Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #12: All the Weyrs of Pern (1991)

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 actually, I think, the third Pern book I read, because it was the one that my library had, so I think I read this one immediately after Dragonquest, which is wild.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and, as a child, we only ever had an abridged audiobook version of this, which I probably did listen to, but I didn’t really like it, so the first time I actually read the whole book was, I think, in 2013, as an adult.

Tequila Mockingbird: This book is All the Weyrs of Pern, which in a lot of ways is the culmination of the arc-plot that she set into motion all the way back in Dragonflight, although she did eventually decide that she wasn’t completely done; she did keep going after this one. But this is the book that takes us from the discovery of AIVAS, the high-tech artificial intelligence that the original colonizers of Pern left buried in the lava flow when they evacuated from Landing, who gives our current protagonists from the Ninth Pass the technological information that they need to eventually eradicate Thread forever, and the way that they do that is by slowly building up their technology base and getting them to the point where the dragons can take the engines from the three colony ships that have still been in orbit and detonate them against the surface of the red planet,[NOTE: I.e., the Red Star.] physically moving its orbit so that it stops swinging through the Oort cloud and bringing Thread to Pern. Instead, I guess, it’s gonna be wreaking havoc on the skies of the fifth planet, or one of the other planets in Rukbat’s solar system, but that one’s presumably uninhabited, so we don’t care. And also potentially destroying Thread even in the Oort cloud, by seeding it with a parasitical organism that they’ve developed in their laboratories. We also see some of the political and social backlash against AIVAS and these technological improvements, from various communities on Pern, which does culminate, as the book culminates, in a kidnapping attempt against former Masterharper Robinton that doesn’t initially kill him but does lead to some medical complications, and the book ends with him dying, and AIVAS deliberately turning himself off to leave the Pernese people with the information that he gave them and the memory banks and the data banks, but without him, because he feels like it’s become a crutch for them, and they need to move forward into the future on their own and making their own decisions about what technological improvements to incorporate in their society, and what to deliberately forsake. And you will notice, in that summary, that we don’t really talk about any character stuff. I didn’t tell you who the main character was. I didn’t tell you about any life events that happened. I didn’t talk about any relationship developments. And that’s because McCaffrey doesn’t give a fuck about any of that in this book.

Lleu: Yeah. This book is, I would say, possibly the weirdest-paced of the whole series.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s a competition that has some real contenders in it.

Lleu: It really does. Yeah, the whole thing is essentially a montage, like, a long, ongoing montage, punctuated by little scenes of character interaction, some of which, to be fair, are not bad and often funny, which we’ll talk about later, but a weird amount of this book is Robinton wandering through the complex at Landing and poking his head into different classrooms and being like, “Ah, yes, in this classroom they’re learning chemistry. In this classroom they’re learning about electromagnetism. Ah, isn’t that fun!”

Tequila Mockingbird: And these vignettes of AIVAS teaching various craftmasters and giving them information about, “Alright, now all the green dragonriders need to learn how to go up to the spaceship and be weightless in space,” and it’s fun — we get dragons in freefall, which is awesome. Who doesn’t love a dragon in a spaceship as a concept? This is, I think, the place where you really get the beautiful fantasy-science fiction marriage that this story could be, is really at its apogee here, but then we get a random time skip to a completely different set of people doing a completely different thing, so we never really get to meet these people or care about these people.

Lleu: Yeah, there’s so many new characters in this book — not always new, but so many recurring characters, and some new ones, and some of the recurring characters are, like, why on earth does Tanner Ligand, the person that Menolly gets a belt from when she challenges someone to a duel at a Gather in Dragonsinger — why is he back in this? He should have just been a one-off character, but she couldn’t resist the temptation to be like, “Ooh, every named character has to be someone who’s shown up before.”

Tequila Mockingbird: You could have made this book into two or three books that were truly from the point of view of someone coming to be an AIVAS student, or coming to Landing and learning from AIVAS, and having this incredible development in their Craft and their personal life, and really given them a backstory and a relationship history and interactions and emotions — and those books I think I would have loved to read. But this one sort of just drifts through. It almost feels like she’s trying to get it out of the way, or get through it, instead of lingering in it and enjoying it, and really diving deeper into it.

Lleu: Yeah. We’ll talk more about this later, also, but you know, who would have been great potential protagonists for this book?

Lleu: — who seems like he should be a major character, and he’s always there, but he’s also always just kind of there. Either of them would have been, I think, a great point of view for this, because they are involved in all of the things that the, I would say, actual main character, Jaxom, is involved in, but with more to gain from it, in that, if they succeed, then…

Lleu: In another 30 years they’ll be able to actually retire and not have to be like, “Ah, yes, now I have to preserve dragons for the next 200 years.”

Tequila Mockingbird: They kind of have a stake in the game. They’re both still in the middle, potentially, of their own Bildungsroman.

Tequila Mockingbird: And part of the problem with Jaxom as the narrator of this story is that he’s not a protagonist, because he doesn’t grow or develop at all.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. He does work; he is necessary for AIVAS’s plan. Ruth is part of the plan, and Ruth’s ability to always know when he is and therefore go between times more accurately, is crucial to the plan, but Jaxom doesn’t really care about that. Jaxom isn’t worried about that. It just sort of feels like this is a chore Jaxom’s checking off of his to-do list, instead of a nail-biter or a climactic sequence of development or of accomplishing a terrifying task.

Lleu: Yeah. The problem with Jaxom is that we got to the end of The White Dragon, and Jaxom came to the realization that, “Oh, actually, what I want to do is be exactly the person I’ve been expected to be my entire life.”

Lleu: And this book is like, “Now he’s the person he’s been expected to be for his entire life, and that’s fine.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And even though we do get a little bit of his, like, “Ugh, do they really take me seriously as a Lord Holder,” that’s not the thrust of the book. There’s no agony; there’s no problem here for him to try and solve. He’s just sitting in a work meeting rolling his eyes and doodling on a piece of paper.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it really feels like she didn’t want this book to have a protagonist, she wanted it to be an ensemble piece, but she didn’t make the choice to jump around to a bunch of point-of-views.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s just kind of Jaxom’s point of view, but an ensemble piece. Which is weird.

Lleu: — because we get all of these things — now I’m second-guessing myself. It is S’lel, right, and not S’len? S’len is the bronze rider at Benden Weyr?

Lleu: See, this is the problem. He’s always there, but he’s only ever there in the background.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would like to take this moment to officially let all of our listeners know, if they haven’t already noticed, that I’m really bad at names of fictional characters. You have perhaps picked this up by the multiple times that I’ve fucked it up.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and I think, let’s have the conversation, because F’lar — and I can’t believe I am saying these words on purpose, in this order — would have been a better protagonist for this book.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because F’lar has spent his entire life monomaniacally obsessed with destroying Thread, and he finally gets to do it, and, frankly, F’lar’s, euphoria is much more compelling through the remove of Jaxom’s point of view than Jaxom’s, like, “Ah, yes, good job. Did we destroy Thread? Hah.” I want to feel catharsis. I want to feel overwhelmed and overjoyed and relieved and bittersweet. I want complicated, big feelings about the fact that they fixed the problem that this planet and this society has been struggling with for 2,500 years —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and I just think I don’t get as much of that payoff, because Jaxom doesn’t care that much.

