? Because the narrative requires it like.

Lleu: ’Cause she was in love with Petiron and she’s bitter about it still, for some reason.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I guess we have a couple of people who their villainous motivation is that they’re misogynists. But it’s just…it’s so empty.

Tequila Mockingbird: The problem is that you can get away with that when they’re in the book for four pages being mean to a teenager in the middle of a more complicated novel, but when you make Thella a significant protagonist —

Tequila Mockingbird: — a significant chunk of this book is from her point of view.

Tequila Mockingbird: It becomes very obvious that her point of view is weird.

Tequila Mockingbird: She just sits around thinking about how to be evil all day.

Lleu: And reflects on her past evil deeds, like the time she beat a drudge, and that was fine, and then she beat an animal, and it died, and that was not fine. Then she got punished.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s like, okay, (a) yikes, but also (b) why are we hanging out in this character’s head? Just to show us that she’s really evil? I got it the first 40 or 50 times.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not providing anything new, and it’s also confusing or surprising, because Lessa’s not a nice person.

Tequila Mockingbird: Lessa loves to do murder. Lessa loves to throw a coup. It’s her favorite thing to do. If she is not given exactly what she wants exactly when she wants it, she is thinking about ways to harm and manipulate others in order to get what she wants. But Lessa is sympathetic and compelling. So I know you can do it! You just have to dial the switch a little bit away from the evil and a little bit towards the compelling. It’s possible.

Lleu: Yeah. She just feels uninterested in her villains, is really the thing.

Lleu: Fax is kind of the exception, but he dies 20 pages into Dragonflight, and even in Masterharper, when he’s more of a thing, he’s there less as a person and more as a specter that’s haunting the narrative, and it’s the specter of —

Lleu: — if you’ve already got feudalism, what’s to stop someone from establishing monarchy.

Lleu: So this brings us to maybe the question of perspective, and one particular question, which is, why does Thella get so much perspective time?

Lleu: I feel like it would be better if it were more Jayge, first of all, and also if any of the book, even a page, were actually from Aramina’s perspective, that might be nice.

Tequila Mockingbird: What? We want to hear Aramina’s perspective? I don’t know about that. I don’t know if we can do that.

Lleu: I mean, I can understand why you would say that, because “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” which is entirely from Aramina’s perspective, is boring. It’s not a good story.

Lleu: But given that, despite the fact that she is so absent from this book — she shows up on the page once when Thella meets her, when her family is still at the Igen Caves, once when Jayge meets her at Benden Hold but doesn’t know her name, once when Jayge rescues her, and then in the two scenes subsequently that are at their Hold in Southern — but at the halfway point there she makes one of the most dramatic demonstrations of agency in the whole series, when she says, “No, I don’t want to go to the Weyr,” which is something that we saw a little bit at the end of “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” or at least as a possibility at the end of “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” and Aramina says, “No. Take me away from here.” And Jayge is like, “Are you sure? ’Cause it seems like it would be helpful if we had help from dragons, and they want you, and it’s high status, and all these things.” And Aramina’s like, “I cannot live there. I cannot live like this. I cannot live in the Weyr. I cannot live constantly hearing a cacophony of dragon voices in my head at all times. I will go insane. You have to take me away from here. Let’s go to the Southern Continent.” And they go to the Southern Continent, and then that sets up, among other things, Dolphins of Pern eventually, but also some stuff in All the Weyrs of Pern. And that’s really interesting! And we don’t get to see Aramina’s interiority at any point during the novel.

Lleu: It’s a really interesting choice that’s, like, where did this come from?

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s such a cliché story up to that point, right? There’s this girl who has this special magic power that no one else has, and the bad guys want to get her and want to hurt her because of it, but that’s okay, because a strapping young lad has fallen in love with her, not because he knew she had the powers — he just saw her and thought she was great, and then he’s going to rescue her dramatically from the evil villain, and they’re gonna fall in love, and it’s all gonna be fine. And right at that point where you would get the very cliché finale, Aramina removes herself from the narrative. She literally fakes her own death, changes her name, and runs away forever. And that’s a bold choice! It’s the only part of this book where she passes the sexy lamp test. That’s Kelly Sue DeConnick who came up with the sexy lamp test, who is a Marvel comics writer...

Lleu: The gist is, essentially, could your female character be replaced by a sexy lamp without any change to the narrative?

