Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #13: The Dolphins of Pern (1994)

Tequila Mockingbird: 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.

Lleu: And today we are talking about possibly, as I think about it, the book I listened to the most as a child? In part just because it’s so long — I probably spent more hours listening to this book than I did listening to Dragonsong or Dragonsinger. I think this was your first time reading it, though.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I — I never read it. I vaguely remember that there were dolphins, and I think, honestly, my little 12-year-old self was like, “We’ve jumped the shark. I’m sorry; this is just one step too far.”

Lleu: Well, your 12-year-old self was so wrong, ’cause this book is great. Dolphins of Pern, published in 1994, is once again overlapping in part with the plot of All the Weyrs of Pern. So, at one point in All the Weyrs of Pern, when Jaxom is going looking for stuff for AIVAS, he visits Jayge and Aramina, our old friends from Renegades of Pern, at Paradise Riverhold, their new settlement. And he hears a fun story from their son Readis, who tells him about how he and Alemi were rescued by “shipfish,” who he says told them they were called “dolphins.” And Jaxom’s like, “Huh, that’s interesting! I’ll have to make inquiries into that.” All the Weyrs of Pern does not follow up on this, but Dolphins of Pern is all about this. It starts with a little prologue about dolphins a hundred years after landing, and then we jump to Readis and Alemi, going out fishing and getting caught in a sudden storm and then being rescued by dolphins. So, our main characters are Readis, the son of Jayge and Aramina — I would say he is the protagonist of the book, but there are two major secondary protagonists. One is Alemi, Menolly’s older brother, who you may remember from Dragonsong, who is now the Masterfisherman at Paradise River Hold, and also T’lion, who is a young bronze rider who was not supposed to Impress, accidentally Impressed a bronze dragon at the Hatching that his older brother was a candidate for. And so, early in the novel, has a mostly full-grown bronze Dragon, but also is 12, and so is mostly assigned to transportation duty carrying people back and forth between various places in the Southern Continent and Landing.

Lleu: Alemi, Readis, and T’lion all become involved with dolphins in various ways, to varying extents, but crucially, Readis’s parents, and especially his mother, Aramina, do not want him to be involved with dolphins, and this becomes a recurring point of contention throughout the book, especially after Readis gets some kind of sea thorn in his foot that causes him to become seriously ill, almost kills him, and leaves him with one wasted leg that means he has difficulty walking. He has a horse or maybe a pony, possibly, based on some of the descriptions, that he rides to get places, because walking long distances is difficult for him. Ultimately, after a big storm sweeps in and devastates large portions of the coast, including stuff at Paradise River, Readis gets in trouble with his parents for prioritizing caring for the dolphins, because the humans were all busy on land and Readis was like, “Well, the dolphins are also injured and they need help.” So he and T’lion give them some medical attention. And then Readis’s parents say — and especially his mother says — “Either promise me you will never speak to a dolphin again, or you can’t live in my house.” And Readis says, “Okay, then I can’t live in this house; bye,” and goes to live in the woods and meet some new dolphins and then is reintegrated into society when the Tillek, who is the leader of all the dolphins on Pern, comes to visit him, takes him out to sea where he meets a fishing boat full of all of our favorite characters. Menolly’s there; Lessa and F’lar are there; his parents are there; Masterfisher Idarolan is there; Master Rampisi from Southern Hold is there for some reason.

Lleu: Right! And they all say, “Wow, Readis, you’ve done such a good job, and Teresa approves, so you can be a dolphineer and set up a Dolphineer Crafthall at your little cave that you found. Wow, isn’t that a fun, nice ending that’s still really fucked up in a bunch of ways that we’ll talk about? The other thing that happens in this book is, Toric is there, and Toric is plotting to seize a bunch of land that he is not entitled to, and the Weyrs, who have been given the responsibility for distributing land in the Southern Continent according to the terms of the Charter, find out that Toric is planning this and stop him from doing it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you might be thinking, “Those two plots don’t really sound like they have a lot to do with each other. And you’d be right.”

Lleu: As I was saying, as we were discussing this before the novel, I don’t think the Toric stuff is bad, but the Toric stuff is completely disconnected from the other stuff that’s going into the plot, except insofar as — the one upside of how weird and boring All the Weyrs of Pern is, is that All the Weyrs of Pern made this book possible. This book is everything that I wanted from All the Weyrs of Pern and didn’t get. It is entirely about the kind of lived experience of all of the social, political, technological, etc. changes that happen as a result of working with AIVAS and rediscovering Pern’s past.

Lleu: Yeah! So, this is the first book that we’ve had that’s really basically entirely in Southern, which is an interesting change of pace. Everything feels kind of new, and the result is that there’s a lot more time and attention given to all of the new things that are happening, not moving towards the teleology of “We’re getting rid of Thread,” but rather, “How is life on Pern changing?” That’s what this book is about. And I think it’s quite good at that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and one of the ways that life on Pern is changing is that life on Pern is becoming more socially, politically concerned with the Southern Continent as it’s becoming the nexus of these new social mores and political expansion and technological advancements, and I think nowhere is that more exemplified than in the dolphins.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because this is a big change in Pernese life. We have rediscovered a third sapient species on the planet, and that’s a big deal, even if they’re maybe not treating it as if it is a big deal.

Lleu: Which is sort of the thing, right? We’re at this transition point where more people are becoming aware of the existence of dolphins, but a lot of people still regard them as basically just fish or don’t really grasp the implications of there being a third intelligent, speaking species on this planet. One question that we both were coming up against, unfortunately, as we read this is: how the fuck did they forget about dolphins? And I think you were a little more stuck on this than I was.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah… Here’s the thing. It fundamentally doesn’t make sense. The problem is that she then tries to explain it, and that makes it worse and not better. We get a prologue, as you mentioned, from the point of view of one of the dolphins having realized that the humans forgot them. They’re ringing the bell. They’re like, “The humans aren’t coming. What’s going on?” And the way that Kibbe rationalizes this to himself is, “Well. Humans die.” Which is a line that made us both wonder: does this imply that dolphins don’t?

Lleu: Specifically what we get is, they’re ringing the bell, Corey, the other dolphin who’s there, is mad that no one’s answering, and then we have this exchange:

Lleu: “‘There has been illness. Ben told us that,’ Kibbe reminded her.

Lleu: “‘He was not well,’ Corey replied, reluctantly employing Speech [sic] to impart the concept. ‘Humans can die.’

Tequila Mockingbird: That just sounds like a conversation that two beings who can’t die would have.

Lleu: So it sounds as if the intended explanation is that there was illness at Fort Hold, and I guess all the dolphineers died.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m just baffled by the implication that the only people who knew that dolphins existed were dolphineer- — like, it’s not logical that the number of people who know that dolphins exist and are sapient is a small enough number that they could all have just died of a plague and the population would have continued. In Dragonsdawn, everybody knows that the dolphins exist. You might not work closely with dolphins, but you know that they’re there and you know that they’re sapient. So, even if you can’t work with them anymore, because I remember you were thinking about like, okay, well, some of it’s just, they lose the SCUBA equipment, and as they don’t have the technological capacity to swim underwater with the dolphins in a meaningful way, the dolphineer relationship goes. And I fully believe that. But there’s nothing that’s stopping a fisherman from listening to a dolphin come up out of the goddamn water and speak in English to them.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we are, in fact, told that that continued to happen for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years as the broader community, including the broader fishing community, was like, “Haha, you’re so superstitious! You think they’re talking?” Like, bitch, what the fuck?