Lleu: It would have been interesting to see this through F’lar’s perspective in a way that it was not really that interesting to see through Jaxom’s — and, secondarily, through Robinton’s, which we’ll also talk about.

Lleu: I’m just really stuck on Mirrim and S’len, especially Miram, because she’s been in the series before, she’s had this weird arc where, when we first meet her, Menolly really likes her, and then she gets really unpleasant in The White Dragon and even in Renegades, and then in this book she is kind of back to where she started, in that she’s a little acerbic but fundamentally is fine to be around now, and people are like, “Ah, T’gellan’s so good for her!” And it’s like, when did that happen?

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, okay. I sort of suspect, though, that the reason McCaffrey wasn’t willing to make Mirrim a protagonist is that if she really did dig into T’gellan and Mirrim’s relationship she would have to engage more with green rider relationships —

Tequila Mockingbird: The fact that Mirrim is a female green writer would become —

Tequila Mockingbird: — something that she would really have to textually dig into in a way that maybe she was just not willing to do.

Lleu: Yeah, honestly, that is probably true — although the counterpoint is that five years later —

Lleu: — she does write Dragonseye, where P’tero, a blue rider in a long-term relationship with M’leng, a green rider, is one of the main POV characters.

Tequila Mockingbird: Could have gotten there a little earlier. But I do also think it’s interesting to note that Lessa in this doesn’t come back and be the protagonist.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think there is something to the fact that she could have written this book about Mirrim. She could have written this book about Jancis, right? Jancis could have been a more significant character, and instead she went with a male character, which is an interesting transition, and perhaps reflective of a different demographic reading these books, perhaps reflective of a different publishing world than when she had originally written Dragonflight.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it is interesting to me to note that this book is a boys’ book in a lot of ways. Who are our movers and shakers? It’s Jaxom; it’s Robinton; it’s Lytol and D’ram; it’s F’lar; it’s even the Lord Holders. We don’t really get a lot of female characters who get to do things. Mirrim and Sharra are kind of it. Jancis is nominally here.

Lleu: And not only that, but Lessa is very specifically cheated of the opportunity to participate in the final destruction of Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: Swapped out one for one with Jaxom, because — and this is also a weird plot decision — no one else can know Jaxom and Ruth are leading the dragonriders to time travel back and blow up the Red Star 400 years ago and 1,800 years ago, or whatever, leading to the two Long Intervals. That’s why McCaffrey needs that to happen. Within the world, F’lar just decides that he doesn’t think that it’s…safe? Question mark? For Lessa to do this dangerous thing.

Lleu: It’s implied that in some way F’lar has sort of arranged events so that Ramoth will happen to be pregnant at the time.

Tequila Mockingbird: In Dragonflight she gets to defy expectation and do the dangerous thing and be this protagonist. And here, yeah, F’lar deliberately tricks her into getting Ramoth pregnant, in a way that, to me, really put my hackles up in terms of pregnancy manipulation as a tool of relationship violence but also felt very much in keeping with Jaxom just lying to Sharra about the multiple times that he is doing these dangerous things.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that never really getting engaged with — I thought it was gonna be. There’s this whole scene where he’s like, “Oh, shit on to me; she’s figured it out. Oh, no! The tension!” And then…nope!

Lleu: There’s no follow up. It’s so weird, ’cause she clearly, on some level, was like, “Hm! Something’s a little off here” — McCaffrey, I mean.

Tequila Mockingbird: To me it feels like, because that’s not what she wanted to do with this book.

Tequila Mockingbird: This book is not about Jaxom and F’lar as human beings with relationships. This book is about Jaxom and F’lar as little Lego people doing the plan.

Tequila Mockingbird: This book is about destroying Thread. Is AIVAS the main character of this book?

Lleu: That’s a great question. I mean, is AIVAS a character? Is AIVAS a plot device? I would say AIVAS is definitely a character.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and there’s a certain degree to which the characters are also thinking about, “Is AIVAS a person? Should I be using it or he pronouns, does he have a sense of humor, does he understand what we’re saying when we say this is, are we befuddling him? Haha,” and interacting with him as a personality especially over the course of the story.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we can sort of infer AIVAS’s motivations or perspectives from what we do see, which is the fact that he also seems to really want to destroy Thread and feel like maybe he let the original colonists down by being unable to help them destroy Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so he, even beyond the plan to move the Red Star so that Thread doesn’t come into the orbit of Pern, wants to destroy Thread the species. The fact that when that’s done he feels like, “Okay. I’m done. I don’t need to continue. I don’t want to continue to exist,” and whether that is for the sake of Pern or for his own sake does get questioned. They say, “You know, it was probably pretty exhausting and lonely being alone in the dark for 2,500 years —”

Lleu: And, see, here’s the thing. I think that could have been really compelling if we’d seen AIVAS even once in Dragonsdawn.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, Lleu, that’s really picky of you, asking for emotional continuity across multiple books in this series.

Tequila Mockingbird: But, yeah, ’cause we do technically get a reference to the fact that —

Tequila Mockingbird: — they can’t move the locator beacon, and in the evacuation they’re like, “Oh, we should evacuate that.” And they’re like, “Oh, just can’t be done. Rats.” But, yeah, we could have met AIVAS. Why couldn’t we have? It would have been easy. Even if AIVAS isn’t a significant character, literally just talking to him once.

Lleu: Jaxom’s perspective and other characters comment to the effect of, like, “Wow, AIVAS knew our ancestors! AIVAS was friends with Paul Benden!” It’s like, well..was he? We don’t know.

Tequila Mockingbird: Did Paul Benden consider AIVAS a friend or consider AIVAS a light switch?

Lleu: Yeah. I think if it were clearer that AIVAS had been, in fact, friends with all of these characters, then that would have been better. For example, the one of the things that happens in this book is that they retrieve Sallah Telgar’s cold-mummified corpse from the bridge of the Yokohama.

Lleu: And, to be fair, I actually think that scene is quite well done. It’s very intense, as it should be —

Lleu: — and there’s a a funeral that’s movingly described at Telgar Hold. But at the very beginning of the novel, when Larad introduces himself as the Lord Holder of Telgar, AIVAS says something like, “It’s good to know the Telgar name is remembered.” And, of course, we also get these refrains of, like, “Ah, she gave her life to save the colony!” She did not do that. That didn’t happen. But, anyway: does AIVAS know Sallah Telgar?

Tequila Mockingbird: Are they retrieving her body because AIVAS cares about Sallah Telgar as a person and wants to remember and honor her or because they needed a spacesuit, and he wasn’t sure if the Pernese people could make one?

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t know, and the book doesn’t even really engage with that question.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because if you’re uncertain, that would be interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although it is funny that when they’re initially listing off, like, “Hi, I’m so-and-so,” and he gets to Lord Holder of Lemos Hold, AIVAS is like, “Lemos. Mm.” A little judgey.

Lleu: Yeah. That’s one of the moments that I think is quite funny, because you can tell that it’s, like, through gritted teeth, “Congratulations…” when Sigomal shows up.