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is allowed to put a single post-it note on the sexy lamp, so that she can transmit one piece of plot-relevant information. So in every other part of this story, Aramina would not pass. She is essentially a MacGuffin, a magic able-to-hear-dragons machine that the other characters are passing around, but here — uh, whoa! And it’s cool, because I really didn’t see it coming. As I said, I don’t remember ever reading this book before. I had definitely read “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” and we got to the end, and we kind of joked like, “Wow, they’re kidnapping this child. She doesn’t want to go to the Weyr,” and I fully at that point did not know or remember or anticipate that she would not become a queen dragonrider and just slot into this narrative exactly as predicted.

Lleu: But she doesn’t! She turns her back on it. She says, “I don’t want the status. I don’t want the power. I don’t want the dragons” — which is a wild thing to say in the context of Pern.

Lleu: “I want to go away from here and live by ourselves on the beach,” which, I don’t know. Fair enough, I guess, but also it’s a wild choice in the context of this series. And I just would have loved to see it from Aramina’s perspective, even if it were only that scene, even if that were the only scene in the whole book that were actually from Aramina’s perspective. It would have been nice.

Lleu: Speaking of Aramina as a magical girl with a special ability, here’s the problem. It’s not that special.

Lleu: She is the most telepathic of the multiple women who we know can hear all dragons, but there are three currently living women whose age is all within a couple years of each other; Aramina’s 10-ish years younger than Lessa. But it’s not that special! And there’s also… Explicitly, canonically, in the series, we only see women with the ability to hear and talk to all dragons. But there are a number of passing comments about N’ton, specifically, and the fact that he can communicate actively and proactively with Canth is something we’re told in Dragonflight, and they’re briefly considering, like, “Hmm, if he can do it, maybe other people can do it, and then we could send the young riders out on older dragons, if their riders are injured.”

Lleu: And they decide not to do that, but then also in Dragonquest there’s a passing comment when F’nor is talking to Canth about going to the Red Star, and N’ton is there, and N’ton is like, “What’s he saying?” Essentially, “You’re talking too fast. I can’t follow the conversation,” which implies that under normal circumstances he can, in fact, hear Canth and F’nor’s private conversations that they have, which does rather suggest to me that, actually, this ability may, or various degrees of this ability, may, in fact, be extremely widespread.

Lleu: And just not pursued or explored adequately, for perhaps etiquette, reasons, perhaps just lazy writing reasons, and also, I must say, does make me convinced that N’ton and F’nor did hook up at least once, but that’s a side thought. Anyway. It’s very funny that we’re told constantly how special and powerful Aramina’s ability is, but it’s like, how special can it really be? Brekke has the same thing. Lessa has the same thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. We are shown so much about how magical it is to Impress a dragon, how overwhelmingly wonderful, how it becomes immediately the most powerful relationship in your life, unconditional love in every possible way. And that’s great. But it’s interesting to me that when people are trying to convince Aramina to come and be a dragonrider, they’re not selling it as “this is going to be a life-changing, incredibly magical relationship of love.” They’re selling it as, “Don’t you want to be higher status? Isn’t it impressive to your parents that they’ve raised a dragonrider? Won’t that look good to people?”

Tequila Mockingbird: Where, to me at least, like that would not be the highest sell.

Lleu: And so they’re like, “Hm, if that’s not enough of a sell, I guess we can try some of the more pragmatic things.” But it’s weird.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also… It’s a little unnerving the way we don’t get an impression, I wouldn’t say, in “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” that Aramina’s relationship with her parents is negative. It seems like a fairly loving, stable family.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then she is completely down to fake her own death and never let her parents find out that she survived.

Lleu: Yeah. Despite the fact that they do bring some of Jayge’s family members with them.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right! They tell her parents that she’s alive? Question mark? Two years later?

Tequila Mockingbird: So, when Aramina proposes to Jayge that they fake their death and go to the Southern Continent, he asks, “Oh, okay. If you’re not going to the Weyr, would you want to go to Ruatha to your parents?” And —

Tequila Mockingbird: “She was shaking her head before he finished his sentence. ‘They would be appalled.’ She gave a weary smile. ‘Me hearing dragons embarrassed them enough. To think I would leave the Weyr would crush them.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “Jayge nodded, since she seemed to expect some response of him.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘I shall go to the Southern Continent. I hear that there’s lots of it no one’s ever seen.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: So that to me seems like a significant departure from what we got in the story, “The Girl Who Heard Dragons.” They didn’t seem embarrassed.

