Episode #15: Red Star Rising/Dragonseye (1996/1997), part 2

Tequila Mockingbird: To be fair. That is my speculation, but it has a dragon on the cover, y’all. It’s by Anne McCaffrey. I wouldn’t have been that worried. ’Cause there’s also Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, and they did sort of shoehorn the “dragon” in that one. You could tell that they were like, “Euh…” Nerilka’s Story, I guess, doesn’t start with “dragon.” Maybe it sold badly.[1]

Lleu: I think, also, it is likely that they changed the title so that people wouldn’t think it was a book about the Cold War.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm — the whole “Red Star” thing came back to bite her.

Lleu: I think, perhaps, yes. ’Cause there are a bunch of other books called Red Star Rising, and they are mostly about the Cold War or communism.

Tequila Mockingbird: Gotcha.

Lleu: I think they’re mostly later, based on the covers that show up when I image search, but, yeah. I think it’s probably a combination of multiple of these factors. The other thing relative to the Bitra plot that I specifically wanted to flag is the question of citizenship, because it…kind of seems like they have a concept of citizenship. On the one hand, we’re told that the charter guarantees absolute freedom of movement: Chalkin has no legal right to prevent his Holders from leaving. On the other hand, there is also an implication, I would say, that the border posts that he has are not just things Chalkin made, but that there are specific, established border crossings between Bitra and Benden Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: It does seem that way, although that might be a geographic, rather than a political, feature.

Lleu: It’s possible, yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: If there are mountains, it might just be, “This is the mountain pass that you can use to get there.”

Lleu: Yeah. So I would say it’s not 100% clear, but it’s possible to read it that way. But also, crucially, when Iantine, who has had this horrible experience working on a painting contract for Chalkin, finally escapes Bitra, basically, he ends up in almost freezing to death and is picked up by P’tero, who sees the SOS that he has stomped out in the snow and brings him back to Telgar Weyr. When he arrives at Telgar Weyr and they find out who he is, he is told that they have informed the people who seem to be the relevant authorities about his situation, and the relevant authorities are, first of all, Iantine’s parents, although he’s an adult, so that’s just a matter of courtesy, presumably, and then also the Benden Lord Holder, because, we’re told, Iantine is nominally subject to Benden Weyr, and also the Benden Weyrleaders. Part of that is because, presumably, Bitra is subject to the Benden Weyrleaders, and the Benden Weyrleaders should know what’s going on in Bitra. And the kind of legal justification that the Weyrs come up with to allow them to intervene and retrieve the people from the concentration camps on the Bitra border is that they are de facto protecting people from Thread, because Chalkin is not preparing his Holders for Threadfall, so he is derelict in his duty, and they have the legal authority, on the basis of protecting people from Thread, to intervene to retrieve these people and to make sure that they are prepared for Threadfall.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is a lovely piece of sophistry.

Lleu: Yeah — and it comes back later. I think we’ll probably talk about this in Masterharper, but I would say that that’s probably the basis of F’lar’s claim to Lessa that a dragonrider can champion any Holder who comes to him with a grievance, as long as he is convinced that the cause is just. I think that’s probably an extension of this reasoning. But the fact that they contact the Benden Lord Holders, specifically, suggests to me that there is some kind of concept of citizenship, such that, even though Iantine has been studying at Hall Domaize, a painter training facility in Keroon, he’s still in some way a Benden subject, legally speaking.

Tequila Mockingbird: This does actually remind me of our discussion about names from “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” because he’s “Iantine of Benden Hold,” and he’s going to stay “Iantine of Benden Hold” until he becomes “Iantine of somewhere else.”

Lleu: True.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right? So I think there’s a degree to, the place where you’re born, until you exercise your freedom of movement and offer your fealty to a different Lord Holder is your default…

Lleu: Yeah, but it’s interesting because I don’t think we get the sense that citizenship in that way is a legal construct —

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm.

Lleu: — in any of the other books, but here it seems like there is in fact some kind of legal citizenship that’s at work, such that when they rescue him they have to notify Benden Hold and Benden Weyr.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t know about “have to.” That, to me, loops back around to the same thing we noted with Groghe — like, his “chattel.”

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Iantine is Bridgely’s chattel, so if something happened to him, there’s the sense of, you want to know because you care for Iantine, but there’s also the sense of, some other Holder fucked with your stuff — that Bridgely has a legal and moral right to be offended on behalf of Iantine with Chalkin. Like, “Hey, you fucked with my guy!” It’s also possible that there is a more specific relationship, because Bridgely sponsored Iantine into Domaize.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: So he’s his patron in some way.