Lleu: “‘Lord Sigomal,’ Aivas replied, sounding genuinely apologetic, ‘no input has been received on such specific details.’”

Lleu: “‘A list of the names of those settlers who removed to Fort Hold is being prepared and will be made available to anyone who requests a copy. Your own Hold records probably detail who established Bitra. However, you may be pleased to know that your province was named for one of the shuttle pilots, Avril Bitra.’

Lleu: “Menolly wondered at the odd clipped delivery of that information. Aivas was an incredibly flexible voice, capable of amazing dynamics and nuances.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Lemos? Indeed. But before the listeners could react to the mild surprise in Aivas’s tone, it continued. ‘It is good to know that the name Telgar survived.’”

Lleu: In a way that, again, works in some ways, because we’ve read Dragonsdawn, and so we know —

Lleu: — what the deal is with these places and the people they’re named for.

Lleu: But also, if you think about it for a few seconds it becomes, “Well, wait a minute. Why does AIVAS —”

Lleu: Or Sallah Telgar. At least I can imagine that Bart Lemos and Avril Bitra might have spoken to AIVAS before, but I don’t know that Sallah necessarily would have.

Lleu: It’s just weird. It all ties into something else that I wanted to note, which is the narrative convenience of everything about this book.

Lleu: In a way that — obviously it’s a work of fiction. It’s always going to be artificial. But it feels a lot more obvious here than it has in other books. I’m thinking, in particular, about the development of new Crafts. As they are rediscovering the sciences under AIVAS’s tutelage, the three things that emerge as things that they need urgently to be able to do in order to progress are: have working computers, have a printing press, and have plastic creation capability. And, lo and behold! There are three people who have been studying with the school, each of whom coincidentally has developed a personal interest in these.

Lleu: Toric’s brother Hamian is like, “Ooh, plastics. That’s interesting.” Tagetarl’s all about printing presses. And Benelek, my beloved, is all about computers. And it’s like, Oh, isn’t that handy.

Tequila Mockingbird: And into your point of having a random leatherworker who was mentioned once in Dragonsinger come back, it feels like she succumbed a little too much to the temptation to make everything tidy in this book.

Tequila Mockingbird: And in a way that sometimes fucks up her own continuity, because — I finished Renegades, and then I started this book, and I immediately texted you being like, “Wow, Jancis was promoted to Mastermith in between the end of Renegades and the beginning of All the Weyrs of Pern.”

Lleu: Yeah, which is like a couple hours, during which they’re listening to AIVAS.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because she’s a Journeywoman in Renegades, and then, when she gets introduced to AIVAS on, like, page 8 of this book, she’s introduced as Mastermith Jancis. So my only conclusion is that the discovery of AIVAS was so impressive that as soon as AIVAS started to talk they’re like, “Holy shit, Jancis, you’re a Mastermith now. This was the equivalent of whatever masterwork or experience that you need to earn to be promoted to Mastermith in the course of your regular duty.”

Lleu: Yeah, which is not unreasonable, I would say, but also…it’s just an error. She did not mean to do that.

Lleu: And there’s other things, like Larad’s wife’s name changes in this.

Tequila Mockingbird: Ranrel also gets promoted to Masterfisher in between the beginning and the end of a scene.

Lleu: N’ton’s dragon is referred to as Monarth, who we know is T’gellan’s dragon, rather than Lioth, N’ton’s actual dragon, but there are also continuity errors even with things within this specific book, like Ranrel getting promoted to master between the time Jaxom and Company see him at the beginning of the day and the time the confirmation hearing starts an hour later.

Tequila Mockingbird: Look, they weren’t sure whether or not he was going to become a Lord Holder, so they gave him mastery in the Fishercraft Hall as a consolation prize.

Lleu: Apparently, or they thought it would help him get help his case, maybe.

Lleu: Meanwhile, literally on page 8, as everyone’s being introduced to AIVAS, we’re told:

Tequila Mockingbird: Another continuity issue is, she wants us to be keeping track of the voting —

Tequila Mockingbird: — at the Lord Holders’ council. She wants us to be worried about whether or not there are enough votes, but none of it is internally consistent, and none of it makes sense, because first she says that there are one vote for each Lord, and also Lytol gets a vote as the arbiter. So that would give us 16 votes. But then she’s like “out of 17,” and I’m like, who is the ghost voter? And then they go around and they count 15 votes. And it’s like, “Okay. So Lytol doesn’t get a vote, and then when it’s seven to eight, Jaxom thinks, “Oh, no, that was too close.” But we’re also told that you need a majority of 12 for the vote to count. So how is seven to eight close?

Tequila Mockingbird: Make it make sense, McCaffrey. And it really undermines what could otherwise be a tense scene, because I would love to be actively tracking the votes and thinking about the politics of, how do we get a vote from him and how do we convince him? But instead, I’m sitting there going like, “Wait, how many people are voting again? What?”

Lleu: Right — why give us the numbers at all if you are not tracking the votes either? And clearly not expecting us to do so, because otherwise you would have tracked the votes and realized, “Wait a minute. These don’t add up.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I think this book also leads to some interesting worldbuilding questions, and the question of, again, whether these are continuity errors or just opportunities to develop further elements of the world, that that she wanted to develop and hadn’t had a chance to do previously. We get some very interesting discussion on — ’cause we previously wondered whether or not Pern has fiction. We haven’t really heard about it. Any time we’re referencing ballads they seem to be historical ballads. But in this one we are informed that it turns out that some of their ballads are stories from Earth, from the original colonists. But it’s not clear whether that means historical narratives that they just thought were fictional because they had no context for who these people would have been, or why they would have been doing things —

Tequila Mockingbird: — or whether that means that some forms of Earth fiction survived to become Pernese ballads. Are are they singing the “Ballad of Star Wars” or is this the “Ballad of the Qing Dynasty”?

Lleu: The other thing about this is, even if we now know that they have fictional narrative poetry, they still don’t seem to have any tradition of oral storytelling that’s not historical.

Tequila Mockingbird: There seems to be this weird monopoly on telling stories or singing or making recreational narrative art, and that’s just never been the way that humanity has worked as a species, ever.

Lleu: There is no, as far as I can think of, unambiguous indication of narrative storytelling at any point during the book. We get Menolly telling a factual stories about her own life and telling people about recent events in a way that is artful. She has had rhetorical instruction from Petiron and also sort of her natural talent, and then also, presumably, at the Hall, but there’s no indication that anyone is sitting down and being like, “Alright, I’m gonna tell you a ghost story.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And that’s weird, ’cause people love that stuff, and to me seems to also maybe fit with the insistence that, “Oh, there’s no superstition on Pern.” And it’s like, but that’s just not the way human brains work.

Lleu: Yeah. There are some things that we’ve had questions about on that front.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is talking about Sallah Telgar’s spacesuit that they’ve retrieved from the Yokohama:

Tequila Mockingbird: “Aivas remarked to Lytol that since someone would be expected to wear that suit, it was fortunate indeed that superstition was not a facet of Pernese culture. Lytol disagreed. He and Aivas immediately became involved in a discussion of primitive religions and arcane beliefs, so that Robinton was just as glad that he was free to leave for Telgar Weyr with F’lar. The Harper wondered fleetingly if he would have done better to have stayed to listen to what was certain to be a fascinating debate; but he was deriving too much satisfaction in being the bearer of such remarkable tidings.