Lleu: Yeah. It certainly seemed like it made their lives more complicated, but not in a way that they were mad about.

Tequila Mockingbird: It also made their lives easier, in that it helped protect them from Threadfall while they were living Holdlessly and itinerant.

Lleu: Yeah. I don’t know. It’s all very weird, especially because her parents didn’t want her to go to the Weyr, either.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, are we supposed to believe that Aramina is lying to Jayge in this moment to try and convince him to do what she wants? Or are we supposed to just chalk this up to a failure of continuity?

Lleu: I think we kind of have to chalk it up to a failure of continuity, because there are so many of those at this point in the series, and there will only be more.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I guess, to be fair, she is artificially increasing the difficulty of the task by rewriting her own stories. She’s coming back to the same plot elements from different perspectives. She’s nested together multiple different arcs and she’s given them all dates, which is her first mistake, and so they don’t line up.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I can see that if you had just told a linear story you wouldn’t have been in this much trouble.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I do feel like, at a certain point, write it down. Have some notes.

Lleu: Well, and, in fact, she does in later books thank a continuity editor. I don’t know how much, having the continuity editor actually helped, but she does acknowledge them, anyway.

Tequila Mockingbird: The problem is, you get baked in. By the time you’re nine books deep, you’ve already made some messes, and then it’s, okay, what do we do? Do we ignore the first one or ignore the second one? To your point where one of the Oldtimers’ names changed back. Well, it was back.

Tequila Mockingbird: — T’ton, and then he becomes T’ron in Dragonquest and The White Dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then here he goes back to being T’ton. And it’s like, okay, she was trying to fix the continuity, question mark?

Tequila Mockingbird: But you only really end up drawing more attention to it, because now we’re like, “Wait, is this…? Huh? Is this the same—? Oh, okay, this is the same guy.” I think would have been better to have him have one name in Dragonflight and a different name in every other book, and just be like, “Well, Dragonflight. What can you do?”

Lleu: Yeah, there’s also — I don’t know if you noticed — Aramina does, in fact, attend a hatching and does not Impress, and the person who does Impress is Adrea, who goes on to be the Weyrwoman at Southern Weyr and her queen is first named “Beljeth” and then a couple of chapters later is referred to as “Wenreth,” and then, a couple chapters later, is referred to as “Beljeth” again.

Lleu: It’s the same book! You don’t even have the excuse of, it’s been 20 years. It’s been 50 pages.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think Larad’s wife’s name also changes, too. She’s something that starts with a — “Dulsay” in this book, and then I think she becomes something completely different in All the Weyrs of Pern —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and then goes back to being “Dulsay.” So it’s just, at a certain point, Anne, make a list. Have it in a notebook, tape it to a wall, and refer back to it.

Lleu: The thing is, she literally does have a list. It’s in the back of every book!

Lleu: If you listen to the audiobooks for some of them, they include someone reading the Dragondex, which is just a list of proper nouns for like 20 minutes, at the end of, I think, the Moreta audiobook has it. It’s very funny, and also bizarre. Bizarre editing choices.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Well, also, are we supposed to consider the audiobook name pronunciations canonical? Did they check with McCaffrey?

Lleu: Dick Hill reading the main series books refers to the character I think of as “Breh-kee” as, variously, “Breck,” “Breh-kuh,” “Breh-keh,” and “Breh-kee.”

Lleu: Just sort of on a whim, whereas Sally Darling, who reads the Harper Hall trilogy, consistently refers to her as “Breh-kee.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I just read the books, and she’s “Breck” in my head and always will be.

Lleu: Yeah. And there are definitely others. For some reason Dick Hill reads Toric’s brother, whose name is spelled H A M I A N, so like Damian but with an H, not as “HAY-mee-un,” which is how I would read it —

Lleu: So I don’t think I don’t think Anne was involved in the pronunciation decisions.

Tequila Mockingbird: I very much recuse myself from all pronunciation debates or discussions, because I have a terrible habit: I don’t actually fully read fantasy names. My brain just tags it as, like, “This is this character. It starts with this letter. We’re moving on.” And so I frequently will be trying to talk about a book that I’ve read, and it will be the first time I’ve ever actually thought about, like, “Oh, how would I pronounce that name? Huh..” And it usually results in things going very poorly.