Lleu: True. So he has a creditor. The Benden Lord and Lady Holder paid half of Iantine’s student fees at Hall Domaize, so he does owe them literally, not just morally.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think this comes back all the way around to what we were talking about in the Ninth Pass in our All the Weyrs of Pern episode, this idea that even if you have freedom of movement, you either need or are supposed to get a letter of permission or recommendation from your Lord Holder to exercise that.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: This idea of, like, “Oh, I gave him permission to go south or to come to Landing.” And so, to me, that raises the question of whether they’ve lost that freedom of political movement over the 2,500 years, and whether they’ve lost it de jure or de facto. It might be that, technically, you still have freedom of movement, but now everyone’s going to look at you funny if you don’t have a letter of permission from your Lord Holder, in a way that functionally means you don’t have freedom of movement unless you’re willing to be Holdless.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think also, at this point, do we see any question of Holdlessness?

Lleu: The traders, the Lilienkamps.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, we — we have the Lillian camp traders, but all of these people who are fleeing Bitra, there isn’t this implication, “And who knows what’s going to happen to them”; it’s like, “Oh, and they’re coming to Benden and they’re coming to Nerat.” They’re going to have somewhere to land.

Lleu: Yeah, although it is as refugees, right? They’re going to go back to Bitra, is the idea.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: And they do, in fact, go back to Bitra, because after Chalkin is deposed, impeached, exiled —

Tequila Mockingbird: Concussed.

Lleu: — and, yeah, he’s knocked out in order to load him onto a dragon, and then when he's dropped off on the island with, I think, some stuff too, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: To me, it implied that some time had elapsed. M’shall was like, “Yeah, he was still unconscious when I came back.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. So you left him severely brain damaged and exiled on an island where Thread is going to eat him in three months. Cool”

Tequila Mockingbird: It felt honestly very much like the like “pirate code” marooning — you leave him on the beach with three days of hardtack and a bucket of water, or whatever it was.

Lleu: It’s very silly. So, they replace him with his uncle. Vergerin, who had lost the right to hold Bitra to Chalkin in a gambling session where Chalkin cheated. And one of the things that I thought was particularly striking and unpleasant here is, again, the eugenics. So, in addition to this sort of general corruption of blood, “Bitrans are all gambling addicts,” etc., we also very specifically are told, “Well, okay, Chalkin's father, Vergerin’s brother, was a perfectly adequate, if not the most pleasant, Holder.” But Chalkin is simply horrible, and one of the manifestations of this is, of course, that Chalkin is —

Tequila Mockingbird: Ugly. Yeah.

Lleu: — fat and ugly and is repeatedly described as looking like a “pig,” and his children even more so. And Vergerin, meanwhile, when he's introduced, is like, “Ah, yes, Paulin could see the resemblance in him and Chalkin, but he had more refined versions of Chalkin’s features.” It’s like. Of course he did. Uh-huh.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the whole Iantine subplot, as much as it’s, I think, mostly compelling, is that Iantine refuses to paint a dishonest portrait of Chalkin and his family at first.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so repeatedly emphasized the fact that Chalkin is physically ugly and also morally ugly.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: That these two things are connected and that we’re supposed to be gleefully mocking Chalkin’s appearance as well as his crimes, and then, by the end of the story, the ultimate sort of vengeance on Chalkin seems to be not that he’s been functionally sentenced to death, but that Iantine repaints the portrait to be very accurate and unflattering and hangs it on the wall in Bitra Hold so that he will go down in history as ugly, and that that’s a worse punishment.

Lleu: Right. People are like, “Vergerin, why do you have his portrait up?” And Vergerin’s like, “It’s to remind me of what I want not to be.” Oh. Okay, so fully “ugliness is cautionary tale.” Great.

Tequila Mockingbird: And again, I think it’s fair to say that Chalkin is a terrible person, but why did we have to marry those concepts so closely?

Lleu: Yeah. The one both counterpoint and exacerbation of this that I also thought was interesting is the portrayal of Tisha, who appears to be basically the Headwoman at Telgar Weyr, who is also fat, but is sympathetic and pleasant and who we’re supposed to like, but who is treated as a joke on the basis of this when they go down to Southern at the end. She’s like, “I want to come too,” and it’s like, “Oh, and then it took four people to get her up on the dragon.” And it’s like…you could have just not —

Tequila Mockingbird: Spent time on this.

