Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #14: Red Star Rising/Dragonseye (1996/1997), part 1

Lleu: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but the only one by us.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I thought that I had never read this book before, but when I got to the lion fight scene, I had a sudden visceral flashback. I had read this book before and just remembered none of it.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I read this book for the first time in 2021. Note that in this episode, we will be talking at some length about homophobia, sexual violence and reproductive control, violent border control, and eugenics, so be prepared for that. This book is Dragonseye slash Red Star Rising, which we will talk about shortly.

Tequila Mockingbird: Much like Renegades, Dragonseye slash Red Star Rising is sort of three novellas in a trench coat more than it is one coherent novel. We have three different plot threads that are only nominally connected to each other. We’re about 250 years post-landing. We are on the cusp of the second ever cycle of Threadfall, and the people on Pern are dealing with the loss of technology that their ancestors once had and kind of grappling with how to best preserve their culture and their knowledge in the future. They lose the computers in a dramatic lightning strike incident, which we’ll get into, and end up making the decision to shift their education from a learning all about pre-Earth history, science, and literature to a music-based, Pern-information-only-based curriculum that we will see in later books — the teaching ballads, the Harper system, all of that. And the college is also concerned with how to preserve memories about Thread, and that’s what leads to the Finger Rock and the Eye Rock, which we’ve also seen in the Ninth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: Simultaneously, and not particularly related, we have the story of Debera, who is a young Hold girl who Impresses a green dragon against her parents’ will; is brought into the Weyr; and has a charming, anemic little romance with Iantine, a painter. And then — actually legitimately somewhat connected — we get the story of Iantine going to Bitra Hold and the downfall of Bitra’s Lord Holder, Chalkin, who ends up being impeached by the other Lord Holders for failing to warn his Hold that Thread is coming, failing to prepare his Hold that Thread is coming, and also just acts of extreme violence against his smallholders. That’s kind of just all happening at the same time over the course of this book?

Tequila Mockingbird: We also get a little bit of the budding, complicated romance between K’vin — not K’van! — and Zulaya, the Weyrleader and Weyrwoman of Telgar Weyr, which is where Debera Impresses and where Iantine ends up living. So, it’s — I think it’s fair to say that this is somewhat more connected than Renegades.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it still definitely feels like at least two, if not two and a half, things that are just all happening simultaneously than one coherent story with a character who makes actual narrative progress.

Lleu: Yes. And then, crucially, all of the Chalkin stuff, which is the most —

Lleu: — yeah, dramatic, anyway, component of the things that happen in this book — all of that’s done 60 pages before the end of the book, and then they’re just kind of chilling. They’re waiting for Thread to happen. They go down to Southern, notionally to check on the grubs but really just to get a break from everyone sitting in the Weyr waiting anxiously for Thread to fall. And some stuff happens, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s notable that the two characters who have the most character growth and development are Iantine, who starts as this very smug, “I know better than my elders; I’m the hotshot young painter; I’m going to be able to get a good deal out of Chalkin. Don’t worry about me” and is humbled by his very emotionally and physically distressing experiences in Bitra, and P’tero, a young blue rider who is similarly a hotshot, thinks he’s very cool, is trying to impress his lover, and ends up getting mauled by a lion when they do go down to Southern and learning important lessons about bravery coming from the inside and being honest and vulnerable with your romantic partner. But I wouldn't say P’tero is a main character. He’s, I think, a secondary character with significant time on the page…

Lleu: Well, I think I would say it’s K’vin. If I had to pick one protagonist, I would say it’s K’vin. If I had to pick two protagonists, I would say, yeah, K’vin and Iantine. I would say K’vin because the novel starts — well, technically the novel starts with Chalkin, but then it immediately transitions to K’vin, and then it ends with K’vin. So, that seems to me like a pretty strong indication that we’re supposed to see this as the K’vin story.

Lleu: It just also has all these other people, and I think Iantine probably gets at least as much page time as K’vin, if not more.

Lleu: It’s a very weird book. I was looking back on my review of it from when I first read it, and at the time I was like, “This book is kind of bad. There’s some interesting stuff, but also some really bad stuff. It’s boring and slow, nothing happens, and the characters are not very well developed.” And on rereading it, I no longer agree with that assessment. I actually think the characters are quite well done — I think it’s, that’s probably the strength of this book. Events happen in the book, but not in a “this book has a plot” way. Mostly this book is about sitting with characters in this period of uncertainty as they’re waiting for Thread, as the last bits of technology are dying, and as they're trying to figure out, what do we do from here? And they don’t necessarily have definitive answers by the end of it! They have: “Here’s some stuff we’re going to try, and hopefully it’ll work, but we don’t know.” The end of the book ends, and…we don’t know! I mean, we do, because we’ve read the Ninth Pass books, know that at least some of it worked, but we also know that some of it didn’t. And I think that’s really interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: Some of what we’re grappling with is the fact that these characters we’ve named as the protagonists are really passive in the story in a lot of ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: The events of the narrative happen to them, rather than they go out and cause things to happen. Chalkin is actually doing a lot more story propulsion than K’vin or Iantine is.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would say Chalkin and Debera are the characters who actually change things in the story, and our protagonists are reacting to those changes.

Lleu: Yeah, which I think is cool, actually. It’s interesting to have characters who are peripheral to the action. And that’s part of what is bothering K’vin, is that he just became Weyrleader six months ago after the old Weyrleader, who was in his 60s, died suddenly. Zulaya, the Weyrwoman, is ten years older than him, and also he’s the like many-times-great-nephew of Sorka Hanrahan.

