Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #17: The Skies of Pern (2001), part 1

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

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I have a first edition hardcover of this book that I read in 2001 and have not read since. Until now.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I definitely read this book, but I had confused it in my head with Dragonseye; evidently it didn’t stick that clearly.

Lleu: So, today we are talking about the final Pern novel (question mark, as we will discuss when we get to things in the future) —

Lleu: — and that is The Skies of Pern, published in 2001. The Skies of Pern, follows up from All the Weyrs of Pern, kind of in parallel to Dolphins of Pern. We will talk a bit about the continuity, because it does not make sense, at all. The Skies of Pern follows mainly two main characters and a handful of additional characters who have passages from their perspective. The main characters are F’lessan, the son of Lessa and F’lar who has taken over the stewardship of Honshu, an archaeological site on the Southern Continent, which we know from previous readings was the home for the duration of the first pass of Stev Kimmer and his fucked-up little pseudo-incestuous family. And the other is Tai, who is a female green rider who Impressed in around age 20; she was most of the way through an apprenticeship, kind of on the verge of becoming a journeyman, “Starsmith,” so, astronomer. There are two main stories running through the narrative. One of those is F’lessan and Tai’s developing relationship, both professionally and personally — they do eventually become romantically involved, after a mating flight, of course. And along with that, F’lessan and Tai as paradigmatic of the shift within the Weyrs, as people begin to think seriously about what will happen after the end of the Pass, which is only 16 years away at this point.

Lleu: So, F’lessan and Tai and their interest in astronomy lay the groundwork for what ultimately becomes the new path forward for dragon riders, because partway through the novel, a meteorite strikes Pern’s oceans and produces a set of devastating tsunamis that severely damage a bunch of coastal Holds, but, fortunately, dragonriders, through the magic of time travel, are able to save almost everyone who lived in these areas by evacuating them to higher ground. And in response to the panic around this, the dragonriders decide, “This is what we’re gonna do in the future. We will be the ‘Starcraft’ — word is used specifically; very funny looking back — and we will protect Pern in the future from space-borne impacts.” The way that they’re going to do this is that — in All the Weyrs of Pern, AIVAS was perplexed by the fact that dragons had teleportation and telepathy but didn’t have telekinesis, because normally, apparently, these three things all go together. Turns out they do have telekinesis; they just didn’t know it yet, and Tai’s dragon figures out how to do it proactively, instead of instinctually while flying, which is something that is implied that dragons are doing in this, although they haven’t kind of fully worked that out. But they’ve started to guess that that’s one of the ways that dragons maintain themselves in the air. So, dragons are gonna use their telekinesis, plus astronomy to stop future meteorites and similar from hitting Pern. There is another feline attack here, which probably contributed to Tequila confusing the two books —

Lleu: — ’cause at the end of this book F’lessan, Golanth, Tai, and Zaranth do all get attacked by a pack of felines. In Dragonseye it’s a pride of lions, right? Here it sounds like it’s multiple felines of different kinds all collaborating, possibly, which I thought was interesting.

Lleu: The result of this is that Tai and Zaranth are both minorly injured and F’lessan and Golanth are both severely injured. Golanth is partially blind in one eye, coming out of it, and F’lessan has lost a big chunk of one of his legs and as a result they’re not sure that he’s ever gonna be independent again, fully, even to the extent that Readis in Dolphins of Pern is, say. It seems like he’s going to recover to some extent, but he will be permanently disabled. That’s one plotline. The other plotline that’s happening is, the Abominators, the people who wanted to destroy AIVAS and stop all of these new technologies, are still active, it turns out. A small group of Abominators, including, most prominently, Shankolin, who is the son of Master Norist, a conservative Craftmaster who was one of the leaders of the first group of Abominators, has escaped from prison —