Lleu: So, we’re told in Dragonseye, which is… 257 to 258 years after landing, that the Lord Holder of Ista goes out fishing and talks to dolphins, and people are like, “Huh, that’s kind of crazy!” And someone from the College is like, “Well, actually, according to the records, it is possible.” Uh. Okay? You’re not doing anything with that?

Tequila Mockingbird: Ask a dolphin! Ahh! So, first of all, I don’t believe in it fundamentally, but second of all, I don’t believe in it a hundred years after landing.

Lleu: I agree. I also, though, do think that the fact that we don’t get an adequate explanation just kind of doesn’t matter. I’m willing to go with it; it’s the story that she wanted to tell. And I think the story that she tells with them having forgotten it is a good one, so of all of the continuity things in this series, this is one of the few that, like, I don’t mind it. It’s fine.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah…I will accept it, but I want it noted that I’m doing this under protest.

Lleu: Noted, yes. So we talked about dolphin the prospect of dolphin immortality. I will note that it does also immediately after that conversation say:

Lleu: “Pod Leader and one of the oldest in their pod, Kibbe had had two dolphineers as partners. He still fondly remembered Amy, his first one. She had been as much fish as he, even if she had to wear the long-feet and had no fins. She had given the best chin scratches and knew exactly where she had to slough off old skin. When he had been injured, she had stayed in the water by his cradle through the days and nights until she knew that he would recover. He would never have survived that long gash if she hadn’t sewn it up and given him the human medicines that prevented infection.”

Lleu: Which does kind of make it sound like Kibbe outlived, in fact, his first human partner. Make of that what you will.

Lleu: Another upside of dolphins is that, for the first time in the whole series, we have a female political leader who holds power in her own right and not as partner or subordinate to a man, namely the Tillek Teresa. It’s also kind of implied that the Tillek is always a woman, because we’re told that the typical structure of dolphin pods is, an older or sort of senior female dolphin is the pod leader — not always, but that’s the typical arrangement. And I have to say, it’s really nice! It’s a really nice change of pace from everything else in the whole series.

Tequila Mockingbird: Dolphin culture seems kind of great. They’re having fun. They’re getting stuff done. They have an inexplicably powerful code of ethics, ’cause they’re still like, “Well, it has been 2,400 years since the humans kept up their side of the bargain, but that doesn’t mean we can slack.” And I respect that.

Lleu: Yeah. I think for me, one of the highlights of this book is the fact that we do get a bunch of — typically short — passages from the perspective of dolphins responding to humans’ renewal of contact. So after the first time that Alemi makes proactive contact with the dolphins, we get this little interlude where the dolphins are delighted by this. They’re like, “Oh my god, it’s finally happening! We’ve been waiting 2,400 years for this and finally humans are talking to us again!” The news is traveling all through the seas of Pern, and they’re like, maybe now they can finally do all the things. “We can swim with them again. We can show them where the coastline has changed or where the coastline is changing currently. We can help them find stuff that was lost” — ’cause something else that comes up in this is that they find —

Tequila Mockingbird: The cargo that was lost in “The Dolphins’ Bell” — it does come back and become relevant! I thought she was leaving too obvious of a little tag for herself there at the end of that one.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s nice because it creates, “Oh, yeah, the callback! Continuity!” And also because it’s cool to see, none of the conservatism that’s going on on the human end matters at all to the dolphins. The dolphins are like, “Finally, we can get to work again.” And it’s an interesting change of pace from humans who spend so much of the later books in this series going like, “Hm, all these changes are happening. I don’t know how we should feel about this,” to have people who are unquestioningly, “We got to move. We’re going forward. It’s finally happening.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Delighted. I also really liked the way that she handled dolphin point of view and dolphin speech. I did think it was interesting. It feels noticeably different from human speech, in a way that I think made sense. It wasn’t unreadable, ’cause I do think sometimes trying to write in dialect or trying to deliberately alter speaking patterns to make a character feel alien can bog me down as a reader, and this really didn’t.

Lleu: Yeah. I think it’s interesting in part because the dolphins learned to speak English, but they were taught to speak English 2,500 years ago. So they speak with 2,500 years ago accents, and also most dolphins haven’t been using their human speech training regularly. So, when they transition to adulthood, dolphins, we’re told, go to spend some time kind of studying with the Tillek, learning the history of Pern, the history of dolphins, and learning hand signals and human speech, etc. But they don’t typically use it among themselves, so it’s clear that many of the dolphins that we interact with, especially early in the book, are like, “Oh, yeah, I remember this word I learned in Human class 15 years ago!”

Lleu: Yeah, it’s delightful. And also you can see as the book goes on that they start to get more comfortable with using human speech. Their sentences get longer. They get more grammatical. The characters notice, like, “Oh, they’re using more words.” They are like, “Oh, I just remembered this other word!” And the human characters are sort of putting it in scare quotes, but I think it’s absolutely, yeah, these people took high school high school Human 15 years ago.

Tequila Mockingbird: And now suddenly they’re talking to a bunch of humans being like, “Oh, damn, yeah…”

Tequila Mockingbird: It is intriguing to me to question vowels, because the big difference that we get at the beginning of the book is that the way dolphins say words has more syllables and the vowels sound different. She’s phonetically writing some things out, like, “teach” becomes “titch,” “name” becomes “naym” — although that one I’m like, “That’s already how I pronounce it…” — and it does make me wonder about vowel shifts. We do also know, when AIVAS shows up, that he initially has trouble understanding them, and he has to modulate his speech and his listening, and that’s a moment where the Harpers are embarrassed, ’cause they were thinking that they had kept the language so “pure.” But we do know that vowel shifts just happen in languages, so it makes me wonder whether Pern has had a Great Vowel Shift since landing.

Lleu: I think probably, yeah. We also know, from even as early as Dragonseye, there’s significant dialect variation across Pern. We see some like eye dialect Bitran speech in Dragonseye, and then also, of course, Piemur and Sebell are putting on their Crom shepherd voice accent in Dragondrums.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. Realistically, I don’t think it’s plausible that a planet, for 2,500 years, would have no speech variation, no drift —

Tequila Mockingbird: Dialects would happen — indubitably they would happen, even without the strong emphasis on remaining in a single community, usually for most of your life.

Tequila Mockingbird: The Holds can get very isolated and very autonomous, and that’s what makes dialects happen, and then you also have the Weyrs, where you’re pulling people from a bunch of different areas, which is what makes pidgins happen.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s already deliberately foreignizing a lot of the words in these books — we have “herdbeasts,” we have “footstraps” for, instead of “stirrups.” She’s already deliberately doing that in a lot of ways to try and make it feel not like 21st-century Earth, and I think trying to do any kind of dialect writing, as I said, would have been…meh. So I think it’s fun to now be told in some way that that has happened, because it feels plausible.

Lleu: Yeah. And it does seem like mostly it’s vowels that are the problem. Consonants to the extent that dolphins’ mouths are different, so they have trouble with certain consonants, but broadly, vowels are the issue, which also is realistic. It’s one of the first things that we were taught in my historical linguistics class in undergrad, is, if you’re trying to sort of identify cognates, consonants are the priority, ’cause vowels go wild sometimes.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Also, I think syllabization and blends, ’cause they’re saying “suwim” instead of “swim,” they’re saying “oo-ait” instead of “wait” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — so that is the other thing I noticed about dolphin speech.

Lleu: I wonder if it’s possible that part of it is that dolphins’ transmission of human speech over 2,500 years has also perhaps not been perfect.

Lleu: Especially if maybe not everyone who goes to the Great Subsidence necessarily studies with the Tillek personally.