Lleu: So he has all of this expectation on him, and he’s like, “Not only do I not know if I can live up to this expectation, but there’s simply no way for me to live up to this expectation for at least another six months. I’m just…stuck waiting.” And I think she does a really good job of putting us in the mindsets of a bunch of characters who are kind of stuck waiting. And they’re like, “We can do little things, but much of what’s happening right now is completely beyond our control.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I think my main frustration with this book is that I want it to be more than it is because I think there could be two really, really good books buried in here, and that’s not the book that happened.

Lleu: Yes — or perhaps we should say, the books that happened, because actually, technically, we read two slightly different books. So, Tequila read Dragonseye, the US edition published in 1997, and I read Red Star Rising, the UK edition published in 1996. And they are not actually exactly the same — in mostly small ways, and also some ways that are small but significant in terms of world-building stuff, especially in terms of homophobia, which we will talk about later, and in ways that I’ve been losing my mind about for the last week as I try to find out why they’re the same length when every passage that I found where they are different is longer in Red Star Rising than it is in Dragonseye.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is not unique. We didn’t get a chance to mention it in our episode about “The P.E.RN.^c Survey,” but the UK edition of that one is also pretty significantly different, as you will have noticed if you read the transcript.

Lleu: Well — yeah, not necessarily significantly, there are extensive but minor differences between the UK and US editions of that text, so if you look at the transcript for it, you can see in the notes that I marked down any places where the UK text was different from the US text.

Lleu: And it was basically all of them. I think not quite all — there were, like, one or two where it was the same — but in most of the passages that we quoted, there was at least some difference, even if it was just an extra word.

Tequila Mockingbird: And a visible part of that difference is that they changed the title on this one, which is fascinating!

Lleu: Yes, they did. Especially because the UK edition, Red Star Rising, has a subtitle. It is Red Star Rising: The Second Chronicles of Pern, which suggests to me that she thought that Chronicles of Pern: First Fall and Red Star Rising: The Second Chronicles of Pern were going to be the beginning, perhaps, of an ongoing series of prequels looking at transition points in Pern’s history that she didn’t end up writing, but that maybe she was thinking about. Which also let me feel a little bit more generous towards this book, if she maybe thought that she was going to say more about some of the things that come up here that don’t get maybe as much time as we would like.

Lleu: But also, by the time Dragonseye was published a year later, she seems to have abandoned that idea.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, we don’t read those, but she and Todd quote-unquote “co-wrote” a bunch of books set around the Third Pass, so I can see that maybe she felt like, “Okay, we go from the First Pass to the Second Pass. We’re marching through each Pass and doing a little section on life at that time.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And then she hit the point where she felt like she could no longer write books and eventually passed away. But I think it is notable that at this point in her publishing career, she is shifting more and more towards co-writing with other, younger writers, and the impression that I get is that she’s doing more of the ideas work, the world-building, the plotting, and they’re handling the actual craft.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And so she was clearly kind of starting to slow down. There are only two more independently-written Pern books after this one, and at that point, she co-writes several with Todd.

Tequila Mockingbird: He is still, in fact, I think, writing them.[1] And at least we feel pretty strongly that once she switches to co-writing with Todd, they’re books by Todd, and she’s putting her imprimatur on them, which is why we don’t read those. But maybe there are things that, as you say, she set up here that she meant to come back to and ended up just not having the time or the energy to come back to.

Lleu: That’s my impression of it. And I think the result is still — as I said, I gave this, I think, three stars the first time I read it and I bumped it up to four when I just reread it recently, ’cause I was like, I actually enjoy this book. It’s not great, but there’s so much stuff going on in it that even if some parts of it are absolutely bizarre and some parts of it are simply baffling, there’s enough that I think is interesting and engaging, and I do like the characters, that it keeps me thinking about it, keeps me coming back to it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I’m also, frankly, a little surprised that I clearly didn’t like it when I read it as a tween. To your point, I’m like, “Yeah, this kind of works. I’m okay with this.”

Lleu: It wouldn’t be good if every book in the series were like this, but I think it’s fine to have one book that’s just, let’s just sit with some characters and see what it’s like to be in this world for a while.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we’ve wanted more of that recently, so it’s nice to get it.

Tequila Mockingbird: We are definitely getting second verse, same as the first, because we have, yet again, the same plotline repeating that we just talked about in Dolphins of Pern.

Lleu: Yeah. We have not one but two Menollys in this book, although one of them gets more page time. The first is Jemmy, who is a student at the College, but a very advanced and precocious student at the College, who is the younger son of a Seahold who was really gifted academically as a child, but his parents didn’t understand him and he had a hard time relating to people. He’s, I think, fairly heavily implied to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, although not in those words. Then he goes to the College, and now they sort of unlock his true talents, and he’s still a little bit abrasive and awkward, but he’s a gifted musician, of course, and has a kind of encyclopedic memory and has kind of flowered in this environment — the College, of course, being eventually the Harper Hall.

Tequila Mockingbird: He even has a hypothetical romance with an older mentor figure.

Lleu: Yeah. So, Jemmy, Menolly 4.0, and then we get Debera, the young woman who is the neglected daughter — although an older daughter rather than a younger daughter — in her Hold, whose father is abusive in a variety of ways, not necessarily always explicit, but certainly controlling. He plans to marry her off to someone so that he can lay claim to land grants that she’s entitled to to expand his Holding, and she runs away to go be a dragonrider and live in the Weyr and have a psychic animal friend who attacks people that are mean to her. And it’s sort of Menolly if Menolly had ended up staying on at Benden rather than going on to the Harper Hall. So, Menolly 5.0.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although I do think Debera also has maybe shades of Nerilka, in terms of, her father has remarried and she has a lot of scorn for this second wife —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and the way that this second wife is managing the household that Debera was raised to help her mother manage.