Lleu: Yes, so he was serving a term of hard labor in the mines at Crom. It’s unclear how long a term; it kind of seems like it might have just been, “You’re gonna work until you die.” He has escaped, thanks to another, smaller meteorite, has reorganized the Abominators, and leads them in a set of attacks on new technologies — first against the Healercraft, because people are mad about surgery and internal medicine, and second, an attempted attack that is thwarted on the Printercraft Hall, because books are a new, technological abomination, apparently. Both of these attacks are foiled, and, finally, Shanklin decides to attempt to personally destroy AIVAS, even though AIVAS is already shut down, as a symbolic attack on all of these new technologies, and Toric, the Lord of Southern Hold, helps him get to AIVAS and get in to AIVAS, but as soon as he enters the room, AIVAS zaps him with a laser and he dies. Then there’s a couple more scenes with Toric, and nothing comes of that, and they never find out who Shankolin was. They know he was an Abominator, but that’s it.

Tequila Mockingbird: If you’re thinking that sounds kind of unsatisfying, we don’t disagree.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I’ll continue with a little bit of confusion. So, the book opens with an epigraph that is actually a quotation from Dragonseye slash Red Star Rising, in which Clisser, the head of the College, what would become the Harper Hall, thinks to himself of a quotation from a piece of literature, and he misquotes it as:

Tequila Mockingbird: “Ours [is] not to ponder what were fair in life, / But, finding what may be, / Make it fair up to our means.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And he interprets this as, “Well, we’re here on Pern now. We have to make do with what we’ve got. We’ve gotta make the best of our new society using the tools that are available to us.” And then that becomes the epigraph of this book. And I’m fascinated by this, and tormented by it — if any helpful readers have thoughts about why this might have been chosen, I would love to discuss it, because it’s a misquotation from Robert Browning’s “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” which is, first of all, a poem that I don’t like, but, second of all, really doesn’t have any of that meaning in its own original context. The original quotation is:

Tequila Mockingbird: “The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s, / Is—not to fancy what were fair in life / Provided it could be,—but, finding first / What may be, then find how to make it fair / Up to our means: a very different thing! / No abstract intellectual plan of life / Quite irrespective of life’s plainest laws.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And, so, maybe there’s something there in Clisser’s context of turning away from academia or emptiness of academia into practicality, but the broader context of the poem is, essentially, Pascal’s Wager? It’s the bishop making an argument that he is fine being an insincere person, because sincerity is overrated? Question mark? And it doesn’t really seem to have any connection to Pern. So I just — I have to leave a question mark there. I have to ask, what’s going on with that?

Lleu: Hearing the accurate version, it actually does make more sense to me, not as a “We’ve got to make the best of what we have,” but, actually, “Disregard what you have. Imagine what you could have, and make that instead.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah? McCaffrey, please explain. This is why I need a séance.

Lleu: All of those “five historical figures you would invite to a dinner party.” Anne McCaffrey. Let’s talk.

Lleu: Okay, notwithstanding the perplexing opening, this book is shockingly good. I was genuinely shocked to get through it and be like, “This was great, actually.” It still has a lot of problems, but the problems are all things that are par for the course with Pern. It mostly doesn’t add new problems. It adds new, creative ways of dealing with old problems that don’t necessarily solve the old problems, but there’s nothing in this book that I got to and was like, “What the fuck?” There’s stuff that I got to in this book and was like, “Huh. Interesting.” The writing is good. The pacing is incredible.

Lleu: The pacing is good, and it’s paired with good characterization, so it’s not like All the Weyrs of Pern, where it’s just kind of a bunch of little anecdotes. It is moving back and forth between people a bunch — in addition to F’lessan and Tai, we also get passages from Lessa’s perspective; we get passages from Shankolin and Toric’s; we get a bunch of passages from Tagetarl’s perspective, the Masterprinter, both in the first section and especially in the lead-up to the Abominator attack. And a few passages also from various other characters, especially the Harper spy Pinch, whom we’ll talk about later, as he’s trying to unravel the Abominators’ network. And random other people — there’s one from Haligon’s perspective and one from Tenna’s, who we met in “The Runner of Pern.” It’s kind of all over the place, but it always comes back to F’lessan and Tai and to their relationship as the thing that keeps the whole book grounded, and it really works.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also think having the disaster, having the meteorite strike and the tsunami, does help make that back-and-forth narration feel urgent instead of distracted —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because we’re jumping around a lot, but I’m eager to know. I’m like, “Yeah, tell me what’s going on in Benden right now! Oh, and now we’re back at Landing. Oh, and will they be able to evacuate Monaco in time?” So I think that sense of urgency really does help me stay focused and me stay curious and excited, and like, “Yeah, take me to the next point of view! Tell me the next piece of information!”