Lleu: — spent time with this, but you went out of your way to make a point that, “Haha, isn’t it bad that she’s fat?”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. One other…omission? Juxtaposition? Is the fact that we’re being told about all of these human rights abuses, and they’re being pretty directly framed as human rights abuses. The reader and the characters are clearly supposed to be shocked and appalled by the way that Bitrans are being treated.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: But in these very same scenes where they’re talking about how terrible this is, we have this very casual mention of the drudges who are working, and the specific scene that caught my eye was when they’re horrified by the way Iantine was being treated, and one of the things they say is:

Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s not the fact that there is a drudges’ level that’s a problem.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s the fact that a non-drudge is being subjected to drudge-like conditions —

Lleu: That’s a problem, yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: — that’s a problem. And I think we see that all over, because, okay, freedom of movement. Do the drudges have legal freedom of movement? Do they have Charter rights?

Lleu: Yeah. If you don’t like your employment at Bitra Hold, can you just leave?

Tequila Mockingbird: If you don’t like your employment at Benden Hold, can you just leave?

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because it seems like the drudges are people who don’t have Charter rights.

Lleu: It does kind of seem that way.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the degree to which they are doing unfree labor is, I think, never really clarified.

Lleu: I also can’t think of a time when it’s clarified, and we know that Pern does have its own systems of unfree labor, right? We know Dowell was working a term of indenture —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: — in “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” so…

Tequila Mockingbird: And then, when Iantine finally gets to Benden Hold to work on his commission, there’s an extended sequence where they’re talking about this beautiful, large room that he has and how much nicer it is than what he had at Bitra, and how much better they’re treating him than the Bitrans were treating him and the Bitrans were treating people. But in the middle of all of this, like, “Wow, it’s so lovely,” one of the things that she’s talking about as she’s showing him into his beautiful, new room:

Tequila Mockingbird: “Lady Jane led him onto the family’s floor, urging the two drudges who were carrying the canvases and skybroom wood panels to mind their steps and not damage their burdens.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, okay, Benden Hold is this blissful, perfect place for upper-class people.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Are the drudges in Benden treated better than the drudges at Bitra? Does anybody know? Does anybody care?

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: So you might notice that one of the three plotlines that we talked about at the beginning really hasn’t come up again, and that’s because it really has nothing to do with the other two plotlines in the book.

Lleu: Well, it does a little bit with the Charter stuff, but we’ll get there.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s the College and their transition and attempt to maintain institutional memory on Pern. And that plot line does eventually end up coming to bear a little bit on the Bitran question but is functionally very siloed from everything else that’s going on in the story. It’s also just a little bit weird.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it suffers from two things. One is that she is, I think, overthinking some of the transition, in the same way that we’ve seen her do with The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall books, where it feels like she wanted to make the change from the Pernese culture that we see when they first land and the Pernese culture that we see in the Sixth or the Ninth Pass, and she, for some reason, commits to making it immediately and all at once.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I talked about, I have three layers of quibble. There’s one layer where I’m just like, this wouldn’t happen. I don’t believe that everyone would forget about dolphins. I don’t believe that we would just forget how to make paper and stop making paper. And then there’s the layer of, I believe that it would happen, but I don’t believe that it would just happen all at once in a single instant. Because we have people in this book complaining about like, “Wow, the youths are using ‘Turn’ instead of ‘year.’ That’s terrible.” There’s some other things with fostering, as we spoke about in “The Ford of Red Hanrahan” — I don’t believe that it would be one morning we just wake up and Peter Hanrahan decides to do it and now everyone else does it for the entire rest of history.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, three, even if it was going to happen because of a trend, or if it was going to catch on suddenly, I don’t believe it would happen one time between 50 and 300 years after they first landed and then remain completely static and unchanging for the next 2,000 years. If it changed this early, it’s going to change again.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: All of this to say that I don’t actually find it plausible that at the beginning of the Second Pass, they just completely changed their curriculum to only be teaching ballads and never went back, and nothing evolved or changed after that.

Lleu: Yeah. For a lot of reasons. One part of this is, McCaffrey’s a musician, or wanted to be a musician, and placed a lot of value on music, and music goes on to be, as you said earlier the preeminent artistic form on Pern, I would say. I think that’s fair. And so it’s perfectly reasonable that, like, yeah, music’s an important part of Pernese culture.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: But also we’re told, “Yeah, everyone on Pern knows how to read music.” I’m like…I don’t think that’s true, especially in a context where at least some portion of the population isn’t literate. And also, much of this plot in this book rests on the assumption that every single faculty member at the College is also a highly skilled professional musician. And I just don’t buy that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I would just like to say, as an educator who is so tone deaf that it is genuinely concerning and painful to musically talented people when I make music: we exist!