Lleu: I did, yeah. She’s, again, Aramina if Aramina had made the opposite choice. So, rather than “Everyone’s pressuring you to be in the Weyr and you choose not to be in the Weyr,” Debera is, “Everyone’s pressuring you to be in the Hold and you’re choosing, ‘No, I’m going to exercise my agency and leave this and be something else.’” So, reverse Aramina and also, again, a Readis being like, “I’m going to do something genuinely different and break with expectations,” or a Jaxom if he were good, not being everything that he’s been expected to be since he was a child.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, to be fair, there are only so many ways to do a coming-of-age story.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think the running away from home, I’m not going to be what you want me to be, is a pretty typical one.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it does start to look pretty familiar after thirteen books.

Lleu: Yeah. I did also just want to flag — Iantine’s story does not closely recall anyone else’s, but he does suffer a severe feet injury. She does love to give people foot problems. We didn’t mention it with Readis in Dolphins of Pern, but not unlike Menolly, also, in that way.

Tequila Mockingbird: It does make you wonder, like the haircut thing — did someone in McCaffrey’s life have foot troubles?

Tequila Mockingbird: Or is this just a random preoccupation? Oh, what a segue from feet stuff to sexuality and relationships. But I think we’re going to make it.

Lleu: We are, yeah. So, speaking of things that people sexualize, we get three different sexual-slash-romantic relationships that get significant page time in this book. One, as came up in the plot summary, is K’vin, the new Weyrleader of Telgar, and Zulaya, the Weyrwoman. One is Debera, the young woman who runs away and Impresses a green dragon, and Iantine, the painter. And the third is P’tero, the hotshot young blue rider, and M’leng, his partner, who is a male green rider. This is the second book in the whole series, and the last, that I felt I could tag as “lgbtq” on Storygraph, and it’s because P’tero actually gets a whole bunch of page time, and his relationship with M’leng gets a whole bunch of page time, not just from P’tero’s perspective, but also from other people looking on. M’leng commissions Iantine to do a portrait of P’tero, ’cause he’s afraid that P’tero’s going to get killed in Threadfall. I mean, he’s like, “I want to have something to remember him by.” K’vin is weirdly kind of constantly thinking about P’tero and reflecting on his relationship with M’leng.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we also have a scene where we see the green and blue rider, i.e., the gay or queer male community of the Weyr coming together and interacting with each other, which we've really never seen before. After P’tero and M’leng are mauled by lions in the Southern Continent, they’re recovering and celebrating their recovery, and we get to have this scene where they’re talking to other green riders. And that is, I believe, the first time we actually get textual “his lover” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — as opposed to what we’ve gotten before, which has been “his special friend,” “his companion.”

Lleu: Which functionally is also a euphemism here, especially ’cause it sometimes — it is at least once in this book also used to refer to a dragon who’s in the same Weyr as another dragon.

Lleu: As in, two dragons who are both at Telgar Weyr are “Weyrmates.” So it’s just nice. It’s refreshing. They have sex in this book! We don’t get a detailed description of it — it’s a fade to black —

Lleu: — and they do get mauled by lions immediately afterwards, but they’re on the Southern Continent, they send their dragons off to go hunting, and then…

Tequila Mockingbird: Now, okay, are the psychic and possibly sapient lions homophobic?

Lleu: “The two dragons launched upwards at the same moment and P’tero watched with some pride in the blue’s elegant flight attitude as he made height before he would glide down towards his prey.

Lleu: “‘Oooh, your hide is hot. We’d best be careful not to burn in this sun.’

Lleu: “They enjoyed each other’s company so much that neither was aware when the breeze altered to the west. It still cooled their bare bodies, drying the sweat they had generated. They weren’t even aware of much until two things happened at the same instant: Ormonth’s angry scream reverberated in P’tero’s skull, and he was rammed down hard against M’leng so that he cracked his chin on this rock aas sharp things tore into his buttocks.”[2]

Tequila Mockingbird: And they specifically send their dragons away so that they can have privacy to have sex.

Lleu: Yeah. So, that’s huge for this book. Unfortunately, it’s also paired with some of the most gratuitously homophobic passages in the whole series, I would say. It’s kind of wild that those things are paired together — and also those passages are different.

Tequila Mockingbird: “Five girls stood on the Hatching Ground. There should have been six, but the girl’s family had refused to give her up on Search since they claimed a union had been arranged and they could not go back on that pledge. As K’vin thought that a good third or even half of this clutch might be greens, he hoped there’d be enough suitable candidates to Impress all the green hatchings. Green dragons were valuable to a Weyr for their speed and agility, even if they didn’t have the stamina of the larger dragons. Still, they were perhaps the most problematic when it came to Threadfighting. Greens with male riders tended to be more volatile, apt to ignore their Weyrleaders’ orders in the excitement of a Fall—in short, they tended to unnecessarily show off their bravery to the rest of the Weyr. Female riders, on the other hand, while more stable, tended to get pregnant frequently unless they were very careful, since the greens were usually very sexually active. Even spontaneous abortions due to the extreme cold of between required sensible convalescence, so female green riders were all too often off the duty roster for periods of time. ‘Taking a short dragon-ride’ was now a euphemism for ending an unwanted pregnancy. Still, K’vin had fallen on the side of preferring females when Search provided them.”

Lleu: Here is the equivalent passage in Red Star Rising, the UK edition; it’s about half again as long:

Lleu: “Only five girls stood on the Hatching Ground vying to attract the attention of the greens. There should have been six, but one girl’s family had refused to give her up on Search since they claimed a union had been arranged and they could not go back on that pledge. As K’vin thought that a good third or even half of this clutch might be greens, he hoped there’d be enough suitable ‘lads’”

Lleu: “to impress the green hatchlings. His study of Thread fighting tactics also indicated that greens with male riders tended to be more volatile, apt to ignore their Weyrleaders’ orders in the excitement of a Fall: in short, they tended to unnecessarily show off their bravery to the rest of the Weyr. On the other hand, the green dragons were valuable to a Weyr for their speed and agility even if they didn’t have the stamina of the larger dragons. A careful wingleader alternated his green riders, resting each at least an hour during a Fall.