Lleu: If the Tillek maybe has a school and not everyone who teaches Human at Tillek School is quite as competent at it, or has the same accent.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, ’cause it is obviously second language transmission the whole way down for 2,500 years.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we do know, because the Tillek gets microaggressioned, the Tillek speaks in a much more human way.

Lleu: Yeah. Another thing that came up here re the dolphins is, are they psychic? And, if so, to what extent? We are told that they can hear dragons, but only sort of — they can’t distinguish words, but they can hear that dragons are speaking telepathically to their riders. This is something that the dragons wonder about. Gadarath is like, “Can they hear me?”

Tequila Mockingbird: There is also the impression that at least that degree of empathic awareness is mutual, because it does seem like the dolphins know how the dragons feel about things and are sharing their thoughts with the dragons, or, like, sharing their vibes

Lleu: Yeah, so there’s something going on there. And then, at the very end, as night is falling over the ship that Readis’s family and miscellaneous political leaders are on, they’re hearing dolphins singing in the ocean, and Menolly’s like, “Oh, my god, is that the dolphins?” And they have this moment where everyone’s reflecting on, like, “I’ve heard this sound before.” And two of the people who are saying this are Menolly, who grew up in a Seahold, and Aramina, who lives at Paradise River, right on the coast. And the other person is Lessa, who grew up in Ruatha — not on the coast — lives at Benden Weyr — also not on the coast. And she specifically says that Ramoth sometimes tells her that she hears this song. Are the dolphins singing telepathically and the dragons are hearing them? Have they been doing that for 2,500 years?

Tequila Mockingbird: Frankly, I would buy that. And for 2,500 years the dragons have been like, “Hey, there’s this weird sound.” And the humans have been like, “Don’t worry about it, baby. It’s all good.”

Lleu: “‘Dragons don’t sing, so I knew it wasn’t them, but Ramoth has complained about ‘lonely’ [quote-unquote] sounds impinging on her sleep,’ Lessa said.”

Lleu: So I guess maybe they’ve been singing telepathically and projecting their loneliness and their longing for this renewed contact with humans telepathically and at least some dragons have been picking this up. Okay. Great. Love that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And to be fair. Ramoth is very special, so it’s possible that not all dragons have been hearing it or…

Lleu: The last dolphin thing that I wanted to talk about is just dolphin sexuality. The dolphins are, as we saw in “The Dolphins’ Bell,” they’re hitting on everyone at all times, basically. But, in particular, this book has the first instance in, I believe, the whole series and possibly the only instance in the whole series where two male characters kiss, and one of them is a dolphin and the other one is Persellan, the Weyr Healer at Eastern Weyr, who has been caring for this particular dolphin. And after Persellan finishes his “come back in in a few days so I can check the condition of the wound that I’ve just sewn up” treatment, Boojie rises up out of the water and kisses Persellan and then swims away, and Persellan’s like, “Wow, I wish my human patients expressed their gratitude like that!”

Lleu: Yeah — first of all. Second of all, given that the one time in the series that we have had explicit confirmation of a non-dragonrider being not straight was also the Weyr Healer in Moreta. I think we can only conclude from this that Healers are the gayest craft.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think the point at which I noted that the dolphins are just straight up flirting was when Readis had run off into the woods and was making contact with Cal’s pod.

Lleu: Readis swims out to sea, because he’s like, “Well, I don’t have a bell, so I can’t make contact with dolphins by calling them to me, so all I can do is swim out to sea and make them think I’m drowning, and so they’ll come rescue me. Probably.” Fortunately for him, they do. They swim him back into shore to the cave that he’s been staying in and drop him off. So:

Lleu: “Grabbing the nearest of his homemade water bottles, he returned to the pool and found it stuffed full of dolphins.

Lleu: “‘Yes, want to see man’s land place,’ Delfi said, raising her body out of the water to peer about her. ‘Nice place.’ And she dropped back.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yup. They’re also noting that he’s giving good scritches. I don’t know. It just…they’re flirty. They’re fun.

Lleu: Readis’s relationship to the dolphins brings us to Readis in general. Anne McCaffrey fundamentally only actually had a small handful of stories that she was interested in writing and rewriting over and over again, and…

Lleu: Yeah, and we both picked one of them, and I hadn’t really considered the one that you picked, so tell us about Readis and Jaxom.

Tequila Mockingbird: It did strike me, in this book, that we are again getting a story about the son of a Holder who is supposed to grow up and become Lord Holder and fulfill his social role as a Hold man and then questions that role, does something unexpected, goes against the wishes of the adults in his life, and chooses to become a dolphineer, versus become a dragonrider, and in Jaxom’s case he then ends up exactly where he started. He comes back, he’s like, “No, actually, I’m going to be a Lord Holder in a heterosexual relationship.” And we talked about the way that that potentially transgressive plot was given a more conservative ending, and so this struck me in some ways as: here’s the book that that that The White Dragon could have been, because Readis runs away from home and doesn’t end up coming back to be a Lord Holder. He ends up coming back to be the leader of a Dolphin Crafthall. And it’s possible he will also inherit, but it honestly felt to me like it was prepping us for the idea that his younger brother is going to inherit the Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: And there’s also, in the same way that there was with Jaxom, some noticeable queer subtext, but, unlike with Jaxom, there isn’t really the tidy heterosexual relationship.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s a hint that he is supposed to be in a relationship with Kami — maybe — who is Alemi’s daughter.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I wouldn’t honestly say that that was a stronger textual hint than the idea that Readis has a crush on F’lessan or T’lion is.

Lleu: Yeah. Certainly the book ends with Readis who is, we’re told, now legally an adult, or at least old enough to be legally recognized as an adult.

Lleu: Yeah. So, Readis is more or less an adult, or at least on the cusp of adulthood, and the end of the book is, T’lion has also gotten permission to be a dolphineer. So it seems like Readis and T’lion are maybe going to be living together in Readis’s cave studying to be dolphineers, at least when T’lion is not busy fighting Thread? Make of that what you will.

Tequila Mockingbird: And Threadfall is gonna end, right? There’s only about 20 more years in the Pass at this point.

Lleu: Yeah. So…much to consider. I, meanwhile, was thinking about Readis as Menolly 3.0. So we had Menolly, in Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, following that up. And then we had Piemur, Menolly 2.0, in Dragondrums, going completely off the rails, not the way Menolly’s plot goes, and then we have Readis as Menolly 3.0, where once again, we have a pretty direct repetition of it: child of a Hold, difficult relationship with his parents. They’re not physically abusive towards him, for the most part, in contrast to Menolly’s parents, and the gender aspect is not there, or not there in the same way, but broadly, the dynamic is very similar. Readis has this strong interest in something that he is forbidden to engage in, or limited in his engagement with, and he finds it impossible to live under these circumstances. He runs away. He lives in the woods. He makes himself pots out of clay that he finds, and he meets a bunch of unambiguously intelligent and speaking creatures and befriends them, and also maybe their psychic. And then, finally, a gathering of people that he’s kind of trapped into interacting with tell him, “Actually, it is okay. You can have everything you ever dreamed of after all.”

Lleu: And he’s led into the trap by the leader of the Craft that he intends to join. So he’s truly just Menolly, again, very directly, with different gender politics.

Tequila Mockingbird: And to be fair, I think this is an improvement on the Jaxom arc, and I think the Menolly arc was one of the best arcs that she ever did, so I’m not mad about this.