Lleu: Yeah. It was such a small thing, but I really appreciated the attention to time zones in this book, especially in the disaster section. So, the book is divided into four parts, and part two is called “Disaster (Throughout the Same Day),” and it’s just from the moment they first get the report that there’s an object that might collide with Pern imminently to the time the last tsunami has hit its last location. And it’s moving back and forth — so, first we get a bunch of glimpses of people in different places on the planet looking up at the incoming object and being like, “Wow, that’s really bright. That’s not like our normal meteor showers!” And then to back and forth as dragonriders try to evacuate all of these different areas, and it’s jumping back and forth between the eighth and the ninth depending on how far east you are and so how far into the next day you are, in a way that is really cool. We get this sense of simultaneity, that all of these things are happening urgently at the same time.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s some swag to the “Monaco Weyr—10.22 in the morning—Timing it.”

Lleu: It’s just really good. This 90-page section is, I would say, one of the strongest parts of any book in the whole series; maybe the strongest part of any book in the whole series. There are other books that are better as a whole, but I’m not sure that there’s anything else that sustains this level of both intensity, good writing, good pacing, good character work, for so long.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is fun to see a dragon and a dragonrider fighting a different challenge than Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: Both in the sense that we have kind of gotten used to Thread, right? We know how to fight Thread. It doesn’t feel as urgent, which is something we’ve talked about in previous episodes. But also that the actual fighting of Thread was never particularly the narrative thrust. It was always, “Well, will we be able to fight Thread in the first place? Will we have enough dragons? Will the dragons be strong enough in Dragonsdawn? Will we coordinate…?” and the actual scenes of fighting Thread are exciting, but not usually quite as tense, if that makes sense —

Tequila Mockingbird: — where the scene where F’lessan is trying to evacuate a small Sea Holding — I don’t know if he’s gonna make it. I don’t know if he’s gonna be able to get all of these people out. They don’t want to believe it at first, that they need to evacuate, and the scene where he has to time it mid-air to try and rescue somebody, and Golanth makes that decision independently, because the water’s too — that was thrilling! That was really tense, in a way that I don’t know that a lot has been.

Lleu: Yeah. I would say nothing else really has been — the only thing that comes close, maybe, is F’lar’s two duels, where we get the kind of blow-by-blow.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I would say maybe the feline attack in Dragonseye.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although, for that, I’m pretty confident they’re gonna be okay. It’s fun; it feels very new in a lot of ways, and the feline attack, I think, also feels very tense and very urgent, which is cool. She’s learned and grown, like, you can tell that this is a mature author who’s had 30-something years to get really good at craft, and I think it feels like that is paying off at this point.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s also maybe worth mentioning that in the acknowledgement to this book, she specifically thanks her daughter. She says:

Lleu: “I owe a particular debt to Georgeanne Kennedy, who rallied me to keep to the ‘real’ [quote-unquote] storyline when I had a tendency to go off on tangents, because there are so many people on Pern.”

Lleu: — for making this book as good as it is, because that is something that we’ve observed in the last couple books. Masterharper was very focused on Robin, obviously, but still very meandering, and Dragonseye, certainly extremely meandering. Dolphins of Pern was more focused, but also there was the Toric stuff that just didn’t feel like it connected at all, whereas the Abominator stuff in this, even though it’s a little tangential, it is paralleling this question of, what are dragons going to do? They’re connected so closely.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I think it’s two different parts of Pernese society answering the same question —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in a way that I think does keep it feeling very connected and very tight narratively.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also possible that what we see of the mating flight and the sexual politics of this book is also McCaffrey, 30-something years in, as an older woman looking back, maybe trying to make some different choices or trying to grow and develop?