Lleu: “There had been a monograph on the advantages of female over male green riders in Threadfall. Although the text allowed the reader to make his own decision, K’vin had fallen on the side of preferring females when search provided them. Certainly their personalities were more stable and they posed fewer problems to the Weyrleaders. Young male green riders could go into emotional declines if they lost their weyrmates and would be useless in Fall, sometimes even suiciding in their distress. On the other hand, since the greens were sexually very active, there was more danger of female riders becoming pregnant, unless they were extremely careful. Even spontaneous abortions due to the extreme cold of between required sensible convalescence.

Lleu: “‘Taking a short dragon-ride’ was now a euphemism for ending an unwanted pregnancy. Another good reason to have a few female green riders in the Weyr: less embarrassment.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is worth it noting that in the Dragonseye edition, we do get that comment about the suicide risk, but it’s not specifically attached to green dragonriders. It’s just attached to male dragon riders.

Tequila Mockingbird: “The unfortunate rider was apt to take his life as not. If he lived, he was only half a man, totally bereft by his loss. Female riders were less apt to suicide. They at least had the option of sublimating their loss by having children.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, in Dragonseye, that comes immediately preceding this, two paragraphs ahead of this —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but I think it’s interesting that it frames it not as a green, i.e., gay male, problem, but as a male problem.

Lleu: So, I think what’s going on is that in the homophobic passage, it’s not about “if they lose their weyrmate” as in “if they lose their dragon”; it’s about if someone breaks up with them, or if their weyrmate is injured or dies.

Lleu: That’s my read on this. Even if it’s “if their boyfriend dies, they’re apt to suicide,” it’s like, like…uniquely so?

Lleu: Why, pray tell, Anne? Yeah, there’s so much going on here. First of all, the “‘lads’” in quotation marks versus “candidates” in the US edition. Given the fact that the US edition was published a year later, I have to assume that what happened is that the US edition got another couple rounds of edits —

Lleu: — and someone suggested tightening up this passage and also maybe making it slightly less homophobic.

Tequila Mockingbird: I guess I’m intrigued by the question of, is it that somebody read it and was like, “Anne, what the fuck”? Or is it just that she wanted the flow to tighten up? Because you’ve mentioned that she was at least professionally friendly with Delany — it’s not like she didn’t know queer people.

Tequila Mockingbird: So maybe one of them read it and was like, “Anne, what's going on here?”

Lleu: Yeah, and there's no like there’s no indication in any of the paratext. There are acknowledgments at the beginning, but I believe they’re the same in both. She thanks a group of fan readers for their help with continuity, in particular.

Lleu: Which… But there’s just no comment on it. I only discovered it entirely by accident, because I was listening to the audio book, which uses the Red Star Rising text, and I heard this passage and I was like, this is bonkers. And I went to go look for it in Dragonseye, and I couldn’t find it. And so I had to go to the special collection at the library to consult the UK text and see that it was based on the UK text. And I was like, how did this happen? And I mean, the answer has to be the publication timeline, but I don’t know what the process is behind the scenes — if it was just for flow, if someone was like, “Tone it down,” or if there was some other thought process. Also, I note that there's no monograph. K’vin doesn't get to read a monograph on green dragons! What’s up with that?

Tequila Mockingbird: It does it does pose the question whether she further committed to the idea that there’s no literature on Pern by the time she revised it.

Lleu: Yeah, which is something that we will come back to later in the episode.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause I do want to spend a little more time on gender and sexuality, because in that passage we talk about, oh, there’s only five green candidates. Well, that missing sixth candidate is Debera, who rocks up, having run away from her family, and there’s a very interesting confrontation when her father shows up to try and prevent her from Impressing, gets there too late —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and ends up getting mauled by her dragon. Justice for Morath: she did the best she could, but she was physically too small to bite his head off, and so she ends up just gnawing on him.

Lleu: I think what Morath says is really striking and really telling there. As she’s being like dragged away by Debera and K’vin, Morath says:

Lleu: “He would hurt you. He would own you. You are mine and I am yours and no-one comes between us.”

Lleu: Which, on the one hand, she’s a possessive little baby, but on the other hand, yeah, he was trying to own her and that is bad!

Tequila Mockingbird: And what her dad says when he’s complaining about this is that:

Tequila Mockingbird: “putting ideas in her head when she was a good, hardworking girl who always did as she was told. Then you riders tell her she’s fit for dragons. Fit! I know what you riders get up to and Debera’s a good girl. She’s not like you lot—”

Tequila Mockingbird: And then he gets told to stop. And he comes back, etc., and then his ultimate complaint:

Tequila Mockingbird: “She was a good girl until they come. A good biddable girl!”

Tequila Mockingbird: So I think there’s a very interesting contrast being set up here between a “good, biddable” Hold girl and a dragonrider, who is not “biddable,” not obedient, not part of the social power structure of the Hold —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and, because she is exercising that agency, both sexual and just personal, is bad.

Lleu: Yeah, also there’s a really striking juxtaposition with that. First of all, when the complaint is initially being registered, the Weyrwoman says:

Lleu: “That’s what you weyrfolk always say. But it’s us who suffer from what you call ‘right’.”