Lleu: It’s just silly, is what it is, when it comes down to it. The book begins with approaching the last fall gather, and so the last gather, before Threadfall starts again, at Fort Hold, and all the Lord Holders are there, all the Weyrleaders are there, all the kind of profession heads are there. So they’re having a council meeting just to check in and do some final checks before Threadfall starts, basically. And one of the things that they’re talking about is, “We’re losing a lot of our information, and also we know Chalkin doesn’t believe that Thread is coming back. How do we make sure that people in the future, in potentially thousands of years, are going to know and know what to do when Threadfall comes back?” And Clisser, the head of the College, is like, “I’ll get right on that. Somewhere in our archives, we can find a good information transmission mechanism.” And then, Clisser heads downstairs and joins the rest of the College faculty on the musical podium, they’re starting tuning up before their first dance set, and they’re all like, “Clisser, why the fuck did you say that? We’re so busy teaching and remodeling the College, because we have to do that ourselves, apparently, and also rehearsing the music for the New Year’s concert. We don’t have time to figure out a permanent information storage mechanism.” And he’s like, “We’ll make the juniors do it.” And they’re like, “Okay, buddy…” And I, reading it, am also, first of all, like, “Okay, buddy.” And second of all, like, “Yeah, they would have administrative duties and would be busy on top of doing their research. That’s realistic. They probably wouldn’t have the administrative duty of remodeling the interior of the new extension to the College that you just built, though —”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah!

Lleu: “— and also they probably wouldn’t all be rehearsing and or composing music for the New Year’s concert.” That’s just not realistic. Even a little bit.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s this weird tension between, I can see that she wants to show us the transition from the College to the Harper Hall, but she both goes too far and starts too far along the journey, in that it sort of seems like they’re already the Harper Hall, because they’re already traveling musicians and also teachers.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: So why is that the case? But then also, why is this a sudden switch-flip event instead of a gradual transition?

Lleu: Right, yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I could absolutely believe that, as the computers die and as paper becomes extremely expensive and rare, education switches to a more rote memorization system, and the best way to do that is to set things to rhythm and music. That’s just true. So I believe that evolution, but I don’t believe it as a top-down switch all at once, and I don’t believe that every single teacher is already a trained musician who can just implement that flawlessly.

Lleu: Yeah. So, the thing that maybe makes this plot worst is that the thing that finally drives the transition to “We’ve got to do music only” is that, after New Year’s, when all of the College staff who were at Telgar Weyr come back and are like, “Hey, we had a great performance! Everything was great!” Clisser’s like, “Great! While you were gone, all of the computers died all at once in a thunderstorm.” And they were like, “Don’t they have surge protectors?” And he’s like, “Yeah. The power surge came through the data transfer lines instead somehow.” And first of all, no, that didn’t happen. Second of all, why bother writing it this way? It would be so much easier and narratively more…logical, I would say, to have the novel just start with the day the last computer that’s 250 years old finally gave out. Okay, now we truly have no other options. We have to…

Tequila Mockingbird: Revamp our curriculum.

Lleu: Yeah. Or the last couple computers, or something like that.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause I don’t find it implausible that the computers stopped working after 250 years. I really don’t.

Lleu: Yeah, in fact, I find it implausible that the computers are still working after 250 years, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. You don’t have to sell me on that as a reader.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: What you have to sell me on as a reader is, how does this situation evolve? ’Cause also they get to the point where they’re like, “Hm, maybe we should stop extensively teaching the history of Earth geopolitics.” And I was like, “You were still teaching the history of Earth geopolitics? Why?” It also sets up this really weird, I think, false dichotomy of, “we have to teach every single person on Pern the complete history of Earth geopolitics and literature and science” or “we have to do nothing but vocational education.” There’s actually a lot of middle ground between these two extremes!

Lleu: Right — that’s what gets me. Their takeaway from the current socio-political situation on Pern is: nobody on this planet needs comprehensive primary education. They only need maybe to be taught how to read and write, to be taught some catchy songs that give simplified versions of parts of the Charter, and then they go into vocational education in a kind of one-on-one master-apprentice program. Well, I think there’s some stuff that you missed there, probably, like…anything else, and having people who understand the legal basis of their society.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, no fucking wonder you end up with feudalism!

Lleu: Yeah!

Tequila Mockingbird: You just stopped teaching people.

Lleu: The thing that bothers me most is that the one person on the staff who’s like, “Actually, it’s important for people to understand history in order to understand the present.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: She’s like, “If you want to understand the notionally democratic aspect of Pernese society” — we do learn that there are sometimes planet-wide referenda; we never see one at any point in the series, but in theory we know they exist.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: And that’s the only indication, I believe, in the whole series of something that, potentially, anyway, could be making laws rather than —

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. Just preserving the Charter.