Lleu: Mm. Yeah. The one thing I will say for Anne’s perspective choices and the structure of this book is that, on a artistic level I think the repetitions are potentially interesting. I think you could do an interesting exercise in teaching a creative writing class, for example —

Lleu: — where you read Piemur’s reunion with Menolly and Sebell in Dragondrums from Menolly’s perspective and then you read Piemur’s reunion with Menolly and Sebell as portrayed in Renegades from Piemur’s perspective.

Lleu: Or, similarly, the Piemur in Sharra meeting, and some of the other things. I think it’s an interesting aesthetic choice; I just think that in this book it was unnecessary.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think it’s cool to see the series continuity continue, to get back to this main plot, because I do think we are engaging with what you called out as a central question of this book series: what makes a myth a myth? What makes a legend a legend? And we’re engaging with, alright, this is this central mythology of their origins, and it’s cool to come back to it, having just read Dragonsdawn, where we now know so much more than the characters do. The dramatic irony has been dialed even further up, because now we know all of this information about the original settlement and Landing and who came to Pern and why they came to Pern, and so we’re returning to the main series with, I think, a very different perspective on the world-building than we might have had at the end of The White Dragon.

Lleu: Absolutely. The way this book ends is with the discovery of AIVAS, an “Artificial Intelligence Voice Address System,” which is connected with the original colonists’ computer database and also with the Yokohama, one of the colony ships. And the novel ends with AIVAS beginning to tell the history of the colony to an audience of Piemur and Piemur’s love interest, Jancis, a Smith who is introduced solely to be Piemur’s love interest, as far as I can tell —

Lleu: Clearly evoking the prefaces to the books in the main series, and also kind of implying that the story that AIVAS tells them is Dragonsdawn.

Lleu: Having just come from Dragonsdawn, it’s like, “Oh, now I know the history of what happened when humans first came to Pern!”

Lleu: And then the next book picks up with the end of that story, basically, which is cool. It does make it a little bit weird that this was published after Dragonsdawn, but I assume that’s a combination of the vagaries of publishing and also that perhaps she made a conscious choice to do it this way, so that we could come to the end not feeling like it’s a cliffhanger, but like, “Oh, now I know this story already; I know how this goes, and now the amount of information I have is the same as the amount of information the characters have, for the first time in the series to date.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I think I would understand that as an intentional choice, because I love dramatic irony, and I think the dramatic irony here is delicious.

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re all like, “Oh, what could possibly be in this ‘Admin’ building? Huh! And maybe we shouldn’t bother to excavate; it doesn’t seem like it would be likely to have survived. It was right under the lava flow,” and then Jancis is like, “No, no, I think this building was important. I think it’s the only building that was shielded from the lava flow. They wouldn’t have done that for no reason.” That’s fun, because we’re on the edge of our seats, in a way that I don’t know that we would have been if we didn’t know more context.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although AIVAS isn’t prominent in Dragonsdawn; we never meet him as a character —

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think, similarly, Jayge’s backstory makes more sense, or has a different resonance, given what we learned in Dragonsdawn, both about the quote-unquote “ethnic nomads” and their population presence but also specifically about Joel Lilienkamp, who I think is very clearly supposed to be an ancestor of Lilcamp traders.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so it’s fun to see that thread and to have that external context for this population of nomadic traders who have always been on Pern — we meet them a little bit in Moreta; we do see them in other places — and are very different in lifestyle than theHolders and Craftspeople and even the dragonriders, who are very much staying in one place.

Lleu: Yeah. I think it’s interesting — as we talked about in Dragonsdawn, in some ways it seems like Anne actually does grasp some of the prejudices that in the real world have marginalized itinerant populations in polities that are largely sedentary. Certainly we see, at the beginning of the book, the Lilcamp traders are caught out during the first Threadfall that the Oldtimers fought, because the Oldtimers did not anticipate there being so much new growth, essentially, so a bunch of them die, are injured, and they have to go back to the Hold that they have been maintaining a profitable trading relationship with — a mutually beneficial trading relationship with —

Lleu: — for Jayge’s entire life so far. I mean, he’s only ten, but longer than that. And now that thread is there, the Holder is like, well, “I can’t really afford to be generous with you,” and essentially, “Our partnership means nothing,” and it very much does feel like, oh, not only is this telling us something about how the social structure changes during a Pass, but also this is a real way that sedentary populations respond when itinerant populations arrive and need help or need medical attention or need any kind of services that would be unremarkable for someone from a sedentary community. But itinerant populations are eternally viewed as outsiders, as not quite belonging.