Lleu: Yeah, I’m also not mad about it. In fact, I think it’s great. One of the reasons that I think it works so well is because, in contrast to Piemur, in contrast to some of the Menolly analogues in the later books, also — ’cause there’s more of them, don’t worry; we have not seen the last of mentally analogues —

Lleu: — Readis’s experience is grounded once again in the family as a site of violence and control, in a way that is, I think, really compelling, and — in Dragonsong, the fact that that violence is rooted in the family is sort of obscured by the emphasis on gender and sexism. So, to me, Dragonsong ends up kind of implying that, if Menolly had been a boy, the fact that her family worked like this would have been fine, or that she wouldn’t have been subject to this kind of arbitrary control, which I don’t think is necessarily true, first of all.

Tequila Mockingbird: We do get a passage in this one where Alemi’s like, “Yeah, I had to get out of there.”

Lleu: Right! Literally, Alemi is like, “I can’t live with my father anymore. Can’t stay at Half-Circle forever. I gotta go. I’m out of here.” So there’s clearly something also going on, even for the boys in Menolly’s family. But also, the family just is a structure of arbitrary power and social control and violence. And this book, by virtue of having Readis be a boy makes that, I think, quite unambiguously clear, even though the physical violence is not as much a factor in it. Readis’s parents are awful. Aramina in particular, but Jayge also.

Tequila Mockingbird: It was a question that I was asking myself as I was reading this, because the book is not unaware of the parallel to Menolly’s childhood.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because Alemi’s right there and he’s thinking about it, and so I was curious about whether you felt that the text is suggesting that Jayge and Aramina are “better” than Yanus and Mavi, ’cause it did feel like they were saying that…?

Lleu: Oh, absolutely. So, the problem with this book is that I don’t think the book knows that it’s presenting a sustained critique of the family as a social structure. But it is. The book very much does think that Jayge and Aramina are “better” parents, quote-unquote, than Yanus and Mavi, because they love their son, and they’re just doing this ’cause they care about him and they want him to be happy. Okay, so you think Mavi wasn’t also doing this because she wanted Menolly to be happy and she thought that Menolly would be unhappy if she continued to pursue music? Things that we’re explicitly told and have her tell Menolly in Dragonsong? Uh, hello?

Tequila Mockingbird: And, again, I understand that we did have different interpretations of that in Dragonsong, but to me, the difference in how these two children experience severe physical injury and possible permanent disability is not that strong.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s a question about medical negligence for Menolly, but I think there’s also a question about medical negligence for Readis, because the dolphins are communicating that there’s a medical issue, and they’re not listening to them, and as a result, his leg injury is a permanent disability instead of a temporary injury.

Tequila Mockingbird: When, in fact, Menolly is not permanently disabled by the packtail and is able to recover most of her hand function.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s also worth mentioning that both Alemi and Menolly appear in this book. So, early in the book, Paradise River doesn’t have a Harper, and Jayge and Aramina’s children, and also Alemi and his wife’s children, and some other children from among the Hold community are getting old enough that their parents are like, “We need to have a teacher for them now. They can’t just be running wild.” So Alemi is like, “Well, let me just impose on my sister, the Masterharper, and I’ll ask her to send someone for us.” And then a couple weeks later, a boat shows up and Menolly gets off the boat, and Alemi’s like, “Oh, my god, my sister the Masterharper is here.” So that’s — first of all, legend. Love thought for her. It’s very funny.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I love her energy of like, “I am pregnant. It is cold. I will be here now.”

Lleu: Yeah. But second of all, Menolly and Alemi are both here, and both of them actively collude with Aramina to prevent Readis from interacting with dolphins. So, at this point, Readis is five or six — or seven, depending on how old you think he is at any point in this book. And he had this transformative experience with dolphins and has always been interested in the ocean and now is especially curious about dolphins, but he’s been told that he’s not allowed to swim unless someone else is with him, and Jayge and Aramina have asked Alemi, who is continuing to interact with the dolphins in his professional capacity as a Fisherman, to keep that hidden from Readis. And Alemi’s like, “Okay, I will keep that hidden from Readis.” And Menolly also is told to keep that hidden from Readis and is like, “Hm, yes. Children are so distractible. He’ll probably move on to something else soon, anyway. I’ll get right on that.” How can you, Menolly, of all people, not recognize the very obvious parallels between your childhood experience and what you are being asked to do for Readis right now?

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, yes — I think that’s a flaw, but I think that’s a flaw in Menolly and not in the text, because I think there’s nothing like working with children to make you see how quickly adults forget what it is like to be a child.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that imposing control upon children is something that our society reinforces in every possible way, and that it is actively difficult, even when you are consciously aware of it, to work against that in a space where that is what is normalized in how we interact with children and take care of them.

Lleu: Yeah. I think also it’s exacerbated here by the fact that everything in the text, including Alemi and Menolly, is telling us that Jayge and Aramina are “good parents” who “love their child.” So it might be easier for either Menolly or Alemi to perceive this as a problem if Aramina were —

Lleu: — clearly a bd person the way Yanus and Mavi are. But she’s not. She seems nice. She performs parental love, does all of the things that she’s “supposed” to do, and so that means that her behavior towards Readis cannot be “bad” in the way that their parents were.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s fair to say that, while it’s not how I would raise children, I don’t have as much of an issue with them trying to redirect Readis away from dolphins and physical interaction with dolphins at the age of six as I do at the age of 10. ’Cause I do think it’s fair to say, “My child is obsessed with the ocean, and it is very easy for small children to drown.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “I don’t want him thinking this is fun and sneaking away and going to play with this,” and, frankly, I do believe that, especially if you’re not completely sold on dolphin intelligence, you might be worried that an enthusiastic dolphin might not realize that this kid is not a strong swimmer and an accident could happen.

Tequila Mockingbird: What my issue is, is that I think just never mentioning it again is, in fact, the number one best way to get your kid to lie to you, sneak away, and play with the dolphins outside of your supervision.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think if you actually were worried about his safety, the best method would have been to be like, “Yes, we can visit the dolphins with a grownup and you have to be with a grownup at all times.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Give him parameters and supervise him, if what you’re worried about is safety and not control. But I do think it’s fair to suggest that they are worried about safety and control.

Lleu: Well, the thing is, the worry about safety — Readis obeys his parents instructions. That’s one of the major points of contention through the whole book, is that Readis scrupulously, from the time his mother makes him promise that he will never swim alone, he doesn’t. Never once in the whole book until he runs away, basically because she accuses him of having broken his promise. And he’s like, “No, I have always done exactly what I said I would do. I’ve never swum alone. I’ve always had someone with me. I’ve always had someone, in fact, older than me supervising me” — ’cause T’lion is somewhere between five and seven years older than him. And his mother’s like, “You’ve been doing stuff with dolphins!” He’s like, “I promised I would not swim alone. I’ve never swum alone. You can’t hold this against me.” And she’s like, essentially, “That wasn’t the point. The point was, you should do what I say at all times, always, and also you should never be near the dolphins.” And Readis is like, “That’s not what you made me promise. Bye.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Honestly, for me, the strongest argument that the text thinks Aramina and Jayge are better than Yanus and Mavi is that they get an ending, right? That they come back. They say sorry.

Tequila Mockingbird: They get that scene at the end where they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I didn’t realize!” And it’s like, really? You didn’t realize? Okay. Now we’re all fine with this. In a way that I think both is reflective of the degree to which McCaffrey doesn’t think that what they did is that big of a deal —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and is reflective of the rushed pacing of the end of this book.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where the reconciliation happens in three sentences, ’cause the whole interaction happens in three pages.

Lleu: It does, I must say, seem like perhaps she should have thought more about the fact that, “Hm, I wrote these parents as doing something that made their child want to run off and live by himself in the woods, where he would be subject to, first of all, big cats — Delkey[1] gets eaten by a tiger or something — and, second of all, by the implacable alien organism that consumes all organic matter it touches that falls from the sky at —”

Lleu: “— every couple days.” So, if your child is doing that, you fucked up. Really badly.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yup. I do have a broad question about the American cultural narrative of running away from home as a child.