Lleu: — preserving and enforcing laws. But we don’t actually know if it involves making laws, because we never see one. So, the only person on the whole College staff who’s arguing strongly that, actually, people do need to understand history; hey need to know where we came from; they need to have a grasp of literature, of art history; they need to have, implicitly, I think, not just the humanities, but they need to have access to a more comprehensive understanding, is essentially gently but firmly told, “No. Sorry. There’s no way around it. You're not getting your way,” and is then shipped off to Nerat, because she’s a gifted teacher and there will be good students there. And she’s like, “Well. I guess it’s warm at least.” But it’s treated as if she’s —

Tequila Mockingbird: Unreasonable.

Lleu: — an unreasonable obstacle and not someone being like, “Actually, people should be educated instead of being immediately siloed into their narrow vocational training.”

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s so much middle ground between these two opposites.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it just feels actively odd that nobody is thinking of any of that. It just feels like a plot hole.

Tequila Mockingbird: Nothing to be done.

Lleu: And then we’re told, quote —

Lleu: “And Pernese literature was thus saved another diarist.”

Lleu: — unquote, which is, I think, the only specific indication we get in the whole series that there is Pernese written literature as such.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: And then, third, there’s the passing reference to K’vin reading a monograph in Red Star Rising —

Tequila Mockingbird: But not in Dragonseye.

Lleu: — but it’s cut in Dragonseye, and also, does a psychology monograph count as literature or history? Not really, but it’s independent scholarship that’s not practical applied sciences.

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s written down.

Lleu: And it’s written down, so.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause what we do know is that the things that do get written down are not well preserved. There isn’t institutional knowledge, because all of the archivists tragically died in the first Threadfall, and they have no way to organize their written records after the computers fail, it seems.

Lleu: Yeah, and they also have no way of reproducing written records after the computers fail.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right.

Lleu: Except handwriting them.

Tequila Mockingbird: They can’t figure out how to make a printing press. They explicitly think about it and like, “Ah, but we don’t have electricity,” and…buddy. Good news. You don’t need electricity to have a printing press. Even in the Sixth Pass, the Healer Hall has no coherent records. Capiam has to go back in his personal notes to find one thing he jotted down after a lecture 30 years previously that was like, “Great, vaccinations, that’s a thing,” that it seems like the broader Healer Hall has completely forgotten, because they have no kind of records.

Lleu: Yeah, and that also implies that the Healer Hall, you know, doesn’t have a set curriculum There’s not someone whose job is to teach about vaccination. It’s: some guy gave a talk and he mentioned vaccination, I guess.

Tequila Mockingbird: And similarly, okay, we have Keroon Beasthold. How are they keeping the genealogical records of these animals? Is it all people who, like the one guy we meet in Moreta, have memorized and can recite the genealogy of one specific line of animals? Do they just have bunches of those guys? What is the process by which any of the Crafts are progressing? And maybe the part of the answer is: they’re not.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: The reason that Pern becomes so technologically stagnant for thousands of years is because there’s no way to build on knowledge. We’re just passing knowledge forward and any innovations get lost.

Lleu: Yeah, it’s genuinely baffling, because, again, they do mention the possibility of a printing press, but, first of all, no electricity — apparently they don’t know mechanical printing presses are possible — and, second of all, they’re like, “Well, and also, we’re not going to have a ton of paper, because there won’t be trees.” Okay, I know, because it’s mentioned in one of the Ninth Pass books, that Anne McCaffrey knew that it’s possible to make paper using rags and that even wood pulp paper often incorporates rags.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even in this book! They’re saying, “We’re going to be low on paper,” and one of the other teachers is like, “Start saving your rags!”

Lleu: She knows it’s possible to make paper that’s not exclusively wood pulp. And you don’t need a ton of it!

Tequila Mockingbird: Papyrus was not made out of wood pulp! You are going to be able to grow some kind of plants unless you are planning to starve to death. Oh, you’re not? You’re going to be able to grow grains? Then why can’t you grow reeds? Yo’'re growing reeds for your musical instruments? Huh!

Lleu: Right. There are so many other options that would allow them to have writing materials that are not hide and writing materials that it would be possible to print stuff on. And even if paper is expensive, or papyrus is expensive, and you can’t print everything, you can at least print some things, and that would allow you a much more stable information transmission instead of, the other possibility that’s raised, carbon copy. What!? This was published in 1996! Carbon copy was already well on its way out! And meanwhile, photocopying existed. It’s not even about mimeographs anymore. It’s genuinely — I don’t know what the thought process was on McCaffrey’s end.