Lleu: Yeah, so there are two things about this. One is, it’s not clear whether this means that Lytol is disagreeing with AIVAS and arguing, “Actually, yes, there are superstitions on Pern,” or whether Lytol is disagreeing with AIVAS and saying, “Actually, it’s bad that we don’t have superstitions and religion on Pern.”

Lleu: And we never find out the answer to this, because — and this is the other thing that bugs me about this — Lytol appears to be the only person who’s interested in history. In the whole world. Up to and including the history of Pern itself. We’re explicitly told that all of the Hold records have been scanned and AIVAS has been able to restore much of them, so that they are legible in ways that they were not previously. But even when they develop a printing press, they’re like, “Yeah, this is gonna be for instructional manuals and medical textbooks.” It’s like, “Oh, you’re not gonna print copies of the Hold records so people can read them and learn about things that happened in the past?”

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also just weird that the voice piece for being confused and uninterested is frequently Robinton. You’re a Harper, and you’re confused by why people are interested in stories and history?

Tequila Mockingbird: Your whole job is telling people stories and history. What!?

Lleu: If it were coming from F’lar, or even Jaxom, sure. That makes perfect sense. They wouldn’t care. But Robinton doesn’t care? Hello?

Tequila Mockingbird: And it really kind of ruins the ending, which is otherwise, I found, very emotionally resonant.

Lleu: I was gonna I was gonna relate this also to the fact that when Menolly shows up, the first thing that she does is ask for an example of music, and the example that AIVAS plays her is a video recording of the first colonists in Dragonsdan, the first night they spent on the planet, gathered around a fire, singing fucking “Home on the Range,” and Menolly’s like, “Oh, I know this tune!” I hate it so much! Why? Why is that? And then also like just the fact that she can’t get away from the fact that these colonists were cowboy cosplayers, with all of the ideological baggage that that implies.

Tequila Mockingbird: Ugh. Other moments of authorial ugliness poking through is, we get more eugenics.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because when Oldive is talking to AIVAS about the medical knowledge that was lost —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and mourning the fact that they could have saved so many more lives, or that they’ve had these terrible plagues and they had lost the ability to help, what AIVAS says about that is:

Tequila Mockingbird: “The strong survived, and your population was renewed.”

Lleu: It’s paired with, again, the way that “drudges,” quote-unquote, the laboring underclass —

Lleu: — of Pernese society are treated, and the way that it’s implied at multiple points in the series that drudges are all people with some kind of intellectual or developmental disability, in this case, in that when Robinton is kidnapped, by some of the reactionary forces, from a Gather, the vehicle for this is that a kitchen drudge has been tricked —

Lleu: — manipulated into giving him some drugged food, and the narration is very explicitly like, “She was, you know, kind of a simple woman, but good at turning the spit in the kitchen.” And it’s like — you —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And so she’s found not legally culpable for her actions.

Lleu: Not only not legally culpable for her actions, but also Sharra’s like, “Hm, I bet we can find her a full-time job in the kitchen.” It’s like, wow, this is really the best that you can imagine for this, is that the feudal lady will, out of the goodness of her heart, be like, “Ah, yes, this poor woman.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “You can do this manual labor for me.” Yeah. That whole scene with the — and I’m gonna say quote-unquote — “trial” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — for the people who kidnap Robinton is yet again an example of the fact that if you don’t have any kind of structure for what you do when someone behaves in a way that is counter to the norms of your society, that doesn’t stop people from behaving that way; it just means that your response is going to be vindictive and cruel and irrational. And that’s exactly what happens, because they’re like, “Well, obviously no one can speak on the behalf of the defendants, the people who committed this crime, because no one is unbiased. Everyone hates them. So I guess they’ll just have to speak on their own behalf.” And that’s such a misunderstanding of the way that justice and advocacy is supposed to work, even in a society that doesn’t have a formal concept of those things — which it kind of seems like they do; Harpers are supposed to do that — it speaks to McCaffrey not understanding how that works.

Lleu: In point of fact, it seems like there’s an obvious person who could speak neutrally on their behalf, which would be like Lord Corman, who doesn’t like AIVAS, but also isn’t gonna try and kidnap someone to get them to destroy it.

Lleu: There are neutral parties, but it seems like their search begins and ends, essentially, with Harpers, and because Robinton was the person who was the victim of this crime, they’re like, “Well, obviously, no Harper can be unbiased about this.” It’s like. Okay. Did you talk to anyone else, though?

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s frustrating, and it’s silly, and again we are left with, “Well, I guess we’re just gonna exile people. We’re just gonna dump all of these people alone on a tiny island, and out of the great magnanimity of our hearts their families can come, too, if they want.”

Lleu: Yeah, that’s the clemency that’s offered to the mercenaries who were hired to do this and have no ideological commitment to things, is, “Yeah. Your families can come, too.” Great! I’m sure they’re gonna be thrilled to do that.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is reminding me of a discussion that we had in Dragonsong about the way in which Pern doesn’t feel like a monoculture, in that there are different groups and different perspectives within society, and that that is a world-building strength that McCaffrey brings.

Tequila Mockingbird: But she seems to have walked that back in some ways and committed in some places to, “Well, everybody loves Robinton!” Everybody? Everybody on the planet? All of them? All five million of them?

Lleu: Yeah. There’s a lot of absurdity about the way Robinton is handled, in general and in this book, specifically. He’s “famously neutral.” He’s literally one of the most partisan people on the planet — even more so, I would say, than the people on whose behalf he is partisan.

Lleu: Robinton is more aggressively pro-Benden Weyr than F’lar is. And then also, most infuriatingly, in this book, we’re told — as everyone’s like, “Oh, why would anyone want to hurt Robinton?” — verbatim quote: “He’s never harmed anyone in his life.” He literally tortured Meron!

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And yet again, similarly, in terms of thinking about crime and punishment and justice, they torture some of the mercenaries.

Tequila Mockingbird: N’ton dangles someone off of a dragon by their arm, and then, “Wow! He’s more willing to confess.” That’s actually bad. That’s actually not good!

Lleu: Yeah. We also gotta talk about feudalism and the land tenure, because, again, this is one of the parts where this series is kind of bonkers in that we’ve had Dragonsdawn, and so we’ve seen how the Charter worked and how the original land grants worked, and now we’re told that 2,500 years later, “Wow! You know, it’s so rare that this happens, historically, but actually, we still run our government the same way the colonists did.” Which is like, oof, that’s not a good way to run a government.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the fact that your government hasn’t evolved or developed in 2,500 years is not actually a brag. That’s not good. This is Lytol actually just talking about the fact that “some of our epic sagas he’s identified as paraphrases of Terran originals,” which I think, maybe, does suggest that it is fiction works that have been adapted for “sagas.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘I don’t think any of us realized that our present political structure was handed down from the very Charter our ancestors brought with them. That is historically very unusual, Aivas told me.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Why should it be?’ F’lar asked, mildly surprised. ‘It allows Weyr, Hold, and Hall to function without interference.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Ah, but interference was a major factor in Terran politics,’ Lytol replied. ‘Spurred by territorial imperatives and, all too often, sheer greed.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Adroitly interrupting another one[3] of Lytol’s historical perorations, Lessa rose, nodding to Robinton and the other” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and then it moves on. But it’s both just a weird world-building note, as you say, that the government hasn’t changed, but also that seems to imply, to me, that they think that there is no interference, territorial imperatives, or greed at work in Pernese politics.