Lleu: So there’s clearly a sense of us-versus-them. But then also, at the end, the Lady Holder of Telgar says to Debera’s father and the other two men who came with him:

Lleu: “‘What I would like to know,’ Salda was saying, ‘is why Debera arrived here so late, on her own, and with you evidently in hot pursuit. You realize, of course,’ and the stern expression in Salda’s eyes was one Zulaya knew well, ‘that we – Lord Tashvi and I – would not be at all pleased to find that Debera has been denied her holder rights.’

Lleu: “snorted and then moaned as the injudicious movement caused him pain. ‘She'll not be a holder now, will she? She’ll be lost to us forever, she will.’

Lleu: “‘And any chance of bagging her legal land allotment,’ Salda said with mock remorse.”

Lleu: So there’s a — and we’ll talk a lot more about this — a lot of interest in this book on the question of rights and what you have a right to, what rights you are legally granted.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because this does seem to articulate that Debera has the legal right to be Searched, if she so chooses, and to become a dragonrider. As we will see, though, this is not the end of parents feeling like this is functionally a kidnapping. When we get to the Ninth Pass, there’s a lot of tension between Hold and Weyr, because they feel like, “Hey, you’re just coming in and kidnapping our daughters and sons to be dragonriders.”

Lleu: Yeah. In fact, even Paulin, the Lord Holder of Fort Hold — who’s very sympathetic to the Weyr; he’s part of the political establishment — has a certain amount of, like —

Lleu: “They took two promising young Holders-in-training from me on Search recently, and that’s kind of a bummer. I’m happy for them, I guess, and I can’t really complain, but…” He's not mad about it, but he's also not… thrilled about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. We talked in the very first episode about the way in which, in some very funny sideways ways, the Weyr replaces the church in the Pernese-to-medieval-European paradigm.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is actually another way where, okay, that’s the only option you have if you don’t want to grow up and live in the Hold or follow the path that is set out for you. There is that escape route built into this society, and it’s the “you can always go off and become a dragonrider.”

Tequila Mockingbird: You could always become a nun. And so in some ways it is the only legal agency that women have in this society, or that children have in this society.

Lleu: Yeah, although the other question mark here is, is the question of land —

Lleu: — and to what extent Debera’s land allotment is Debera’s land allotment and to what extent Debera’s land allotment is Debera’s family's land allotment because there’s a bit of inconsistency on that front over the course of the book that we can maybe come back to, ’cause there's other stuff that we should talk about in this section.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also get the fascinating comment that “Promiscuity is not promoted in the Weyr,”[3] which, um, I do beg to differ, but is perhaps a meaningful contrast between Pern in the Second Pass and Pern by the Sixth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we know that by the Sixth Pass, it is not expected for a dragonrider to be monogamous, and it’s, in fact, pretty normal for them not to be monogamous.

Lleu: And by the Ninth Pass we’re specifically told that Weyrwomen categorically should not be monogamous, at least not to the point of like hard-committing emotionally to one person.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s plausible to me that social expectation has not fully established itself yet. There hasn’t been enough time, and so the Weyr is currently maybe in tension between these social mores that they brought from Earth that generally promote monogamy, and maybe also the sort of respectability politics of not wanting to be seen by the Holds as sexually loose —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and the biological necessity that the dragon implies, where you are going to be having some orgies, and you can’t really help it.

Lleu: Yeah, the flip side is, the thing that is explicitly flagged in that passage as proof that the Weyrs do not encourage promiscuity is not, in fact, anything to do with having sex with multiple people, but rather about, essentially, parental support. So “the Weyrs don’t encourage promiscuity” in the sense that male dragonriders are expected to be at least somewhat present and provide material support for any children that they produce.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it also notes that the Weyrlings’ sleeping quarters are separated by gender.

Lleu: Yeah. So there’s also a certain amount of, are we dealing with sort of different perceptions of what “promiscuity” means?

Lleu: Because we do in fact see, even in the Sixth Pass, that tracking relationships between people and like keeping track of who everyone has been hooking up with and who people’s parents might be is actually important for the Weyr because they are conscious of the fact that incest is bad for the gene pool, especially in a context where dragons are making people go wild, that you want to be able to avoid that and to arrange things so that it can be avoided. That is important in the Weyr. To what extent is “promiscuity” here actually meaning “having sex with multiple people,” versus to what extent is “promiscuity” meaning “there are no legal, contractual marriages.”

Lleu: ’Cause we’re told that, in theory, dragonriders’ children, if they are not themselves dragonriders, can make land claims, but that they rarely choose to do so. Mostly they stay in the Weyr even if they don’t Impress. So if we're thinking about sort of the relationship between sexuality and social reproduction more generally, part of what’s at issue is that not only is Debera removing herself from the Hold and so denying the Hold access to her personal land allotment, or the allotment that would be granted to them on her behalf —

Lleu: — but also she’s removing all of her children, right? So there’s a whole, now, bloodline potentially that the Hold no longer has access to and is no longer ever going to have access to, probably.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think in some ways it’s very intentional that dragonriders don’t have land claims, because they are in some way trading their land claim for the other privileges of being a dragonrider.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right? You have the social equality with, hypothetically, a Holder, even if you were not born that way. There are certain rights and privileges that you can expect, and In exchange for that, you don’t get the land holding.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because if you had both, then that would tip the social balance on Pern in a way that is not politically advantageous.

Lleu: Right. It’s important that there be limitations on dragonriders’ status, even if in other ways they are the aristocracy.

Tequila Mockingbird: And limitations on dragonriders’ heritability of status. You can’t set up a dragonrider dynasty —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because it’s about, okay, whoever flies the oldest queen dragon; that’s just what it is, and it’s going to change and we can’t own land and accumulate power in the same way that a Hold can.