Tequila Mockingbird: I feel like so few societies in Earth’s history have had no way of recording history. Even societies that did not have a lot of access to paper figured out ways to do it. You were making cuneiform flippin’ tablets. You were establishing a really effective oral history transmission that could stretch thousands of years with complicated factual details. Societies find a way to transmit history and information.

Lleu: Yeah. And to be fair, they do — it’s just, the history and information that they end up transmitting is an abridged version of parts of the Charter in the form of the Duty Song, which the idea is that you will teach children the Duty Song and now they will understand both their obligations and their legal rights. I don’t think that happened, based on the Ninth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: Understand their obligations, in theory, probably. Their legal rights? Definitely don’t think that happened —

Tequila Mockingbird: No.

Lleu: — based on the Ninth Pass, even for children who grew up knowing the Duty Song. And then, also, the music thing doesn’t work, because we know that one of the pieces that they compose is the quote-unquote “Landing Suite,” which seems to be essentially Dragonsdawn but set to music.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that sure didn’t get transmitted!

Lleu: Okay, if the Duty Song has survived 2,500 years, but the Landing Suite didn’t? I guess? Despite apparently having established musical mechanisms for transmitting aspects of Pernese history, it’s clear that the transition to an exclusively musical curriculum also meant sacrificing not just Earth history, but also, ultimately, Pern history. For some reason.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I am just sitting here wondering how you teach long division by the mechanism of song exclusively.

Lleu: Well, they have the multiplication song.

Tequila Mockingbird: Not that math rap doesn’t exist and that we don’t use it in the classroom, but I don’t think that it is sufficient.

Lleu: I don’t know.

Tequila Mockingbird: “Actuarial Accounting: The Song.”

Lleu: The last thing to flag on this point, which also transitions us to the final miscellaneous things, is: AIVAS is mentioned, but AIVAS is mentioned in an extremely perplexing way.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah…

Lleu: So, this is the reference we get to AIVAS. This is when they’re coming to terms with the fact that “We have no computers anymore; we need to transition to a Pern-focused education system”:

Lleu: “‘Clisser,’ Bethany began in her soft, persuasive voice. ‘We have known from our reading of the Second Crossing that the artificial intelligence, the AIVAS, turned itself off. We know why. Because it wisely knew that people were beginning to think it was infallible: that it contained all the answers to all Mankind’s problems. Not just its history. Mankind had begun not only to consider it an oracle but to depend on it far more than was wise. For us. So it went down.

Lleu: “‘We have let ourselves be guided too long by what we could read and extract from the data left to us on computer. We have been too dependent. It is high time we stood squarely on our own two feet…’ She paused, twisting her mouth wryly, to underscore her own uneven stance,”

Lleu: — because Bethany has some unspecified physical disability —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yet again, a foot thing.

Lleu: Yeah —

Lleu: Hey, what the fuck? When did that happen exactly?

Tequila Mockingbird: So, Anne, when was that story that they're telling in the Second Pass?

Lleu: Was it perhaps in the Ninth Pass, in All the Weyrs of Pern, when AIVAS turned itself off because it thought mankind was becoming too dependent on it?

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm? Hm?

Lleu: Who can say!

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think we're left with the idea that Bethany is a psychic who’s accidentally tapping into things in the future and doesn’t realize that she’s not experiencing linear time, or the idea that this is just the natural evolution of an AIVAS system, and that they are maybe destined or programmed to eventually suicide or turn themselves off when they feel like their community is growing too dependent on them.

Lleu: One or the other of those seems to be the implication. I was also going to say, this is related to one of the questions that we had in Chronicles of Pern: First Fall: why don’t they just go back and dig up Landing? And…

Tequila Mockingbird: Why don’t they just go back and dig up Landing?

Lleu: Why don’t they just go back and dig up Landing? The answer that we’re given here is, they made multiple attempts to go to Landing and excavate it, but they couldn’t find the admin building.

Tequila Mockingbird: It was just too hard.

Lleu: I’m sorry, you had 200 fucking years and you couldn’t find the admin building?

Tequila Mockingbird: Lleu, it was just too hard!

Lleu: So…yeah. Ugh. Anyway, the last two things that I had noted down here are, first of all: are dragonriders human? And initially, this was a facetious question — it’s somewhat less facetious now — but the specific passage that inspired this is Iantine thinking about thinking about his relationship with Debera:

Lleu: “They both laughed and the sensual tension between them eased. He made quick use of the opportunity to kiss her lightly, to prove that he could and that he did understand about Morath. He had also actually asked as many questions about rider liaisons as discretion permitted. What he’d learned had been both reassuring and unsettling. There were more ramifications to human affairs than he had ever previously suspected. Dragonrider-human ones could get very complicated, and the green dragons being so highly strong and sexually oriented, were the most complex.”