Tequila Mockingbird: There are a lot of stories that treat that as a very, like, “Yeah, you know, it just happens.” My Side of the Mountain, you know, all of that. And I’m like, “Really? Were other people actually doing this? Wha-, who — how many people actually tried to run away from home as a child?” ’Cause I was a deeply unhappy child, not because of anything my parents were doing but because of my own mental and emotional situation —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and I never tried to run away from home. I don’t know. I just can’t relate to it.

Lleu: Well, I think it speaks both to an awareness on the part of children’s book writers that children are often deeply unhappy in their home situations, even if, for practical reasons, they wouldn’t consider running away, such that running away might be a desirable fantasy for them, and also perhaps to a certain anxiety on the part of parents about the prospect of children escaping your control that leads to this narrative being so culturally prominent.

Tequila Mockingbird: One of the things that comes up in Readis’s relationship with his family and their control is his disability, both in the sense that, as I mentioned, there’s a question of medical negligence, but also in the way that his disability becomes a further locus of their control.

Tequila Mockingbird: This idea of, “Because you can’t walk comfortably for long distances, we have a greater degree of infantilization towards you. We have a greater degree of control over your ability to leave and come and go and move around, and we exercise that control in, again, this similar way of, we’re expressing our concern for you and we’re covering this control with a show of love. But it is an exertion of control.”

Tequila Mockingbird: When he goes to render medical assistance to the dolphins without his parents’ knowledge and he gets caught and his parents are angry — and to be fair, they did lose a valuable piece of healing technology; they lost the book that they had been keeping all these records from AIVAS, and that was irresponsible of them, because they are tweens. Jaye is ordering him to come back and says,

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Get your shoes on! [...] Let’s not have another thorn in your foot.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “Readis felt a hard cold feeling in his chest at that harsh remark. His father never referred to his limp, had never before reminded him of the injury or where he had taken it.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, there is this, “Okay, so as soon as you are —”

Tequila Mockingbird: “— resisting my control, I am going to try and leverage your disability against you.”

Lleu: Yeah. I’m thinking also about afterwards — he throws himself into doing the work that he’s quote-unquote “supposed” to be doing, with humans, and then, first of all, we get, similarly to Menolly, a, like, “I can’t go back there right now” — the same feeling that she has with the cottage in Dragonsinger. “I can’t be under that roof.” But also a certain amount of, “I’m exhausted and I can’t walk this far.” And when he’s woken up the next morning by his sister, having slept in the animal shed, she’s like, “Everyone’s been looking for you. Mother’s freaking out.” And Readis is like, “I couldn’t make it.” And in the moment, he’s like, “That’s not entirely true.” But then also he starts walking and he’s like, “Uh, maybe it was, actually.” So there’s a — he can be treated as if he’s entirely able-bodied as long as it’s convenient for them, for control purposes, and he can be treated as if he is useless and disabled as long as that’s convenient for them, for control purposes. And also he has this specter of, he’s expected to be the holder, but also he’s got a younger brother who doesn’t have an injured leg.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that’s explicitly called out, isn’t it?

Lleu: For context, Readis has been studying at the school at Landing that Master Robinton set up, and they go on a school field trip to Honshu, where F’lessan is now living basically full-time as the caretaker. F’lessan gives them a tour, and then he and Readis have a long conversation, which is where Readis is a little bit like, is this a hero crush thing or is this a crush crush thing? And then F’lessan asks him, like, “What’s your major going to be?” And “what do you want to do with your life?” And Readis is like, “Well, uh, I don’t know.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And then, after that conversation, he’s talking to T’lion about the possibility of getting SCUBA equipment and about the fact that he talked to F’lessan, and he’s thinking about the fact that it would be useful to him to a connection with dolphins if he is in fact going to be the Lord Holder of Paradise River Hold, that it is a Seahold, and he thinks,

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘And who knows when, or if’—and Readis slapped the knee of his withered leg—‘I get to be Holder. My father’s a healthy man…’ F’lessan’s words at Honshu came back to him: ‘What are you going to do in the time between?’ Then there was his younger brother, Anskono, with both legs in good working order and growing stronger and taller every year. Readis could be passed over in favor of his unimpaired younger brother.”

Lleu: Yeah, so he’s conscious of his disability as something that is looming over his future, and, you know, it is; it does, through the whole book, clearly, once it happens.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t really get a strong feeling about whether Readis wants to be Lord Holder or just feels like he’s supposed to want to be Lord Holder, because it seems pretty clear that he likes being a dolphineer. I don’t know that those are necessarily mutually exclusive, but…

Lleu: When it comes down to it, we simply don’t ever see Readis doing any Lord Holder stuff. We’re told that Jayge is teaching him about holder responsibilities, that he knows how to keep accounts, that he knows how to do some field work and also supervise it, and things like that, but we don’t actually see him doing that, so we don’t know whether he likes it or not. But it certainly doesn’t seem to be something that he’s actively interested in, as much as something that he knows is expected of him and that he has emotionally prepared himself to do when the time comes. But I feel like the fact that his answer when F’lessan asks him about it is like, “Well, I’m going to be Holder someday, I guess,” suggests to me that he’s not actively interested in being Holder as much as aware that this is what is expected of him.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And Readis’s disability is not the only time that it comes up in this book. There’s also a scene with Oldive, the Masterhealer, who does have a hunchback. And he is interacting with dolphins, as we previously mentioned, in Fort Hold, because it turns out the dolphins can use their sonar as kind of a rudimentary X-ray, MRI?

Tequila Mockingbird: They can tell when there are things inside the human body that are not normally there, question mark?[2]

Tequila Mockingbird: This apparently was an ability that was previously used by medical professionals on Pern, and possibly on Earth, since the dolphins had this ability on Earth as well. And they renew its use, where they’re like, “Oh, okay, the dolphins can sense cancerous growths. The dolphins can sense pregnancy. The dolphins can sense some other things.” And the dolphins do notice Oldive’s disability.

Lleu: Yeah, they comment on it explicitly, in a way that breaks the social contract of “We have to pretend that people are not disabled.” ’Cause the dolphins don’t have that social convention.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the fact that the dolphin can notice that he has a bad back is part of what convinces him that the dolphin sonar is possible. But I also do think that Oldive is one of the better portrayals of physical disability in these books.

Lleu: Yeah. And his disability is consistently mentioned, and it does narratively impact him — he sometimes needs a hand doing stuff, dealing with stairs — but it is neither moralized, nor overplayed, nor underplayed, I think.

Tequila Mockingbird: No magical cures, no inspiration porn. He’s just a guy with some physical disabilities and also a job to do.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also do, once again, spend some time with Camo. Still ain’t good, folks. Still ain’t good.

Tequila Mockingbird: He comes with Menolly as her child-minder for Robse, since she is both pregnant and working full-time as the Harper for this Hold.

Lleu: I should say, the audiobook that I listened to from the ’90s reads Menolly’s child’s name as “Rob-see,” which makes more apparent the fact that his name is Robinton and Sebell combined.

Lleu: I just mentioned it because, truly, she cannot let us forget that Menolly and Sebell are both in love with Robinton.

Tequila Mockingbird: No, and she shouldn’t. So, when they arriv and they’re trying to figure out where people can sleep and logistics, “Okay, we can put a cot here. There’s a room…” And they’re just casually like, “Oh, or I can settle Camo in the store shed. That way he’s near but not underfoot all the time.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Like, what the fuck, bro? “It’s fine. He could just sleep in the storage shed”?