Tequila Mockingbird: But I — it’s tough, because if this had always been the sexual politics of mating flights and the logic of Pern, I would love it, but the fact that it’s being introduced in the last book makes it feel like a sloppy retcon.

Lleu: — but we should probably talk about what the mating flight in this book actually entails.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. We have, yet again, the old standby of a character who is unprepared for a mating flight and suddenly stuck, alone, with the person that there’s been some romantic tension with — oops! What’s gonna happen? And, previously, the answer has always been, at best, “Oh, no, we mustn’t! Oh, but we must!” and fade to black. Menolly and Sebell. F’lar and Lessa. This is a playbook that we’ve seen before. Brekke and F’nor, not quite, it’s gone off the rails a little bit, but it’s definitely not new. But here there are some interesting differences, the first being that it’s a surprise to F’lessan as well.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s really interesting, because previously we’ve really only seen that for a female character, where the male characters have often been deliberately calculating about it — lying in wait, almost. F’lar knows exactly what’s gonna happen and has chosen not to tell Lessa about it, and then is shocked that she doesn’t know. M’hall is counting on the fact that Torene is not gonna realize that this is all part of his plan for them to end up as weyrmates.

Lleu: Yeah. Crucially, it’s not just that F’lessan is caught off guard by the mating flight, but that part of what he’s caught off guard by is the fact that he is attracted to Tai at all, which is one of the things that I think is really interesting about their relationship, is that at the beginning of the book, F’lessan meets Tai, coincidentally, in the archive and is immediately like, “I just think she’s neat! Let me rearrange my personal and research interests, in order to spend more time with her.” And only fairly slowly, does he start to be like, “Yeah, I guess she’s kind of attractive. I enjoy spending time with her.” And then the mating flight happens, and he’s like, “Oh, we’re gonna have sex. Do I want that?” And has to think about it, and comes to the conclusion that he does, but that he’s caught off guard by every part of it, and not just by the “Oh, and we’re gonna have wild sex” but also hasn’t realized fully that that’s something that he wants until the mating flight also is really interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: — that men might have to think about it, where before, I feel like, every male character, their consent has just been presumed.

Lleu: — we’ve talked a lot about that; we don’t need to talk more about it. So, the counterpart to this is that Tai has not considered this possibility at all, first of all, and, second of all, is horrified by this possibility, because her previous experiences of mating flights have all been violent. And, in the same way that F’lar says, “If it hadn’t been in a mating flight, it would have been rape…” Okay, so it’s rape — has been all of her previous experiences with mating flights. People that she’s not interested in, not attracted to, cornering her or catching her out when she is not ready, not interested.

Tequila Mockingbird: There is something very interesting and new, that I do respect, about looking that in the face and saying, like, yeah, that’s shitty. That’s bad. Because I think that’s something that this series has not really been interested in doing previously.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s something that I think she’s been getting more conscious of…

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and I do think, M’hall and Torene in “The Second Weyr,” there’s that specter raised of, “Oh, is this okay?” And it turns, yeah, it’s fine. She likes him a lot. She’s totally into this.

Lleu: It’s something that came out, I think, most prominently in Dragonseye, when Debera and the other green riders are talking about what happens if a blue rider flies your dragon, and we get the kind of contrived, “Oh, you just lock yourself in a room with whoever you actually want to have sex with and the other rider finds their preferred partner, regardless of the fact that your dragons are having sex and you two are telepathically linked. Don’t worry about that; it’s fine.” Okay, that’s kind of goofy, but it is an attempt to deal with one of the fundamental problems of sexuality in these books, which is, if green dragons are also having mating flights, at least as often as queens, if not more, then there are meeting flights happening potentially several times a week, or possibly even multiple times a day, as we’ve discussed ages ago in the dragon demographics episode. What does that actually mean for people? And only now in the ’90s books does she really deal with green riders’ sexuality. And there’s an implication, both in this book and in some of the others, that green riders are often just kind of slutty, so, the follow-up from that presumably being that we’re meant to think, “Oh, they wouldn’t be picky about it, so it’s a non-issue.” So I think it’s interesting and good that this book finally does say, “Okay, but what if a green dragon rider isn’t slutty and does care, actually, about who their sexual partners are and the conditions of their sexual encounters?” Again, as I said, in previous episodes, it does strike me as probably not a coincidence that this is happening in the books now that she’s introduced slash reintroduced there being non-trivial numbers of female green riders.