Lleu: Which implies that dragonriders are not human. And I think you could make a case for this, on the basis that dragons and their riders are, in some senses, one being, but also it seems a little bit bonkers to claim.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: It is related to something that I just realized we forgot to talk about, which is the anxiety about sexuality in connection with newly impressed green riders.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm, yes. We get a piece of world building here that we don’t ever get before or since — although we also don’t really ever spend time with newly impressed green riders at other points in the story — where it turns out that green riders have to be careful not to have sex until their dragon is of age, because there’s some implication that it affects them in a negative fashion or tips them over into some kind of sexual experience that they’re not ready for. Which is fascinating. We don’t previously see dragonriders having sex before their dragon is of age. Almost universally we see sex initiated by the dragon, rather than initiated by the human. Yeah. Also, typically, the newly impressed dragonriders we see are 12 to 14.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right.

Lleu: The ones that have POV time.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where we do see this, perhaps, is with Jackson and Ruth, where Jackson is having sex, and Ruth is never going to become sexually mature for a dragon, is never going to participate in a mating fight —

Lleu: Mm.

Tequila Mockingbird: — compared to here, where we have here the implication that female dragonriders, who Impress older? Question mark…?

Lleu: Well, it seems that at this point they have not yet started pushing the age back to 12 to 14 for first Impression, and it’s still more in the 16 to 20 range —

Tequila Mockingbird: Older teens, yeah.

Lleu: — ’cause we know N’ran, who’s the Weyr medic at Telgar Weyr, was in veterinary training when he Impressed.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right.

Lleu: Which to me suggests probably late teens, early 20s.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, we also get informed that Jule’s had a pre-existing sexual relationship with another dragonrider —

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: — ’cause she’s the only Weyr-bred green rider who Impresses in this cycle, and there’s a whole conversation about like, “Yeah, we talked to her. She knows that she has to wait to have sex again until her green is old enough.”

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And has put her relationship with this dragonrider on pause until, hypothetically, his bronze can fly her green dragon.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it doesn’t contradict anything we learn anywhere else, but it’s sort of interesting and, I think, maybe plays into the tension between initiating your own sexual encounter versus having it brought upon you by the dragon.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also, though, an, again, plot hole(? question mark) here, where we’re told that, “Oh, it’s fine, Debera — when your green flies to mate, you can just have sex with Iantine instead of with the person whose dragon flies your dragon,” which is not only explicitly counter to everything else that we learn in every other book but fundamentally breaks the romantic world-building logic of every other book.

Lleu: Yeah, especially because the way that it’s framed here, basically, is, the way that you make this happen is that when your dragon rises to mate, you lock yourself in a room with the person you actually want to have sex with and the rider of the other dragon latches on to whoever is nearby. It’s so goofy!

Tequila Mockingbird: If it was that simple, then why are any of the romantic pairs from the Ninth Pass a thing?

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: Why are Lessa and F’lar a thing? So, you could, if you really wanted to strain the world-building, suggest that that’s just information that has been lost, or a cultural more that has shifted as Pernese society grew, to be like, “No, no, no, it’s fate! The dragons are deciding! You gotta have sex with whoever your dragon wants you to have sex with!” But…

Lleu: You know what occurs to me? The earliest time that we see that no longer being the case is the Sixth Pass, at which point all green riders are men.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right.

Lleu: And obviously gay men aren’t just picky about their sexual partners — because the reason that it’s brought up is specifically because the female green riders are talking among themselves, and they’re like, what if it’s a blue rider?

Tequila Mockingbird: A blue rider who’s gay flies our dragon and doesn’t want to have sex with us.

Lleu: Yeah. So rather than being like, well, in the moment it doesn’t matter, because —

Tequila Mockingbird: Dragons.

Lleu: — everything is irrelevant during a mating flight, it’s like, “Oh, no, don’t worry. We can rationalize around this.” First of all, I almost wonder if it's connected to AIDS anxieties about men who have sex with men also having sex with women and then transmitting HIV to them.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: But also, I suspect that it’s probably not unconnected to the fact that this is the one book where there are a non-trivial number of female green riders.

Tequila Mockingbird: From an extradiegetic perspective, I wonder if this is her actually coming back to her world-building and trying to engage with the idea of queer dragonriders and fitting that in, where, in the previous books, she just wasn’t thinking about it.

Lleu: Mm.

Tequila Mockingbird: It was like, well, of course you just have sex with —

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: — whoever; that’s just how we're doing things. And then at the point over the course of these 30 years where she realized, “Oh, shit; all of these green dragon riders are men.”