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is supposed to be, “Wow, so inspirational! So great that they’re so nice to him! Because clearly it’s bad to be mean to him. But that’s fine.”

Lleu: Yeah. She could have just left him behind. He didn’t need to reappear in this, but everyone, I guess, needs to reappear, so he’s back. The other thing that you had flagged that I had forgotten about until you pointed out is the reference to the fact that dragons “never” Impress a human with a quote-unquote “drudge personality.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I just want to ask McCaffrey — she’s dead, so I can’t. I want a séance in which I ask Anne McCaffrey, “So, Anne, what are you picturing here? Are you picturing a situation where at the age of, say, five or six, all of the parents on Pern evaluate their children and say, ‘Hm, you have a drudge personality, so instead of educating you, we’re going to have you do unfree labor for the rest of your life. Bye’? Is that what you’re picturing? Really? Really?” Because it’s so clear from the outside that being a drudge is something you are born into and cannot escape, and that there are probably quite a variation of personalities that those people have before they are treated like drudges and subjected to servitude and not educated for the rest of their life.

Lleu: Yeah. No, but some people are just born to labor for others. Apparently.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, unfortunately, the implication that I do see is this idea of, okay, a “drudge personality” means an intellectual disability, which has been the implication. And so it does seem like Anne McCaffrey is actually picturing that when your child is a toddler, if they have some kind of intellectual disability, you’re just like, “’Bye, kid. Not going to raise you as my child anymore. Now you just become a servant.” And that she thinks everyone on Pern is chill about that.

Lleu: Yeah. The other thing that I’m thinking about is the constant focus on especially girls as being “biddable,” which is also one of the most egregious things in this book, is that not only does Menolly hide dolphins from Readis, but also, as she’s talking to the various parents at Paradise River Hold, she explicitly praises Alemi’s children, in conversation with his wife, because they’re “such biddable children,” his two daughters, as if this is a good thing? Which, again, makes no sense coming from Menolly, of all people. Menolly, who told Petiron, “What’s wrong with being a big, strong girl?” Hello?

Lleu: Where’s the line between being “biddable” in a good way and being a “drudge personality”?

Lleu: And we’re going to talk a lot more about class and stuff when we get to Dragonseye.

Tequila Mockingbird: And talk more about disability and drudgery when we get to Masterharper.

Lleu: Uh-huh! So, there are a couple other character things that I did want to talk about. One is just, Mirrim’s good again in this!

Lleu: Mirrim’s back, and we see her and T’gellan — I’m a little unclear about what Mirrim’s status in the Weyr is, because T’gellan is the Weyrleader at Eastern Weyr, and when he’s disciplining T’lion, there’s no sign of the Weyrwoman, but Mirrim, a green rider, is there, as if she is also in charge. I don’t know what that is supposed to mean or what’s going on with that. But, anyway, T’gellan and Mirrim get mad at T’lion because he’s been, not hiding hiding, but hiding the fact that he’s working with the dolphins, but throughout this whole thing, Mirrim is perfectly pleasant to be around. She’s taken aback by the dolphin telling her she might be pregnant, but when they go to meet the dolphins, T’gellan’s the one who’s a little bit like, “I don’t know…” And Mirrim’s the one who’s like, “Oh, T’gellan, they’re so much fun!” They’re splashing around, they splash her and T’lion’s like, “Oh, this is so embarrassing. They’re getting my Weyrleader and his Weyrmate wet,” and Mirrim’s like, “I’m the one who went into the water. What was I expecting?” Finally, Mirrim lives up to the promise of her character in Dragonsong. 10 books later.

Lleu: She was, to be fair, having a really bad decade. Maybe it makes sense to talk about T’lion’s character arc here, ’cause I love T’lion.

Lleu: He sort of falls into the background, but early in the book, when Readis is still six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12, T’lion is really the main character that we see interacting with dolphins, and he’s just really fun. Especially because — speaking of childhood and power — he’s in this interesting position as the rider of a fully-grown dragon but also a teenager.

Tequila Mockingbird: So he’s kind of a Weyrling, but not a Weyrling, in a weird way.

Lleu: Yeah. Notionally he’s supposed to be accorded the privileges and the respect that is due to a dragonrider, but also, when he goes to Landing, the cook can be like, “T’lion, come on, I need you to help carry food. Go deliver this food to the conference room. And I stuck some like some meat rolls on there for you too, but go do chores for me.” Obviously, we do see adult dragonriders get co-opted into this sometimes, but it wouldn’t be like that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because of this, he has this weird social position, where he does have all of these very disparate adults who feel a kind of paternal fondness for him, where they do feel comfortable suborning him to do chores and giving him extra snacks, which we see within Weyrs, but I don’t think we’ve previously seen for adults outside of the Weyr and a child with a dragon.

Lleu: Agreed. It puts him in a really like narratively interesting spot, where he’s in a suspended, he should be an adult, but also everyone recognizes that he’s not an adult. And he is very conscious of — he’s introduced for the first time when he goes to pick up Alemi to take him to Landing to report on the dolphins, and he’s like, “Alright, Master Alemi, I’m here to pick you up!” And Alemi’s like, “Okay. Can Gadareth bend down so I can climb up? Can you give me a hand so I can climb up?” And T’lion’s like, “Oh, right! Oh, my god, of course, yeah.” It’s really endearing, and it also sets up, then, a dynamic where Alemi can is like, “Okay, well, obviously he’s a dragonrider, but also…he’s 12.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And there is this kind of mentorship relationship between him and Alemi, that grows into more of a relationship of equals as the book continues —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and they’re both investigating dolphineering, in a way that’s fun!

Lleu: And it also then means he’s positioned interestingly relative to Readis, because he’s older than Readis and has these responsibilities, so he can, for example, be the person supervising Readis when Readis is swimming, but also, they’re close enough in age that they can hang out. There’s a couple of scenes, including after Readis has talked to F’lessan, where Readis is in his dorm room at Landing and T’lion is just wandering in and out of his room, talking to him, chatting about their plans for, they’re going to get SCUBA gear and all this stuff. I’m like, this is very F’lon and Robinton, as we’ll see in Masterharper.

Lleu: But they’re very conscious of T’lion’s status as dragonrider but also young. So T’lion is like, “Well, I could probably ask the Smithcraft to make us some of this equipment, but I would be way down on the priority list, basically because I’m young and because it’s such a weird request, so maybe it would be better if we ask Alemi to do it for us, because he’s a Masterfisher and not just some random dragonrider, and a young one at that, and also it’s obviously relevant for his Craft work, so it might be slightly higher priority, although also AIVAS stuff is going on, so everything’s going to be below that…” There’s just all these kind of layers of status that are going on.This book is perhaps not as class-conscious as some of the other books in this series —

Lleu: Speaking of class and age and status, the other thing that’s going on, as I indicated at the beginning, is this book is all about social and political changes, in a bunch of different ways. And one of those is, the political structure is changing. The, part of the Toric plot is a transition from a transition from ad hoc cooperation between Weyrs and Halls and Holds to a much more systematic, “We have a planetary government now.” The Lord Holders met collectively and asked the Weyrleaders to distribute the land on the Southern Continent, because none of the Lord holders could be impartial about it, whereas the dragonriders are at least more impartial about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: F’lar and Lessa are becoming king and queen of Pern, more and more clearly with every book.