Lleu: Yeah, although that’s sort of belied by the fact that K’vin is —

Tequila Mockingbird: — yeah. So is M’shall. But in the sense that, yes, that can mean you’re more likely to Impress a dragon, but you don’t accumulate the power.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. The idea is, the Weyr has sort of a net amount of power that will never increase or decrease.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is mostly granted by the fact that you have a giant, fuck-off, teleporting, fire-breathing dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, to try and counterweight that, you can’t have any other power. Also financial power — you can’t accumulate wealth in the Weyr, particularly.

Lleu: Yeah, so a contrast with the status of the church: the Weyrs do not own large tracts of land. They aren’t producing artisanal goods. They aren’t engaging in commerce in the ways that monasteries, for example, often did.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it seems like they sort of are by the Sixth Pass, because they’re talking about, “Okay, how are we going to make money during the Interval?”

Lleu: True. Yeah, there’s some vagueness about it here. So, on the one hand, yes, we’re told here that Paulin, for example, when he’s reflecting on those two guys who were Searched, is like, “Well, yeah, they won’t have as much freedom to like practice a trade or whatever as they did during the Interval.” But we don’t actually get an indication that anyone in the Weyr in this book has been practicing a trade previously.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, yes, but, to be fair, we also don’t really see Weyrs during the Interval. It’s not as interesting.

Lleu: Yeah, so maybe they were all doing trades ten years ago, and now, over the last ten years, they’ve been winding down. It’s possible. I can’t think of another time in the series when we see a dragonrider using currency, but we do see that M’leng has marks and is using them to commission Iantine to do a portrait.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is interesting, because I think we’ve sort of seen in other places that the Crafts are the ones that make marks, or, like, they can mint money, basically.

Tequila Mockingbird: Maybe that’s starting to become the distribution of powers, in that...

Lleu: Holds produce stuff, but the Crafts are the ones who maintain the financial system.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and that if a dragonrider wants to make money, they have to run additional errands or provide additional services outside of being a dragonrider to someone in a Hold or a Craft.

Tequila Mockingbird: And maybe that means practicing a craft. Dragonriding, you get room, board, and privileges, but you don’t get a salary.

Lleu: Yeah. And we do, in fact, also know that one of the things that they’ve been doing during the Interval is being planetary transportation system. When they’re redoing the school curriculum, one of the things that Clisser, the head of the College, is thinking about is, like, “Ugh, okay, and also, on top of all of this other stuff, I have to figure out how I’m transporting people around the planet, because dragonriders are going to be too busy to be delivering teachers and transporting them between the individual smallholdings within Nerat or High Reaches.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And also there’s going to be Thread, so they can’t just walk.

Lleu: Right, so it seems like, in fact, contra Ninth Pass stuff where they’re like, “Well, dragons aren’t mule carts!” It’s like, well, they were, though. You c-, you could do that. You would be contributing a significant service to the Pernese economy by providing extremely high-speed transportation. Even if it’s relatively small-scale — you can’t be a mass transit system — you could do that, actually.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and you were saying, right, that it makes sense that maybe they lost that in the Long Interval.

Lleu: Yeah. At the beginning of the Ninth Pass, Benden has been the only Weyr for 400 years. They don’t have the ability to be a transportation system on this scale, ’cause there just aren’t enough dragons.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also, having been the only Weyr on this Long Interval, there might have been an impetus not to do something like that to maintain Weyr status and privilege —

Lleu: Exactly. And at the same time, the Oldtimers, most of them, have only ever been in an Interval for like three months. They don’t know. They have no idea what they’re going to do. So it makes conceptual sense to me that, by the beginning of the Ninth Pass, people would genuinely have forgotten what dragonriders used to do during Intervals, ’cause none of them have ever lived it.

Lleu: Yeah, and they haven’t a normal one in 450 years. So let’s talk about land, and labor, and rights, and the Bitra plot.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. So my big question with Debera’s land tenure is, okay, you’re saying that she has some kind of land rights — by virtue of her birth, she is entitled to claim a certain quantity of land. We also have this with Crom Mining Hold: they’re applying to found Crom in this book, and there’s some like debate from the Lord Holders where they’re like, “Well, if these four different people put together their land stakes, that’s actually a pretty substantial amount of land But is that enough to make it a Hold?” We’re starting to see this tension: is anyone independently claiming land starting a Hold? What is the boundary between a smallholder and a Holder? Are they under the auspices of another Hold, of a Lord Holder? Or are they independent? And those questions begin to be raised — to me that circles back to, like, okay, if just by being born on Pern I have the right to x acres of land, what is it about being a Lord Holder that gives you a right to 500 times x acres of land?

Lleu: Yeah, and it seems like it’s a combination of a couple factors. So, one, their Bloodlines—

Lleu: — right, with a capital B, for some reason, have had these stakes earlier, so I think probably at least some of them are people who are descended from any original charterers or contractors who had staked their claims on the Northern Continent. I think that’s probably at least some people. But also we know that, for example, Avril Bitra and Stev Kimmer both either died or abandoned their stake on Ista. So Ista Hold at least has to come from somewhere else. And, (b), it also seems like what it comes down to is size, essentially, ’cause that’s what I got out of the Crom stuff, is that it’s these four people who are combining their stakes, and so, first of all, they’re a little bit like, “What’s the legality of this?”, which is something that we know has come up in the Ninth Pass too, is that in theory you’re not supposed to be able to cede your land outside of your Bloodline.

Tequila Mockingbird: And yet, when Ruatha Hold was founded, Red Hanrahan was able to gather a bunch of different people together and combine all of their land stakes to create Ruatha Hold in the first place.