Lleu: So there’s something about, women are naturally more sexually discerning than queer men, but it’s an attempt, I think, to deal with the ordinariness of mating flights. If these are something that actually happen every day to dragonriders who are, presumably, a varied population, each with their own individual idiosyncrasies, so what happens when a dragonrider doesn’t want sex and we don’t have the queen mating flight in Dragonquest and Wirenth dying to help us evade the problem.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, as I said, I would be a lot more open to this if it wasn’t showing up at the end, because I think I have a lot of the same response I had in Dragonseye, which is, that’s nice —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but if you actually want me to take that seriously, it fundamentally invalidates everything else you’ve been telling me for an entire book series.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because what she ends up doubling down on in this one is, well, actually, what happened to Tai is surprising and bad, and F’lessan’s like, “What? You should have had a choice!” And I’m reading this like, the fuck she should! What do you mean? Are you telling me that every single romantic relationship that you’ve wanted me to root for so far in these books has been rape?

Tequila Mockingbird: Or are you telling me that that is just how the cookie crumbles and this is inevitable and you make your best of it? I’ve been functioning under that second set of assumptions for an entire book series, and now you want to change that, and I’m like, “Okay, but you realize that by saying that you are supposed to be able to choose, you’re making it a real problem that Lessa and Brekke and Menolly didn’t have that option.”

Lleu: Yeah. The sort of in-world justification, again, is I think that all of those characters are in atypical situations. Brekke’s probably in the most normal of the situations, but again, McCaffrey evades the problem by having Wirenth die. Whereas Lessa — that’s not normal for even queen mating flights, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. You’re not supposed to be the only queen dragon on all of Pern.

Lleu: Yeah, and you’re not supposed to be coming into the Weyr with no education after you turned nine because you were plotting revenge against the person who murdered your family.

Tequila Mockingbird: And with R’gul in charge and not interested in educating you further.

Lleu: Yeah. Lessa’s not in a normal situation when that ends, so I think F’lessan saying you should have had a choice doesn’t necessarily — Lessa should have had a choice. I think that is kind of the takeaway there. And it (quote-unquote) “worked out” for Lessa. We get a bunch of glimpses of F’lar and Lessa’s relationship in this, and, as in All the Weyrs of Pern, it’s like, “Oh. Yeah, they actually feel like a married couple now. That’s fun.”

Tequila Mockingbird: They might like each other after 30-plus years and a kid.

Lleu: They might even like each other. They are still managing each other, in a variety of ways, but in somewhat less gendered ways — although Lessa is still very much like, “Oh, when is F’lar gonna retire? He’s working too hard…” Which does feel very gendered still. But I think I’m comfortable coming out of this thinking that maybe we are in retrospect, supposed to be a little…

Lleu: “Man, it’s good that F’lar and Lessa’s relationship worked out as well as it did, because it shouldn’t have started like that!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; I think some of my hesitation is that she is very deliberately placing this in the voice and the mind of F’lessen.

Tequila Mockingbird: So there is a cynical part of me that reads this, and I’m like, “I’m sure you’d love to think that, bronze dragonrider.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “I’m sure you definitely tell yourself that there’s great consent happening and has been every single time you’ve had sex in a mating flight. And the fact that you were”…at most 16 when his son was born? Is totally fine and normal and we shouldn’t worry about any of this.