Lleu: Which is so funny, because, first of all, Lytol lived under Fax, for a long time.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: Buddy.

Tequila Mockingbird: The reason he was put in charge of Ruatha was because Fax murdered the entire ruling family out of greed for owning that territory.

Lleu: And, second of all, Toric is there.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah!

Lleu: That was a pretty significant thing that happened!

Tequila Mockingbird: And literally we get the inside view of a Lord Holders conclave in this book — although it’s called a council, yet another “is this a continuity error or is this a world-building thing and a conclave is different from a council in some way?” — and this whole conclave is about whether Ranrel will get to inherit, and the reasons that people are siding with Ranrel or with Blesserel are explicitly not about them but about, like, other political alliances and interference!

Lleu: And greed!

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s about, are you pro- or anti-AIVAS and Weyrs, and that has nothing to do with the Lord Holders and who inherits a new Hold.

Lleu: And, also, the other thing that happens in that meeting is that the way that they get Toric to vote for Ranrel is by telling him that, actually, because he was granted, under the Charter, the right to hold all the land between Ierne Island and I forget where in the east, the people on Ierne Island who have rebelled and are attempting to set themselves up as an independent holding legally cannot do so, and no matter what happens, regardless of whether Toric is actually involved in anything that’s going on there or not, any profit that they make is legally Toric’s by right, which is so stupid, and also, if this is how the charter works, no wonder you’ve ended up with this horrible fucked-up feudalism.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and also, the specific phrasing that Jaxom uses is:

Tequila Mockingbird: “That sort of irrevocable grant is mentioned in the settlers’ Charter. And, remarkably enough, Pern still operates, and enforces, the rules and restrictions of that Charter, even if half the world doesn’t know it. So, once given, a grant can’t be rescinded. It can’t even be ceded out of the Bloodline of the original grantee.”

Tequila Mockingbird: One: Fax happened. You’re his son, do we not…? Okay, great. Two: what do you mean “even though half the world doesn’t know it”? Those are the legal rules that property ownership abides by. If half of your population does not know how property ownership works, you don’t have a functional economy.

Lleu: I don’t think that’s what he means by that; I think what he means by that is, the half of the world doesn’t know —

Tequila Mockingbird: That it’s because it’s the Charter?

Lleu: — that there is, in fact, this Charter system that guarantees these legal rights, and people think it’s just customary law.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. But why does Toric not know that? If that’s how property rights work, Toric, who’s obsessed with property rights, should know how property rights work.

Lleu: Yeah, I think it might just be that the details are unclear, because there’s a tension, right, throughout the series, between “Holds are an irrevocable grant owned by a single Bloodline that can be subdivided among members of the bloodline, but that’s it,” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the contention that what earns you holding rights within a larger feudal Hold is your ability to “prove” the land. And so I think what’s going on there is that Toric is concerned that Denol and company having worked the land de facto independently for the last —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: — several years —

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: — is going to outweigh the fact that the land was legally granted to Toric.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is also a fascinating little subversion, I guess? Inversion? Of the broader obsession with the American frontier, because, actually, that was very much, I believe, the justification given for removing land from the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, that the American Government said, “Well, if you’re farming the land, you have a better right to it, because you are improving the land.”

Lleu: Mhm.

Tequila Mockingbird: So this is just an interesting, “No, actually, legal treaties, and once you made a legal land grant, it’s irrevocable forever.” Oh. Huh. Cool...

Lleu: Yeah. It’s irrevocable as long as it’s convenient for everyone for it to be irrevocable, and in this case it’s convenient.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: Whereas I can certainly imagine a situation in which they hadn’t needed Toric’s vote and someone had been like, “Actually, that Denol guy’s an independent thinker. We like him. We’ll back him over Toric.” I can imagine —

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: — one where there is an Ierne Island Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, frankly, what I want from this is for Denol and his guys to just get a boat and fucking sail somewhere else on the Southern Continent and do exactly the same thing, and then you will be granted that Hold, in the same way that Jayge and Aramina were. Just go somewhere that Toric isn’t officially already holding, guys. I’m rooting for you.

Lleu: But here’s the thing. They’re ambiguously Toric’s property — Lord Groghe’s Holders are referred to as his “chattel,” so…

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.

Lleu: And Jaxom’s perspective explicitly tells us he’s got rights to everything in Ruatha, so…ehh…

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, but I think the fact that people are leaving Northern areas to go to Southern implies that you can sort of vote with your feet.

Lleu: To some extent, although it’s also kind of implied that…

Tequila Mockingbird: These Northern Holders are consenting. Yeah.

Lleu: At the very least, it’s better if you have permission to do it, right. Like, Lytol’s like, “Yeah, I told Dorse he could go south.” And I think the part of the implication is, “And I gave him a letter of reference,” the way Jayge gets —

Tequila Mockingbird: Right.

Lleu: — in Renegades, but it also does seem like…oh, so could you have told him he can’t go south, then?

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm.

Lleu: And obviously Dorse could have just run away, but he would have been running away.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: So even if people theoretically can leave regardless of what their Lord says, if your future employment and Holding prospects are influenced by whether or not you have your Lord’s permission, that presents a substantial obstacle.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, that becomes a lot less realistic.

Lleu: Speaking of the conclave —

Tequila Mockingbird: Or the council.

Lleu: — or the council and Lords and permission, let’s talk about the Abominators.

Tequila Mockingbird: Let’s, indeed, talk about the Abominators, both in a good way — I think they are the most successful villains, other than Thread, that McCaffrey comes up with across the series, because they actually have legitimate reasons for goals that are directly counter to the goals of our protagonists, and so we understand why they are trying to work against the goals of the book, unlike other villainous characters who seem to have just woken up one day and decided to be evil for fun.

Lleu: I agree, but I also disagree. So, I agree in general that that is how I feel about them. My disagreement is that I’m not entirely sure that McCaffrey intended us to read the goals that I, at least, ascribed to them into the book. It kind of seems like from the book’s perspective the Abominators did just wake up one day and decide to be kind of evil. But if you think about it in the broader context of the series’s world-building, it’s very clear that given the structure of Pern, the reason — we’re told explicitly — that this particular version of feudalism developed is because there is a need for shelter during Thread. So people whose grants are shelters, places that can hold many people and keep people safe from Thread and also be productive and support a population “naturally,” quote-unquote, came to occupy this position of feudal lordship. And so, if your goal is to eliminate Thread, functionally, what you are doing is eliminating the basis of this feudal structure.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: There’s no longer any reason for people to need to be dependent on Sigomal of Bitra for protection if they can just go live anywhere and build out of anything without having to worry about Thread burning through their roof and eating them alive.

Lleu: So there’s a very obvious immediate material benefit to Sigomal for not eliminating Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: Whereas eliminating Thread is a problem.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: Both potentially in the short term — although, in fact, not actually, because what they’ve done is made it so there will never be another Pass of the Red Star, but not so that Thread will not continue to fall for another 30 years

Tequila Mockingbird: Maybe 20 years at this point.