Lleu: Yeah, so it seems like a lot of what it is is just, “Is it big enough?” So, Crom, if they combine their four — presumably four families’ — accumulated land claims, rather than for individual people’s accumulated land claims, then they have an area of land that is big enough that they, under — I guess? — the terms of the Charter, because we also know that Lord Holder’s rights are guaranteed by the Charter, which suggests to me that the Charter has been…reconfigured since the original colonists —

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, unless what they’re interpreting as Lord Holder is the contractor versus charterer distinction.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we do know that the original Charter has a split —

Tequila Mockingbird: — basically two social classes, the charterers, who get a very large stake by right of their birth, and a contractor, who has to basically work off an indenture with x years of specialized labor to access a much smaller, personal stake of land.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I could believe that, over the course of 200-300 years, the terms have shifted, or the interpretation has shifted, to “You’re either born with huge land rights — you’re a Lord Holder — or you’re born with minimal land rights — you’re a regular person.”

Lleu: I think because the Hanrahans’ stake that becomes Ruatha is the combination of people’s —

Lleu: — I think the issue with Crom is (a) can they legally do this, seems like the answer is at least tentatively yes; (b) is it actually big enough that they will be a major Hold and have a Lord Holder, we know that the answer goes on to be yes, at any rate, and, at this point, the result is probationary “yes and we’ll decide in a bit”; but, three, it seems like part of what’s at issue is, okay, if this is four people combining them, who’s going to be the Lord Holder?

Lleu: I don’t know that that’s explicitly stated, but that’s the question that I was left with, and it seems like that would explain at least some of the hesitation about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm. Well, and some of what they talk about is, like, okay, but can they be self-sufficient? Is it big enough?

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think, to your thought about size, it does make sense that if you’re smaller than a certain size, you do have to be under the authority of a Lord Holder, in that you are going to need to import things. You’re not going to have a full-time medic; you’re not going to be able to raise enough crops or herd enough animals to be self-sustaining, and so you need to be folded into a larger economy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. And so this question of, “Are they large enough that they really can be their own hold, as in, they can bring enough people to can also raise crops and weave cloth and do all of these things so we’re not going to have to bailing them out all the time?”

Tequila Mockingbird: Might be part of the tipping point from being like, “Okay, now you’re a Lord Holder” versus “Now you’re just a small Holder under someone’s umbrella.”

Lleu: Yeah. We were talking about this a while ago. I think there’s three levels to this. So, on the one hand, you have major Holds, which are very large and are governed by a Lord Holder. Below them you have separate, autonomous or semi-autonomous Holds that are subject to a major Hold but operate mostly independently. We get a bunch of these named in Dragonsinger when they’re assigning journeyman at the end of the book.

Lleu: So, people like, for example, Yanus in Half-Circle — presumably he is either notionally subject to Nerat or Benden, but it’s so far away, and it’s basically self-sustaining, so he’s functionally autonomous but also is not actually a Lord Holder, because he doesn’t sit on the Council. And then below that you have smallholders like Barla and Dowell. They have a homestead, essentially, and they may have a homestead that’s part of a little village of other homesteads —

Tequila Mockingbird: And those are the people who, at least by the Ninth Pass, are getting referred to as “chattel.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And who seem to have potentially lost the right, which is very firmly emphasized in this book, of freedom of movement between different Holds.

Lleu: Yes. So, the Bitra plot is based on — Lord Chalkin, first of all, at least claims that he doesn’t believe Thread is coming back. There’s some doubt cast on that, I would say.

Lleu: Yes. But it'’s a sort of classic corruption of blood narrative, even though none of them are related to Avril Bitra, but all of the Bitra bloodline is evil. They love gambling. They’re gambling addicts, and Bitra has no industry of its own, just gambling and a little bit of forestry. And Chalkin exercises extremely strict control over his citizens. He’s constantly increasing their tithes to him. When there was a teacher at Bitra, he attempted to limit what the teacher was allowed to teach and in particular to prevent the teacher from instructing people in the Charter and their rights under the Charter.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s implied that he’s not teaching people how to read —

Tequila Mockingbird: — specifically because he doesn’t want them to have access to knowledge of their Charter rights.

Lleu: And he has what he calls his “cold storage,” his prison-slash-torture cells that he keeps people locked up in. Ultimately, in the book, in order to prevent his subjects from leaving, he sets up these armed border posts and is imprisoning people at the border, cordoning them off in cramped confines, not allowing them to bring any of their property — in fact, destroying any property that they try to bring with them.

Tequila Mockingbird: Denying the medical denying the medical and hygienic supplies, denying them any kind of shelter from cold. We get people who are dying of exposure, people who are dying of injuries, people who are just being murdered in these border camps.

Lleu: Yeah, and ultimately this leads the Weyrs and secondarily the Lord Holders to intervene, the Weyrs first by rescuing the people from the border camps, bringing them back to the Weyrs, nursing them back to health, and then eventually dropping them back off at their Holds with renewed understanding of their rights and privileges under the Charter. And then the Holders eventually, after some political maneuvering, impeach Chalkin and remove him from office and, of course, send them off to those islands off the east coast.

Lleu: We love to exile people. We say “exile,” but functionally this is execution.

Lleu: — if he knew stuff about farming, and the islands were tropical, and they have fruits and whatnot, and he’d be able to survive, he’s going to die when Thread falls. He just is. Because we got no indication that the dragonriders intend to fight Thread over the archipelago that murderers and rapists and impeached Lord Holders are exiled to.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yet again, the failure of the Pernese legal system to have a meaningful engagement with what you do when someone has committed a crime, but also, there are multiple points in this where they bring up the idea that you could just leave someone to die in Thread as if that’s not equivalent to killing them?