Lleu: Yeah, and that is what gives them the political position to intervene when Toric is trying to claim land, because, “Well, the authority to distribute land on the Southern Continent has been legally delegated to us, so you can’t take this land. It’s not yours to give. It is ours to ensure the fair distribution of.” So, this is something that we saw already a bit in All the Weyrs of Pern with D’ram, Lytol, and Robinton administering Landing and that transition towards a unified governance structure, rather than everyone being fully autonomous, is something that is clearly continuing here.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although they do still love autonomy. They have to shout out that dolphin pods are “autonomous,” ’cause everyone has to be “autonomous.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But we’re also seeing that they kind of need that level of unification, because we are moving towards a more industrial structure, we’re moving towards a more interconnected economic structure across the planet than they had previously.

Lleu: He actually specifically tells us that his radios are better than the Ancients’ radios, which I thought was interesting, ’cause I think it’s the only indication that we’ve had since Dragonquest of actual indigenous technological development on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: He was working on telegraphs, and then we kind of got sidetracked by AIVAS, and now we have radios.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also, also have a vague reference to like the fact that there was a runner-based communication system, but I don’t think we’re going to learn more about that until the short story.

Lleu: So it’s clear that they’re moving towards a “higher” technological level, even if they’re still, explicitly, are like, “Well, we’re never going to be on the same level as the Ancients, and we don’t really want to be,” but also, you know, the Minercraft and the Smithcraft are talking about setting up a joint Crafthall to industrialize iron and steel production in the Southern Continent, so it seems like, among other things, the kind of strict divisions between the Crafts as these autonomous guilds are maybe on their way out. One of the other things that happens in this books, book is that the Harpercraft Hall completely reorganizes themselves and essentially abandons music. They’re just going to be teachers now, and they’re focused on developing a new whole educational program that’s not music-centered, which is funny, as we’ll talk about in Dragonseye, because in Dragonseye we see them make the opposite decision.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it’s relevant that Threadfall is coming to an end, that some of the social pressures that have been holding Pern in this static guild system and with this Hold autonomy were the pressure of Threadfall.

Tequila Mockingbird: And now that that is potentially being removed, there’s a lot more, “Well, why can’t you be a dragonrider and also own land? Why can’t you be in two Crafts?” There isn’t the need for this anymore, so I think that combined with the revelation of like, “Hey, there are other ways to do things; we did things differently in the past,” is part of what is unlocking this change in Pernese society.

Lleu: Yeah. Something that you had mentioned, also, was the ways that environmentalism and the idea of sustainability is becoming an issue again, right? Because as they are reindustrializing, they are starting to think like, “Well, okay, we know now what our ancestors were trying to get away from. So how do we make sure that we don’t recreate that?”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think in some ways that is a little naïve. As we have spoken of in the past, there are some ways in which, once you start to industrialize production, you lose economic viability of individual crafting, artisan work, in a way that’s kind of…you can’t have one without the other.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it is possible to consciously and conscientiously develop higher technological base and higher industrial capacity without fucking your environment up, and it does seem like they’re thinking about that, in a way that made me be like, “Oh, yeah, it’s the ’90s now.” You know, we’re, she’s writing this in a post-Captain Planet world, and we’re really thinking, maybe even outside of the books, McCaffrey is thinking more about environmentalism than she was in the ’60s and ’70s.

Lleu: There’s a shift in how people are thinking. There’s still the concern that the world is going to become uninhabitable, but we’re moving away from the concern that the world is going to become uninhabitable because of overpopulation and towards the concern that the world is going to be uninhabitable because of global warming, which was apparently popularized after 1988. So the other thing that I thought was really interesting, thinking also about the environment in this book, is the extent to which this book is really — and I think probably unintentionally, but very strongly — leaning into a bunch of classic colonial tropes about the colonial environment as something that is hostile to the life of the colonist. There is, of course, all of these environmental dangers: tropical fevers, the thorn that ends up damaging Readis’s leg; there’s these sudden, horrible storms. There’s the horrible hurricane that sweeps through. And thinking about it in these terms, I think Aramina stands out as very much the wife of a colonial administrator. That’s her role, is to be the delicate white woman who is bringing civilization to this —

Lleu: — the jungle, yeah. And I think also that positions the dolphins really interestingly, because they are then this kind of liminal entity that is not quite animal but also not quite human, and that Aramina responds to by being like, “We have to violently exclude these beings from the realm of Civilization. They are Nature. They are something that we can use, if they are useful to us, but they are not something that we can ever accept as being on the same level as us.” Which has a certain racial politic to it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah! And also just the sheer fury and outrage when T’lion and Readis are giving the dolphins medical help.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because T’lion and Readis are like, “The most serious human injury was bruising. Some scrapes. And we had two or three dolphins who were going to die unless they received immediate medical attention, so we figured that was a higher priority,” and then are being told by these adults, like, “Not only is that untrue, but how dare you even suggest that?”

Lleu: Right — Readis says, “The dolphins are part of Paradise River Hold, because they inhabit these waters. This is where they live, too.” And Aramina is like, “Categorically, the dolphins are not and cannot be part of Paradise River Hold.” So, in addition to, everyone is struggling to adjust to the fact that there’s another intelligent species on the planet, there’s a policing of the boundaries of who and what we care about. We care about humans, and we care about only humans, plus dragons and maybe fire lizards. But also, there’s an extent to which dragons are an extension of the human, right? Dragons and their riders are in some ways indistinguishable: the dragon is the rider; the rider is the dragon. There were also a few miscellaneous continuity things, um, that came up again. “Name days”… It seems like they’re just birthdays? We’re explicitly told that Swacky’s name day is to celebrate 70 years of his life. But, also, she calls them “name days,” which does kind of imply that Pern has a calendar of saints, and one of them is St. Swacky.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m committing hard to St. Swacky. It just hasn’t come up before or since in the narrative, and that’s okay.

Lleu: The timeline is generally a mess. We do get a bunch of explicit indications of how old Readis is, but the indications that we get of how old Readis is don’t line up with other things we know about when Jayge and Aramina came to Southern…

Lleu: Yeah. So, it’s just a mess. Alemi once again knows what parts of speech are — he makes a reference to “adverbs” in a section that’s focalized through him, so I am forced to conclude that Schoolhouse Rock is among the teaching ballads — presumably heavily adapted because they don’t have storefronts in the way that “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here” implies.

Lleu: I actually went through all of Grammar Rock to be like, which, if any, of these songs are would work on Pern? And the answer is, only “Verb, if you omit the baseball section, which is sort of spoken, so you could probably omit the baseball section. And then I got really distracted because I was imagining Petiron, of all people, as Verb, the superhero in the verb song, and Menolly as the backing singers saying “That’s what’s happening!” It’s a lot to imagine.

Tequila Mockingbird: I love this for you. ’Cause we are explicitly told that they’re reviving baseball.

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that makes it seem like Pern lost all concept of organized sports?

Lleu: The only sports we see them do are foot races and runner races, and that’s it.[3]

Tequila Mockingbird: Also I love the fact that the three sports that the Pernese people are like, “That’s what we’re going to bring back” are baseball, soccer, and polo.

Lleu: That seems so playable, yeah. But apparently it’s back now. Robinton’s death scene happens again. I don’t believe it at all. Someone sends Jayge and Aramina a fire lizard note; Jayge reads it and immediately collapses on the railing sobbing. Readis takes it to Aramina, and she collapses sobbing. Then we get this scene of 12-year-old Readis carrying this note through the whole Hold and showing it to everyone he meets. And he’s like, “I don’t understand what’s going on!” And they read it and they immediately start crying. And it’s, like, every single person in the Hold. Sobbing. They’re collapsing against the tree and in tears. And I’m like, I just don’t believe this. Jayge and Armina have met Robinton. He gave them political support when they were laying a legal claim to their Hold. I can believe that they would feel a certain amount of personal grief about this. But when it’s his Aunt Temma? No! Sorry. She’s not bursting into tears that Robinton is dead.