Lleu: But also, in the long term, in terms of securing the basis of the system that he benefits from, it makes perfect sense. But I don’t know if McCaffrey was thinking about that specifically.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, it is also kind of ironic, because the other side of that is, she’s in a lot of ways drawing from the Luddites and the social movement that was smashing looms and destroying technological innovations in Earth history, but what has gotten remembered in a lot of ways, like, “Oh, they hated technology.” Well, no, that was actually a workers’ rights movement. That was poor people and the working classes, seeing that their labor was being undervalued, and that these machines were being used to deprive them of the value of their work and acting against it, like the Chartist riots. This was not an abstract “we just don’t like machines,” but that has in a lot of ways faded from historical memory.

Lleu: Yeah, and the result is that you get Sigomal and Begamon and Norist, despite the fact that there is an obvious material reason for at least Sigomal and Begamon, the two Lord Holder leaders of this movement, to oppose the plan to end Thread and these new technological developments that are creating social changes, it does seem like their motivation is just “Technology bad. Because.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And Norist — I think you could build out a reason for a man who is a master of his Craft to fear the idea that he has to start over, or that his Craft has so much more that he is not able, maybe, at this age, to become a master of, or something. But you’re right. She doesn’t actually do that. He just hates AIVAS and thinks he’s evil. So a mixed bag, but generally, I do think, better villains.

Lleu: Yeah, no, I definitely think these are her most successful villains. The one last world-building thing that I did want to flag — and it’s related to the question of narrative convenience, and also montage and pacing — is, one of the things that happens in this book is that Jaxom goes to visit Jayge and Aramina at Paradise River Hold, and when he shows up, they’re like, “Oh, are you here to hear Readis’s story about what happened to him and Alemi?” And Jaxom’s like, “...Yes, I’m definitely here to hear Readis’s story about what happened to him at Alemi…” And the story is that they were rescued by “shipfish,” quote-unquote — dolphins — and Readis and Alemi both claim they heard the shipfish-dolphins talking to them. And Jaxom’s like, “Hm. I’d better go talk to AIVAS about this. Maybe I can get Jayge an invitation to come to Landing and talk to AIVAS about this,” and Jayge does, in fact, go to Landing and talk to AIVAS about this. So, first of all, there’s no subsequent follow up on this. And fortunately she wrote a whole book about it a couple years later, Dolphins of Pern, which I love, so we’ll talk about that in a bit. But also it’s just kind of there, and then it’s gone. And it’s like, why? Why was this here? This could have just not been in the book. But also, the specific thing that bugs me about this scene, is that when Readis is starting the story, he’s giving some context for why he and Alemi went out fishing, and the reason they went out fishing is, “It was Swacky’s nameday,” and they need to catch fish to have for the feast to celebrate.

Tequila Mockingbird: I guess we have those now.

Lleu: What does that mean? First of all, I think McCaffrey must not have known what a name day was, because presumably Pern does not have a calendar of saints that they’re celebrating, because most people —

Tequila Mockingbird: Uh, hey, canonically you’ve just told us that Pern does have a calendar of saints.

Lleu: Well, I guess! And one of them is Saint Swacky. But then also, okay, if that’s not what it is, does she just mean “birthday”?

Tequila Mockingbird: But she had to make it sound fun and different.

Lleu: But she had to make it sound weird?

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s the “runner-beast” of birthdays.

Lleu: Or is it the anniversary of the day that you were named? Because that implies a kind of calendar awareness that we don’t really see, either. What is this?

Tequila Mockingbird: We just don’t know.

Lleu: We just don’t know!

Tequila Mockingbird: I think my preference is one of these two. One, Pern does have a calendar of states, it just hasn’t been brought up yet. Don’t worry about it. And two, Readis just invented that day and that holiday out of whole cloth at age four and now they celebrate it at Paradise River Hold, ’cause they thought it was cute.

Lleu: I’m into that. I feel like it would maybe have been commented on if that were the case, but I do like it in principle.

Tequila Mockingbird: Jaxom is already in “Yes, and” mode.

Lleu: That’s true; he literally is. That scene is funny, also, just in its own right. The story is amusingly presented, and one of the things that I said we would talk about is the humor in this book. A lot of this book is actually funny.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, indeed!

Lleu: My personal favorite moment is when, the first night, AIVAS sends people off on errands and people bring back a bunch of computer components, and Piemur, Jancis, Benelek, and then ultimately Jaxom are assembling computers from components and then learning how to use them, and they’ve been at this for like 12 hours straight, and Lessa arrives, and I think it’s like — is it not like early in the morning, Benden time? And she’s like, “You’re still at this?”

Lleu: “‘Aivas!’ Lessa raised her voice as she turned her head to the right. ‘Can you turn these things off? Your students are too diligent.’”

Lleu: Which I love. I thought that was great.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s fun, too, because even within the world of the book they are, diegetically, constantly asking themselves whether or not AIVAS has a sense of humor, or is AIVAS actively fucking with us or is that a coincidence. And I think, to me, yes, he has a sense of humor. He’s fucking with them. He’s being ironic.

Lleu: Oh, absolutely!

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s fun, because especially Piemur’s constantly like, “Wait, was that a joke? Do you —? What? Huh?” So I think we’re thinking textually about humor and personality in a way that maybe gives it a reason to exist in the story.

Lleu: Yeah, humor’s, I would say, one of the themes of the book, as part of “what makes a person a person?”

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: This book is also in some ways still thinking about, are dragons people, and what does that mean?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, it’s fun, because you get the dragons really enjoying seeing Pern from space, and the fact that all of the dragons are obsessed with that and going up to the Yokohama and looking at it, and the fire lizards, and that’s fun, because that’s appreciating art.

Lleu: Yeah!

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is a very sophisticated — especially for the fire lizards. Do they know that that’s their planet? Do they just think it’s pretty? What does that mean, that the fire lizards love to look at Pern from space?

Lleu: Yeah! First of all, this means, if we had any indication that the Printercraft Hall was ever gonna print anything other than instructional manuals, we’re one step closer to the future I dream of where we get the first novel written by a dragon. But also, more specifically, one of the questions that the book does come back to a couple of times — not in any detail, but it’s a recurring thing — is, what are dragons getting out of all of this? And the answer is, the dragons are also learning things while their humans are learning things.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: Ruth obviously learns a lot. Ruth is, of course, smarter than any other dragon, and all of that, and so is internalizing more things through Jaxom, but, like, even F’lessan’s dragon, Golanth, has learned things about aerodynamics and the mechanics of flight, and so F’lessan is like, “How do you do that?” And Golanth is like, “Oh, well, blah blah blah blah, air currents,” and F’lessan’s like, “You’ve been paying more attention than I have!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is very F’lessan, honestly.

Lleu: But also, yeah! Dragons are people. They can learn stuff. Dragons could go to school. A dragon could be a philosopher, if Pern had a conception of philosophers.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think some of that is part of laying the groundwork for the question of, well, what are they gonna do when Thread isn’t a thing anymore?