Lleu: Mhm. In terms of the way this scene is thinking about consent, it seems to present us with two, possibly three options from a dragonrider’s perspective. One is, as F’lessan puts it, to actively “choose” your partner, to, when presented with the “Oh my god, our dragons are gonna mate; we are, at least potentially, going to have sex,” and to lean into that, and be like, “Yes, I do actively want this. I want to enjoy this experience with you, specifically.” Option two, I guess, would be to not choose, and so to, I guess, choose to interpret the sex that you are having as a purely mechanical effect of the fact that your dragon is also having sex. This scene involves F’lessan being like, “Tai, you should have had a choice. You don’t have a choice now. This isn’t how I would want it to be, and I know it’s not how you would want it to be. Our options are, you can either choose me or not choose me. I would like this to be an emotional experience for both of us, where we are both invested in this.” So he asks her to choose him, and then she, I guess, does. But there is an implication that if she’d said no, that would have changed his behavior in some way. What’s not clear is whether that means regarding sex as a purely mechanical process, or if we’re back kind of at the thing from Dragonseye and the idea is that F’lessan would then go lock himself in another room and their dragons would have sex, and they would both just sort of writhe sexually in isolation? Question mark? While still being telepathically bonded?

Tequila Mockingbird: Part of that is, he talks about deliberately choosing to try and retain human agency.

Tequila Mockingbird: “[...] he [...] didn’t want to turn dragon and have her endure rougher handling.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So there’s some implication that part of that choice is, okay, do we try and remain present as long as possible and perhaps choose some sexual decision-making while we are still mostly present, or do we want to just flip the switch, go full dragon, we’re not physically here? And maybe that is what they’re thinking about in your mechanical interpretation, or mechanical choice.

Tequila Mockingbird: Do you choose to be present for this sex or absent for it, mentally?

Lleu: Yeah. From that perspective, that suggests that maybe part of the violence of Tai’s previous encounters has, in fact, been that she hasn’t been able to —

Lleu: — just let herself go and be dragon and that she’s been present in this experience that she didn’t want.

Lleu: Yeah, rather than having it be something where they were both just caught up in their dragon and it was something happening to them rather than something that they were doing, in the way that we’ve talked about in the past.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think there’s also an implication — and they talk about this a little bit afterwards: “Hey, didn’t Mirrim tell you to choose a rider intentionally?”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think there is an implication that if you, the human, have a strong preference, you can influence your dragon —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in the same way that if your dragon has a strong preference, it can influence you, and so that part of what they are telling these — note, female — green riders —

Tequila Mockingbird: — possibly what they tell all green riders, but we don’t have any evidence of that, is, “Find someone that you think looks nice, and very deliberately think about them sexually, or encourage your dragon, or focus your interest in a way that will influence the mating flight —”

Tequila Mockingbird: “— and give you more actual agency.” It’s still a forced choice — choose which of these random guys —

Lleu: Well, also possibly with a side of, “Make sure that you’re near them when your dragon is maybe going to be rising to mate —”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we’ve also definitely been told in the past that who the Weyr as a whole wants to win a mating flight influences a mating flight —

Tequila Mockingbird: — for the Weyrleader, at least, although probably less relevant for a random green mating flight.

Lleu: Yeah, but it makes sense that the result of a green mating flight then would be driven also, potentially, by who the people involved want to win.

Lleu: And so, if there are four male dragons pursuing a green, and each of their riders wants to win, and the green dragon’s rider wants one of those four riders to win, that’s two versus one-one-one, so…

Tequila Mockingbird: Although this is definitely giving me a sidebar into, okay, so is there a Weyr economy of, “Can you please really concentrate on this one hot guy? Because I really want to snag him. I’ll let you know when I’m about to start the mating flight, and you can just, like —”

Lleu: It does raise that possibility. That’s a very funny thought. So (a) there is the question of, is this something they’re just telling female green riders now? Especially because Mirrim is the reference point, although we’ll talk later maybe about Mirrim’s role at Monaco Bay Weyr, because…what? But versus the male green riders — especially because I’m thinking, the one other green mating flight that we’ve seen was the one that Jaxom witnessed in The White Dragon, where it seemed like it was truly just…

Lleu: I don’t know, anyone at the Weyr who’s interested is getting in on this. Which, I guess, is also the specter of choice and consent here, what I sort of take to be what’s happened to Tai in the past, based on some of the things that her perspective says, is not, in fact, that she’s had open mating flights and the result has been unpleasant, but that, in part, perhaps, because she has chosen to live off by herself — her personal Weyr is distant from the main Weyr structures, ’cause she likes being alone and she likes being able to watch the sky by herself and to keep up her astronomy —

Lleu: — it kind of sounds like what’s happened is that individual riders have been showing up —

Lleu: — when they think or know that Zaranth is near rising and so arranging it so they’re the only ones who are present.