Lleu: But anyway…and yet. And then, finally, as we mentioned, Oterel’s there at the climax of this book. If you read All the Weyrs of Pern, or listened to our episode, where we talked a little bit about it, you may remember that Lord Oterel of Tillek dying was a fairly significant plot element in that book.

Tequila Mockingbird: They spend quite a lot of time trying to figure out which of his sons to choose as the next Lord Holder. There’s a whole, very incoherent, mathematically confusing vote about it. We spend multiple chapters on this.

Lleu: But he’s back. From the dead. To celebrate Readis as the first dolphineer.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, to be fair, there’s overlap, right? At the beginning of this book, he’s alive, because at the beginning of this book, All the Weyrs of Pern has not yet happened. But by the end of this book, All the Weyrs of Pern has pretty clearly happened. Robinton is dead, so Oterel should also be dead.

Lleu: I have to conclude that she just got confused and had Oterel and Ranrel switched in her head or something. I will note that, in contrast to Dragonseye, she does not thank the Pern fan community for providing continuity editors. Not that it made a significant difference in Dragonseye, either, but at least they were there. Oterel necromancy is what happens when you don’t have the continuity editors, I guess.

Lleu: The last thing I wanted to talk about, just sort of in passing, is that at the end of this book, when Readis is reunited with his family and Aramina’s sobbing — and I’m like, I don’t believe for a second that you are actually sad or guilty about this, or, rather, I think that you’re sad that your son has escaped your control, but I don’t think that you actually understand the stakes of what you did to him.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I also think you’re embarrassed that you are having all of these people in your social community, many of whom are very high status, seeing that your son has run away from home and seeing it as a referendum on your parenting.

Lleu: Yes. Anyway, one of the things that happens is that all of the political leaders are like, “Yeah, we talked it over with your parents, and they had had a chance to meet and speak with the Tillek, Teresa,” so:

Lleu: “‘She asked us,’ Jayge said, looking slightly embarrassed while Aramina ducked her head and nervously twitched the hem of her tunic, one of her Gather tunics, Readis now noticed, ‘if we objected to your becoming a dolphineer.’

Lleu: “‘It is an honor to be asked,’ his mother said softly, hesitantly, before raising her head to look him straight in the eye. ‘I was once asked to accept an honor—’ She shot Lessa a quick glance. ‘—and could not. I cannot stand in your way, Readis.’”

Lleu: So, this is wild to me, both because in Renegades and also implied at the end of “The Girl Who Heard Dragons” we were presented with Aramina’s decision not to go to the Weyr as because she didn’t want to. For a variety of reasons, including that she was, you know, overwhelmed hearing all dragons all the time, but also because she didn’t want to leave her family, didn’t want the life of a Weyrwoman. But here it seems like we’re being asked to reevaluate that as an act of cowardice.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t know that I insist on that. Two things. One, I think you can parse, “I could not do it” as a failure, but also just like, “I could not bring myself to do it,” as an act of volition.

Lleu: I feel like either way it still implies an “I should have done it, but I didn’t.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. But, two, she’s also looking at Lessa when she says it.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I think there is something to the fact that, Lessa is not the kind of woman who you look straight in the face and say, “You’ve made a mistake,” or “I don’t agree with you,” unless you want to die. And Aramina is someone who very clearly exerts control over people who are lower in the social hierarchy than she is but does not frequently attempt to resist control from people higher in the social hierarchy than she is.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I could absolutely see an Aramina who is like, “Fuck this, I’m not a dragonrider,” looking at Lessa and being like, “It’s such a shame that I couldn’t be a dragonrider.”

Lleu: You know what? Yeah, that’s fair enough. Either way, I think it’s an interesting character moment for Aramina, who is generally done quite poorly in this book.

Lleu: — and she made maybe the most interesting choice in the whole series, of any character, in Renegades, and here she’s awful, just pretty unmitigatedly from start to finish. But this moment at the end is, at least there’s something going on here, and I don’t know that I like it, but there’s something going on here that’s not just, “And she’s a horrible person now.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I could imagine — and here we are once again with the fake good version of Pern that lives only in our head — a version of Aramina who made all of the same bad choices, but for interesting and compelling psychological reasons, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: I could see a version of Aramina, who was deeply traumatized by her experiences hearing dragons against her will and being kidnapped and literally faked her death and ran away from her entire life and her family to avoid this, seeing her six-year-old getting pulled into this and having a really uncontrolled and unhealthy trauma response of, “Keep my child safe. Keep my child away from this.” Which is then exacerbated by the fact that he gets severely injured. I could see that, but that’s not the actual Aramina that we’re given.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think it is reading it — if not against the text but the text is not giving us any of that. I’m putting all of that there.

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that I think could have given you the same plot with more depth and making her more sympathetic.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause to your point, she just kind of wakes up and is a mean and controlling person, and you’re like, “Well, all right. I guess we’re doing that today.”

Lleu: And Jayge is there. Part of it also is, Jayke was also a pleasant enough character in Renegades of Pern. Not particularly interesting, but not boring, and not bad.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also very willing to do unusual things and run away and change his life. And now is again coming down hard on, “No, you have to be a Holder just like me, and you have to be obedient.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. They both seem to have become much more conservative, socially and politically, since they were young, which is, I guess, something that can happen. But we’re also not seeing that as a transition. We’re just presented with it.

Lleu: — now they have land, they have status, there’s stakes now to their choices in a way that there weren’t in the same way when they were 18 and 20, or whatever..

Lleu: We just see the before and the after and none of the how they got there. So the after feels completely disconnected from the before.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it does hearken back to her ongoing issue where her villains don’t have a reason that explains their choices. They don’t have their own logical motivations that conflict with the protagonist. They just wake up one morning and decide to be evil.

Tequila Mockingbird: Wake up this morning and decide to read a different, better book.

Lleu: Well. Yeah. I like Dolphins of Pern. I do think it’s good. I don’t know that I would rank it at the top, but I probably would put it in the top three of all Pern books, for me.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think top five, for sure. But I also don’t know that I think it really works if you have no idea of what happened in All the Weyrs of Pern.

Lleu: It did for me as a child, clearly, but I agree that it would work better if you’ve read All the Weyrs of Pern, and it’s definitely not worth reading All the Weyrs of Pern just to read this book. So, if you’re interested in a book that you can read by itself that is good, I would recommend C.J. Cherryh’s Pride of Chanur, which is a novel about first contact with an alien being, where part of the galactic society that the main characters are part of not only doesn’t understand but doesn’t really want to understand and instead wants to exploit and abuse the alien beings that you have made contact with. It’s got some interesting handling of kind of interesting multispecies interactions, and I’m very pointedly avoiding saying more because parts of it would be spoilers, but it does have cat aliens, so that’s fun.

Tequila Mockingbird: I was really torn between two recommendations by the same author, and so I’m going to kind of half-recommend both of them, in that I think both The Deep and Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon, are good books that are worthy of recommending to your attention, and I think they both partially come to bear on the same themes and concepts as Dolphins of Pern. The Deep is about mermaids who are descendants of pregnant enslaved people who had been thrown overboard from slave ships, have developed their own underwater society, and are now considering how to make contact again with the regular humans up on the surface, and thinking about first contact, or kind of a first contact, but also that reestablishing a contact that has long been gone. And Sorrowland is about a woman who runs away into the woods to escape from an oppressive society and has to then reckon with living separately from that society or trying to return and improve it.

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

[1] Readis’s runner-beast that he uses for mobility — we cut the bit where we introduced her by name.

[2] The word we were looking for is “ultrasound.”