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: What are dragonriders going to do, but also what are dragons going to do? Because they were bred for the purpose. Dragons literally exist to fight Thread. So now that Thread’s not a thing anymore, what purpose will dragons have, internally and also externally?

Lleu: Yeah, which is, you know, a question that dragons and dragonriders are preoccupied with at this point, and also something that she continued to think about. She wrote two more mainline books.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: Dolphins of Pern only indirectly gets at this problem, and then The Skies of Pern is entirely about this question.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think it’s a question worth asking.

Lleu: Yeah, so definitely something that we will come back to in the future. The other big thing before we talk about the very end of the book and conclude, because this episode has gotten quite long, is relationships.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is fascinating to me how much this book series has evolved and changed. And, to be fair, it’s been 20-something years at this point, so it should.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: But these books started out as, in a lot of ways, a romance series, and in this, not only do we not really get any sex scenes —we get some sort of fade to black; we know that Jaxom and Sharra are having sex off the page — but the romantic relationships between significant characters are so non-existent in this text.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Jaxom and Sharra’s marriage is really only present when he’s lying to her and being a little stressed about that.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Piemur and Jancis…nothing. I am informed — I don’t even know if they bring up the fact that they’re in a romantic relationship in this book. Maybe once or twice at the beginning, when they’re all hanging out learning from AIVAS.

Lleu: At the end of Renegades, I was at least willing to believe that there could be a Piemur/Jancis romantic relationship in the future.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: Piemur’s hard-committed to Jancis is great. “Jancis deserves to go in first. This was her building, and I am going to interrupt the Mastersmith and the Masterharper and the Masterminder to make sure that Jancis gets to go in first.” Okay!

Tequila Mockingbird: I love that wife guy energy from him.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: But here…

Lleu: It’s gone.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. While we were reading this book, we brought up that Piemur is not beating the “in love with Jaxom” allegations, and I think part of that is, we do see him repeatedly, being really concerned about Jaxom’s safety and cranky about the fact that Jaxom does risky things in space without checking with Piemur first.

Lleu: In the way that a spouse normally would like, like Sharra, perhaps.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think part of the reason that that stands out so sharply is, Piemur and Jancis’s relationship is non-existent. Jaxom and Sharra’s relationship is, she doesn’t get the chance to be the person standing next to him, saying, “Are you kidding? You’re going for an EVA for the first time with no warning or preparation?” She doesn’t even get told that he does that.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so, how are we supposed to ship those relationships? How are we supposed to engage emotionally with those relationships when we are informed, I guess, that they exist but we don’t get any living page time with those relationships?

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: F’lar and Lessa, we get one little scene where they’re waking up early and F’lar doesn’t want to wake up. And Lessa’s, like, “Oh, my gosh!” And then she’s like, “We can time it. You need to eat breakfast.” And it’s sweet! I believe that they’ve been married for 25 years.

Lleu: Yeah, that’s one of the best scenes in the whole book, which is so funny because it’s F’lar and Lessa.

Tequila Mockingbird: Aah, we’ve been brought to this.

Lleu: We learn that F’lar has a sweet tooth, a fact that you might have thought would have been mentioned at any point previously, but it wasn’t. But now that it has, yeah, I love that! Great!

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. We also get a fun little snippet of Menolly and Sebell’s relationship — truly one page — in which they bring up the fact that he’s a great dad, and, as McCaffrey always needs to bring up when she talks about Menolly and Sebell’s relationship, underscores the fact that they are both also in love with Robinton.

Lleu: Yes, we are explicitly, once again, reminded, “Ah, yes, our great loves: music, and Master Robinton.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But each other’s fine, too.

Lleu: Yeah, you know, I guess.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it doesn’t seem impossible that there could have been a new relationship in this, to our point about if you made this about Mirrim and T’gellan, or if you introduced a new perspective from one of the people learning from AIVAS.

Lleu: Yeah!

Tequila Mockingbird: And somebody we already know — F’lessan is still single; Benelek is still single.

Lleu: Yeah, we’re explicitly told that F’lessan is “not ready to settle down,” which is bonkers because it implies that even within the Weyrs the end the like inevitable end result is going to be settling into a monogamous and, in this case, definitely heterosexual, because we’re explicitly told that F’lessan does not participate in green flights, unlike certain other bronze dragons, so don’t worry, he’s definitely not having sex with men.

Tequila Mockingbird: Have we considered that maybe the men don’t want to have sex with him?

Lleu: That just seems implausible to me, given that there are three different women who are all in love with him and are like, “You have to pick me!” and that’s why he’s not in the Weyr, because he’s like, “I don’t want to be around them, because all they’re gonna be is pressuring me to pick one of them.” In a way that, if this book had been more like Moreta, could have been an interesting, “Oh, yeah, there’s a tension here between F’lessan, who grew up in the Weyr, and three Weyrwomen, who did not grow up in the Weyr —”

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.

Lleu: “— and don’t necessarily have that same socialization about sexuality.” That could have been interesting. But, no, doesn’t do that. We just get the throwaway, “Don’t worry. F’lessan’s not having sex with men.” But also interestingly, green mating flights possibly help bronzes with reproductive fitness.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which, I don’t know how much that’s a retcon…

Lleu: She could have just not mentioned it at all, but instead she threw it in there and was like, “Yeah. Don’t worry about it. Gay men are still load-bearing for all of my world-building.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And, on that topic, the old man yaoi. So, similarly, I think the reason that D’ram and Lytol and Robinton’s relationship does stand out here — first of all, they’re all living together in their little cute retiree home in Cove Hold.

Lleu: Mhm.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also because that’s, again, where we’re seeing this explicit caretaking relationship and this “You need to take care of your health, and I’m deliberately turning off your alarm so that you rest, and I’m eating meals with you, and I care for you” —

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: — in a way that we don’t get to see from any of the textual heterosexual relationships, because the women don’t spend time on the page in this book.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Sharra, sort of, a little bit.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s frustrating. I’m glad that D’ram and Lytol and Robinton are happy together. Good for them, but also…

Tequila Mockingbird: That should not be the emotional interpersonal relationship with the greatest resonance in this book.

Lleu: Well, or it should —

Tequila Mockingbird: And you should have done that on purpose, yeah.

Lleu: — and the book should be about them, yeah. The other thing I just wanted to flag it, ’cause I can’t let it go, is, at the conclave, Master Idarolan, the Masterfisher is so worried, apparently, about whether Ranrel is going to be named Lord Holder, and so he gets wasted first thing in the morning. And so after the conclave, when everyone’s finally getting ready to celebrate for real, Master Idarolan is already tripping over his feet drunk, and so Jaxom and Sebell have to help him to the bathroom, where he’s standing there peeing and Jaxom and Sebell are like, “Wow, his bladder’s really big!” And then Sebell leaves, and Jaxom is just chilling in the bathroom, in a stall with the door closed, with Master Idarolan, and then overhears people plotting to assassinate him.

Tequila Mockingbird: Just a really casual and normal sequence of events.

Lleu: Why did she write this!?

Tequila Mockingbird: And now for the ending. So, as I mentioned, this book ends with Robinton’s death and AIVAS’s death, and AIVAS talks with Robinton about and then puts up on the screen a quotation from, I think, specifically the King James translation of the Bible, but I don’t —

Lleu: Probably.