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: “Shit. Uh. Okay.” And she’s trying to make it work, because we also here have the specific call-out that the green dragons are choosing boys with noted “homosexual preferences.”

Lleu: “‘Lads’” who have displayed “homosexual preferences,” quote unquote, in their home Holds, yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: So we’re actively thinking about it, as opposed to, in other books where we just see becoming a green dragonrider as a punishment from the universe, more than anything else. “Woe, homosexuality be upon ye!”

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: As opposed to a preference.

Lleu: You were already wanting to be here, maybe.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right.

Lleu: Another aspect of it maybe is connected with pregnancy and reproduction.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: Given the amount of sex that green riders are having, because greens are rising to mate all the time, if you have a bunch of female green riders and your concern is “Are they going to get pregnant?” it does seem like it would be good to have a safeguard to fall back on other than making sure everyone who’s related to them is out of the Weyr.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And, again, I could see that as being something that evolves over time in Pernese culture of realizing, “This is an issue. Can we solve it this way? Not really. Okay, let’s solve it that way,” and trying to figure it out.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also, we do get told that they can just self-induce abortions by going between.

Lleu: There’s a lot of question marks.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: This book provides us with so much world-building information, and it is sometimes difficult to integrate into our understanding of the series as a whole, I would say. So, just as a little endnote, one fun side character that we meet in the books is a Weyr boy named Leopol, who has a very much a Piemur in Dragonsinger vibe, I would say.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm.

Lleu: And I don’t really have anything in particular to say about him other than that, but he’s a fun addition to this. He’s part-Piemur, part-Felessan in Dragonquest, in the sense that he knows everyone’s business, knows everything that’s going on.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah.

Lleu: He does the Piemur at the gather being like, “I can dance as well as any journeyman!” and insisting that Menolly do a dance turn with him. He does that with Debera, and when Iantine goes to Benden Hold, he has a moment when he moves in, he’s like, “Huh, maybe I should have brought Leopol with me, ’cause there’s plenty of room in this apartment.” That’s kind of cute. Just your little adopted Weyr friend.

Tequila Mockingbird: Little buddy; just a little guy.

Lleu: Yeah. I don’t know if you had anything else you wanted to talk about; otherwise, we can talk about psychic lions.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I think psychic lions is all that’s really on the plate.

Lleu: Are lions psychic? We know that Ted Tubberman was doing mentasynth to them, and we know that mentasynth sometimes, at least, does result in telepathic abilities and not just heightened intelligence, and, in particular, this passage in the description of the lion attack really jumped out at me:

Lleu: “A dark shadow, and the air pressure above him”

Lleu: — P’tero —

Lleu: So, on the one hand, I think probably, objectively, the “totally alien to a dragon mind” here was just intended to be hyperbole, to show how far out of the ordinary this is, for Ormonth to be this mad, and that he is losing his mind because his rider has been attacked. On the other hand, if we take it at face value, these feelings are totally alien to a dragon mind, so we have to assume that the lions are psychically projecting their anger and revenge to P’tero.

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, you’re not wrong.

Lleu: We do also specifically get told that the whole pride came together to collectively fight the dragons, which I don’t think is normal lion behavior, which does suggest something’s going on.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I really love the idea that there are sapient, psychic large cats on Pern, and they just don’t want to bond with you, ’cause they hate you and want to kill you instead. I think that’s really fun, and I think we will get one more chance to think about that in The Skies of Pern, so we’ll get there.

Lleu: Yeah.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, this time my recommendation, ’cause I still don’t really think you should read Dragonseye, is focused a little more on the budding romance plotlines that we get here, and so I would like to recommend, instead, Your Wicked Ways, by Eloisa James, which is a Regency romance novel that deals with the dichotomy between a “good girl” and a “bad girl” and women exercising their sexual agency and also involves a couple that have been estranged coming back to each other and finding a new sexual rhythm to their relationship through the medium of music, which is how they connect.

Lleu: My recommendation is a little bit out there; it is Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, which is a novel about a young person from Nigeria who is haunted-slash-possessed-slash-inhabited by a supernatural entity that shapes their life experience in a wide range of ways, and it deals, in a different way than Red Star Rising/Dragonseye, with the entanglement of education, class, race, gender, sexuality, and the ways all of these things are shaped by the broader social and political context that they are taking place in. It’s really, really good; it’s quite heavy, but I read it I think basically in one sitting, except that I had to put it down in the middle and take a break to walk around the block because it was really intense. And then I came back and finished it immediately, so. It’s really good.

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.