Lleu: …trading with them is profitable, but when they’re not profitable, they become disposable. In a way that I think is really interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: And a way that I think is completely — you’re on Jayge’s side. You’re on the side of the Lilcamp traders.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s a deeply upsetting sequence, it’s a traumatic sequence, and I think we’re supposed to understand that this is the trauma that shapes Jayge’s life.

Lleu: Yeah. And that’s an interesting contrast, I think, to the way that Travellers, for example, are represented in Dragonsdawn.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it is, yet again, one of the interesting threads that gets brought up and developed and then dropped abruptly, because after, oh, you know, 200 pages of Jayge being entirely about the trading lifestyle and, like, “No, I would never settle down in a hold. No, that’s just not who I am.”

Lleu: Yeah, explicitly saying, like, “That would be so boring. I couldn’t live like this.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Suddenly he’s whisking Aramina away to the Southern Continent, and boom! They’ve established a household, a Paradise River Hold. They’re doing fishing and agriculture. They’re very happy. They have their own little fiefdom, and of course they’re gonna stay there forever.

Tequila Mockingbird: Of course. They could have traveled around the Southern Continent!

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s nothing that means they have to stay in one place once they get shipwrecked and end up in Southern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so this, again, “natural” primacy of a monogamous, settled, heterosexual relationship, where, “Oops, that just seems to happen! The course of the narrative decides it” is yet again.

Lleu: Especially interesting because Aramina also grew up living an un-settled, if not strictly itinerant, lifestyle, right?

Lleu: She knows that it’s possible to have children and raise children without having a permanent domicile. You can do that.

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, she never did! She was born on the road. And it’s, also, especially in Southern, where Threadfall isn’t as much of an issue because of the grubs. Well, but, on the other hand, getting caught out in it might be more of an issue, because there aren’t as many cave systems, but we do know that Jayge and his family, by the second chunk of the book, have figured out, “Oh, we have a metal roof, basically, over our caravans. And we’re fine.”

Lleu: Yeah. So it’s all just a bit predictable for Anne, and also just predictable for a non-itinerant author writing about an itinerant population —

Lleu: — that, of course, even though she is sympathetic and seems in some ways to get it, she can’t quite actually follow through.

Tequila Mockingbird: And she very much doesn’t follow through on engaging with the plight of the Holdless people. She introduces the problem of a lot of people who have been made Holdless who do not want to be itinerant, who do not want to move around, but have lost the ability to Hold or to be part of a Hold: been kicked out, there isn’t room, there isn’t money, whatever.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then she really doesn’t engage with it again, except in this fascinating sequence, where the Lord Holders are talking about, like, “Oh, no! What are we gonna do? What can we possibly do to solve this problem?” And then one’s like, “Wait a second. What if we just give them Hold space and places to live in exchange for their help catching Thella?” And the other one’s like, “Brilliant! That’s what they wanted all along.” And I’m just reading this like, well, why didn’t you just give them that all along, then?

Tequila Mockingbird: Why do you need to wait until you can use them to fight Thella if you have the space and they need somewhere to live and you’re like, this will solve a problem for both of us? We could have done this ten years ago and eliminated the possibility of Thella.

Lleu: Yeah, it really builds on the central conceptual flaw of Dragonsdawn, which is the fundamental political organization of the colony.

Lleu: The colonists’ libertarianism leads inevitably to this feudalism, and this feudalism is incapable of actually addressing the problem, because it believes that the rights of the Lord Holders are inherent and unquestionable, so of course we can’t just give land to people. Like, what if they don’t use it right and they’re not tithing to support their Lord Holder the way they’re supposed to like? “I’ve got a comfortable lifestyle to uphold. If my smallholders aren’t productive enough, then I simply have no choice but to summarily evict them.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Do we ever get any resolution about Denol and his little revolution against Toric? ’Cause I’m so on his side.

Lleu: It comes way later, though. But, yeah, so, the one person who is followed up on in the preface, or the prologue, is, in fact, Denol, who is a crop-picker in South Boll who succeeds in ingratiating himself to the Lady Holder, in order to earn his family a position at least for the winter. So he’s the one person who’s successful, and it’s specifically because’s industrious.