Tequila Mockingbird: — but I don’t know enough about the Bible to know that for sure.

Lleu: “To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I will say that, when I read this book at like 11, I thought that was a very pretty quotation and one that suited the idea of coming to an old age and dying as a natural part of the cycle of life, and I was sad that Robinton and AIVAS had died, and the ending worked for me. And I think you felt differently.

Lleu: Well, I don’t remember how I felt about the ending as a child. I do remember the way that it’s described in Dolphins of Pern — when we get there we’ll talk about the way that Robinton’s death is handled in Dolphins of Pern —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: — but I think it’s not good. In this book, as I was rereading it this time…I’m just kind of over Robinton.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.

Lleu: If I hadn’t had this book, I think the ending would have been effective, but because this book was written in the way it was, so much of the book is Robinton frankly kind of smugly wandering through Landing and being like, “Ah, yes, look at the children learning! Isn’t that great?” Well, no. It’s boring, actually. And so, as a result, I’m just like, “Yeah, yeah, Robinton. We all love him, apparently,” except the people who tried to kidnap him, and also…

Tequila Mockingbird: Me, the reader?

Lleu: Other people who didn’t try to kidnap him, and also Meron, who’s dead, to be fair, but he did torture him, and…

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think the TVTropes for this is the Scrappy-Doo character. Sometimes when a writer really loves a character, it can make the reader resent that character, or dislike that character, because it feels artificial, or kind of shoved down your throat. How did you feel when Robinton had a heart attack in The White Dragon?

Lleu: I think that’s great, but I think that’s great, because it’s a high-tension scene —

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.

Lleu: — and so I’m going with the tension that already is in the scene, because it’s everything else. But I find the dragons holding on to him very moving, in a way that I did not find this scene.

Tequila Mockingbird: Interesting.

Lleu: Here’s the other thing —

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm.

Lleu: — I think if it had just ended —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes.

Lleu: — I think if it had ended with Robinton falling asleep and that was it —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: — then I think it would have worked better.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s what I wanted to talk about, because I read this as a kid, and what I remembered was the ending, the last paragraph that Robinton is alive:

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘“And a time to every purpose under heaven,”’ Robinton murmured, his throat almost too tight for him to speak. He felt incredibly tired, overwhelmingly sleepy. ‘Yes, how very true. How splendidly true. And what a wonderful time it has been!’”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Unable to resist the lethargy that spread from his extremities, he laid his head down on the inactive pressure plate, one hand holding Zair in the curve of his neck, and closed his eyes, his long season over, his purpose, too, accomplished.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s what stuck with me; that’s what I’d remembered being the end of this book, and I think that’s a good ending.

Lleu: Mm. Even just now, I’m a little bit like, “Ah, yeah, okay, I get it.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: But then it keeps going.

Tequila Mockingbird: We get another four or five pages of everyone finding the body and being distressed. And I do think there’s an interesting resonance to when he gets kidnapped, that they swap him out for a dead body, and so everyone’s like, “Oh, he’s asleep,” and then, “Oh, no, he’s dead. Oh, no, that’s not Robinton,” so I think there is a fun mirroring there of the similarly “come and find him and think he’s asleep, and oh, no, he is dead.” But mostly it just exists to have Jaxom be angry about the fact that AIVAS turned it himself off.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t think that that was particularly meaningful, because then Ruth talks him out of it within a few pages, and then he is okay with that, and you kind of get back to the same place you were at.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think maybe it speaks to the same issue that dragged Moreta’s death, where she feels like she hasn’t earned it, and so she overjustifies it.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause I felt like, “Yeah, you earned it.” I was sad, but I understood, and then it felt like she didn’t believe that I would feel that way, and so she spent an extra six pages trying to convince me of that.

Lleu: And then it’s followed by this description of the kind of funeral celebration for Robinton. I didn’t need this. I already know that you think he’s the world’s specialest boy.

Tequila Mockingbird: We had that sequence at Cove Hold where everyone’s pitching in to help build his house after the heart attack. We already had this outpouring of love and support for him, and we already had it in this book when he gets abducted. You’ve hammered that point home. You don’t need to keep hammering.

Lleu: I think it’s really driven more dramatically home in Dolphins of Pern, where we see it from Readis’s perspective as the news reaches Paradise River Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.

Lleu: All of the adults are sobbing on the porch, and I’m like, most of you never met him.

Tequila Mockingbird: Do we think that the rest of the planet has a parasocial relationship with Master Robinton?

Lleu: Okay, I can imagine people responding this way in a context where there’s a robust mass media infrastructure and people have seen JFK give speeches and whatnot.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right.

Lleu: But that hasn’t happened here.

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, I cried my eyes out when Leonard Nimoy died, but…

Lleu: It’s just very weird.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, it’s possible that the abduction and then the news about the abduction brought him, maybe, to a higher social prominence that then makes the death…you know what I mean?

Lleu: Yeah. I simply do not believe Jayge and Aramina —

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.

Lleu: — and all of their other Holders that we’ve met would respond in this way to this happening.

Tequila Mockingbird: Swacky is deeply emotionally invested in Robinton.

Lleu: In Master Robinton, apparently.

Tequila Mockingbird: Alright. If, for some reason, this description made you say, “Wow, I really want to go out and read this book.” Please don’t do that to yourself. Instead, hat if you read some other, better books? I would like to recommend technically a novella, but it does have a novel-length sequel, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, by Saad Hossain, which is also a story about someone from thousands of years ago trying to rejoin the society that has left them behind and the way that that causes awkward upheavals. In this case it is a jinn who awakens into a climate-dystopian future and a Kathmandu that no longer remembers or cares about him and attempts to rejoin that world and regain his prominence there, to mixed results. It’s got some incredible science-fiction-slash-fantasy-blend building, and is also just a hell of a read.[4]

Lleu: My recommendation is Elizabeth A. Lynn’s The Sardonyx Net, which is from 1981. So, Lynn is a lesbian and was one of the first fantasy writers to include explicitly gay characters in her books, in the Chronicles of Tornor, although gay characters are not the focus of The Sardonyx Net. The main character is bi, but it’s a side thing that’s mentioned briefly. Anyway, it’s about a pilot who attempts to smuggle some drugs into the one region of galactic space where slavery is legal, on just a handful of planets, and is punished by being legally enslaved, and his complicated relationship with the woman who owns him and also his complicated relationship with her brother, who is the captain of the law enforcement vessel that transports between planets within these systems, and also about a growing anti-slavery movement on this planet, within these systems, and the ways that this society has told itself a bunch of lies in order to uphold a system that is fundamentally, profoundly unjust, and what social change looks like in that context, in a way that I think resonates with some of the things that Pern does not do in terms of feudalism.

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] Misspoke, as we observe in about a minute — should be S’len.

[2] We should note that the passage AIVAS quotes is from Ecclesiastes, part of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, but neither of us equipped to assess whether the Hebrew Bible is the greatest Jewish work of literature.

[3] Accidental interpolation; should just be “Adroitly interrupting another of [...].”

[4] Belatedly, Tequila also notes that there is also an artificial intelligence attempting to shape human society.