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that’s just fascinating. You have this, where we say, like, “Oh, we’re just exiling him!” And it’s like, okay. But also, part of what happens in these border camps is that some of the guards rape women who come through — specifically pregnant women, because they don’t want to get them pregnant and have evidence of their crime. And when they are convicted of this, their choice is either castration or to be staked out during Threadfall.

Lleu: If it were during a Pass, their punishment would be to be staked out during Threadfall. Because it’s not during a pass, their punishment is castration.

Tequila Mockingbird: So that, to me, is fascinating equivalence. So the non-Threadfall equivalent isn’t just execution? ’Cause that’s what’s staking them out during Threadfall would be. Is it that execution isn’t bad enough?

Tequila Mockingbird: Right! There seems to be this idea that like tying someone up and leaving them out to be eaten by Thread isn’t as bad as killing them. Is it because there's a chance that you might not die?

Lleu: I think it’s probably because there’s a chance that you might not die, yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Will of the gods kind of thing, trial by combat — if you survive, then the universe has said that you don’t have any punishment, and if you die, you die horribly?

Lleu: That’s my interpretation of it anyway, yeah, is that staking you out during Threadfall — maybe the dragons will do their job and you won’t die!

Tequila Mockingbird: So during Threadfall you’re allowed to commit sexual assault?

Lleu: It’s just baffling. One of the things that we get in this is that, unlike the Ninth Pass, this is not an ad hoc penalty that they’re coming up with. This is the quote-unquote “prescribed” penalty for these crimes, which implies they have a legal code.

Lleu: Explicitly, they do not have lawyers. They don’t have “legists.” And there’s some confusion about terminology, like, are they, “Would they be lawyers? Barristers.” Anyway. No wonder nobody on this planet, including the people at the College, understand what’s in the Charter if you don’t have anyone who’s a legal expert!

Tequila Mockingbird: Yet again, just, “Oh, we simply won’t commit any crimes ever, because we’re all good people. So we don’t need to worry about it. So when it does happen, we’re just going to leverage violent state control on those people who have transgressed against the social code, because we don’t have any a better option. And this is the best possible situation to be in.” It’s such “children in a tree house with a no boys allowed sign,” rather than like actual jurisprudence.

Lleu: Here’s what Paulin’s perspective specifically says after M’shall, the Benden Weyrleader, has come to inform him about the effectively concentration camps on Bitra’s borders:

Lleu: “Paulin felt nauseous. That sort of thing was straight out of the ancient bloody history the settlers had deliberately left behind: evolving a code of ethics and conduct that would make such events improbable!”

Lleu: Okay, yeah, it’s improbable, but it happened. So now what are you going to do about it? No mechanism, ’cause it was so improbable!

Tequila Mockingbird: Ultimately it does loop back around in some ways to the eugenics. This idea that we will “evolve” to be better, and that in the space future, we won’t need laws and punishments, because we’re all just going to be good people because all the bad people have died? Question mark?

Lleu: Well, it’s a combination of that and “in the future just people will, on the whole, be the ones in positions of power,” right? You don’t need to have a Harper Hall code of conduct, because Robinton’s the Masterharper, and so, when people misbehave, he can dispense summary justice, and that will always be correct.

Tequila Mockingbird: “It’s fine. Our inherited feudal system will naturally only produce good people in positions of vast political power.” What the fuck?

Lleu: It’s the same thing that comes up here. When they first are investigating this situation, every dragonrider’s immediate response to this is, like, “Man. It would be so easy to just pick up some of these guards and drop them while we’re between. I guess we can’t do that. Probably. But, mm, it would be easy. We could. But we can’t. But we could…” And, yeah, you could. And no one could stop you, realistically, because…

Tequila Mockingbird: And when some of the people on your planet have a giant, fuck-off dragon and some of the people on your planet have feudal authority, you actually do need something else that stops them from just murdering people, because otherwise you get Fax. That’s how you get Fax, people. Do you want Fax? No, you don’t want Fax. But that’s how you get Fax.

Lleu: Yeah. We’ll talk so much more about Fax very soon, because Masterharper is coming next. Oh my god.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. Real talk. Do we need to split this into two episodes?

Tequila Mockingbird: (Gentle listener, this is editing Tequila to say: yeah, we needed to split it into two episodes. But don’t get too excited and read the book about it, or anything.)

Lleu: So, my recommendation to go with Red Star Rising-slash-Dragonseye is Elizabeth A. Lynn’s A Different Light, which I mentioned back in the ’80s retrospective episode. It’s a love story, albeit a bittersweet one, about two men in a sci-fi space future. One of them is an artist who is seriously ill and the other one is his childhood best friend slash lover, a space pilot, who agrees to take him on one final grand tour of the galaxy, even though he knows that this will result in the artist’s death. It’s notable, among other things, as the book that gave the name to the oldest LGBTQ bookstore, A Different Light, in San Francisco, I believe, and it’s fun. It’s not necessarily my favorite of Elizabeth Lynn’s books, but I think it’s a good intro to her work. Worth a read.

Tequila Mockingbird: And my recommendation is leaning more into the thought about forced labor, unfree labor, and the social codification of those roles, especially in a context with education, and it is Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, in which a boy from the lowest social community on a generation ship is brought up to the higher levels because of his talent for drawing and ends up being educated and pushing back against the constraints of his community.

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] The last of Todd’s books, credited to both Todd and Anne, is Sky Dragons, published in 2012; Gigi McCaffrey also published Dragon’s Code in 2018. We will not be reading/discussing these.

[2] This is from Red Star Rising. The US text is essentially identical, substituting “upward” for “upwards” and moving a few commas around.

[3] “It was true that certain customs and habits had been developed in the Weyrs to suit dragon needs, but promiscuity was certainly not encouraged” (identical in both editions).

Episode #14: Red Star Rising/Dragonseye (1991/1997), part 1