Lleu: And then we subsequently find out that he has left and gone south and then sets up on in part of Southern Hold and then essentially attempts to declare his independence from Toric. And we’ll talk more about this in All the Weyrs of Pern and I think again in Dolphins, about how that goes for him, but I think the flaw of the prologue is that it presents most of the evictions, with the exception of Aramina’s parents, who are not, in fact, evicted, but rather run because they know that Fax wants to, presumably, implicitly, murder Dowell and take Barla into his household of women that he has sex with, and Denol, who has been living Holdless but, because he’s so industrious and because he has good ideas, good suggestions, is able to take shelter in a Hold. Everyone else is made Holdless because they are not industrious enough or, in the case of Brare, because he’s lost one of his feet in a rope accident on his fishing ship and so can’t keep up with the work, and so his captain is like, “Well, sorry. I gotta leave you behind forever now. But someone will feed you, probably.” And it’s like, well, will they?

Tequila Mockingbird: Are there no pensions? Because, for all that feudal systems are bad, the hypothetical benefit of them is that there is someone who is responsible, ultimately, for your wellbeing, and yet, no, actually. Yet another stunning piece of ableism in this world-building.

Lleu: — does every day go to Igen Caverns, where there’s a large Holdless population, with fresh food and flour and also with some Healers in order to attend to people. But this is done as —

Lleu: — an act of charity, rather than as an act of substantively addressing the fact that there’s this large Holdless population. And this is something that Laudey gets called out for later, in All the Weyrs of Pern, is, like, “Oh, now you care about the Holdless population when they’re leaving to go do work elsewhere and you can’t exploit them for cheap labor? Interesting.”

Lleu: Brare has made some kind of life for himself, but it’s also clear it’s not a robust social system or support network.

Lleu: And it doesn’t even seem like, in part, because every Hold is essentially a household —

Lleu: — you can’t even rely on family structures, the way narratives about pseudo-medieval in fantasy and science fiction so often do. Brare doesn’t sseem like he lives where he grew up anymore, so he can’t go home and expect to be supported by his family.

Lleu: And Barla and Dowell’s cousin, Lord Kale, has been murdered, so they can’t go to him… All of the other people who are evicted, it’s like —

Lleu: — “Oh, this is a household that’s been evicted all together. They have nowhere else to go.”

Lleu: So for a book that starts off with a kind of litany of, here are all of the failings of this political system, it sure doesn’t follow through on that!

Tequila Mockingbird: One last note before we end. In this book Piemur gets knocked unconscious, not one more time but multiple more times by Thella’s marauding band, and this poor guy’s brain is just porridge. He has no brain. His brain is mush.

Lleu: No wonder everyone’s like, “Hm, Piemur’s really different now and very unlikeable suddenly, for some reason.” Hm, I wonder why that could be!

Lleu: I must say, I’m listening to the Dragondrums audiobook with my partner currently, and, good god. He’s unconscious for 20 minutes! Anyway.

Lleu: If you have listened to us talk about this book and have thought, “Hm, I’d like to witness this train wreck personally.” You don’t want to do that, actually. Instead, you should read a different book.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’d like to recommend The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, by Zen Cho. It doesn’t quite hit any of these beats, but it hits a little bit of most of them. We’ve got, basically, a nun who ends up joining a group of bandits for her own reasons, and hijinks ensue. I think it is a much more compelling and sympathetic perspective of people who choose to live life on the edge, or have left behind a secondary dominant culture lifestyle, and it even throws in a little bit of cool archaeological details, and a romance.

Lleu: I would like to recommend, if you are interested in the ways that this book serves as an indictment of Pern’s social structure and then fails to follow through on the implications of that indictment, and you think, “Hm, I want something that does that, but good,” you should read Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy. The first book is Ninefox Gambit. They are distant, no-relationship-or-connection-to-our-present space opera about overthrowing an evil empire and coming to the point where you recognize that the empire is not a redeemable structure and figuring out how to undo it dramatically and with a lot of calendar shenanigans. They’re very dark, but very good. An interesting mix of military sci-fi with some math and a really cool and really troubling set of ways of interacting with consensus reality.

Lleu: I also would like to give a shoutout again to Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk’s novel, ish, book, collection of vignettes, Sanaaq, if you are interested in a story about itinerant communities actually by a member of a — at least until relatively recently — itinerant community. It’s a great read; it’s doing some really interesting formal stuff as well as being a concise sliding timescale summary of the history of Canadian colonialism in Inuit communities in the far North.

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.