Tequila Mockingbird: Interesting. I don’t think I got that implication; I think that’s plausible.

Lleu: That was my takeaway. So that there’s also, like, she should have been equipped, knowledge-wise, to…

Lleu: Yeah. She should have known that she could slash was supposed to choose people, and also, frankly, insofar as F’lessan blames Mirrim for not telling her, there’s also a certain amount of, the Weyr also should have been keeping an eye on this and should have known that this was happening and that her previous mating flight experiences were not what they were supposed to be.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think there’s also maybe a connection back to Brekke, in the fact that Tai isn’t Weyr-bred.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. So there is this degree of, she was not expecting to be a dragonrider, and she didn’t have that adolescence in a Weyr to slowly learn and watch by example and see how this goes. She was dumped into it, and maybe more figuring it out for herself, ’cause it also sounds like she Impressed right in the middle of the AIVAS stuff. Everyone was busy; everyone was mobilizing; there wasn’t as much, you know, just natural Weyr culture, perhaps, developing, especially in Southern.

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially because there was drama with Toric and changing Weyrleaders — it’s possible that this really just slipped through the cracks.

Lleu: Yeah, well, she also was going through other personal stuff, too, right? We’re told that she came down to Southern with her family. She was going to enroll at the Landing school to further her astronomy studies, and her family, meanwhile, once they got permission, decided to head off into the wilderness and set up a Hold. And they disappeared and are presumed dead. So she also lost everyone that she had known prior to the Weyr, other than her one astronomy instructor that she was working with. No wonder she wanted to go live by herself —

Lleu: And choosing to live by herself in the woods, probably, on top of everything else that was going on, made it a lot easier for her to fall through the cracks. There’s also one of the comments that you picked up on, which I think picks up on something that we’ve been things that we’ve been thinking about consistently about the status of green riders, is, there’s a passing comment early in the book when F’lessan has been inviting her to socialize with people and interact with people, and she gets to attend the council where they’re talking about strategies for dealing with the meteorite impact and the tsunami, and she’s thinking, this was the first time that she felt like a “real” dragonrider and not just a green rider. So there’s that difference of degree, but it’s possible that that also means this is the first time she feels like she’s fully a member of the Weyr community and not just a person with a dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. And I think we were thinking a lot — and, as you said, we have been thinking about the social position of green dragonriders and green dragons on Pern, which I think also maybe has had some retconning? Or perhaps an evolution.

Lleu: I think it follows from — I was gonna say, it follows from Dragonseye; I think it follows from what we saw in Red Star Rising.

Lleu: But I think it might not be in the passage in Dragonseye, because it’s in the monograph —

Lleu: — section. So K’vin has read a monograph about gender and green riders —

Lleu: — and as part of his discussion of that, he says that green dragons, they don’t have the stamina of the larger dragons, but because they are so agile, they’re really important in Fall; you just need to be careful about cycling them in and out of your wing so that they have an hour or two to rest during the Fall, because otherwise they’ll tire themselves out, and they won’t be able to fight. But because they’re fast and agile and smaller than the other dragons, they can catch Thread that other dragons can’t and they can be more maneuverable. You could read that as being like, yes, green dragons have a really important function. I think it would be a stretch to read that as saying green dragons are the most important members of the Weyr. But that’s what we’re told in this book.

Lleu: Here’s another aspect of that. Green dragons are 50% of the dragon population.

Lleu: So, yeah, they probably are, because if you didn’t have them, you’d be at 50% strength. But I don’t think that’s what’s meant here, though.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think, to what you said earlier, a lot of it has to do with whether or not you are using “green dragon” as a euphemism for “queer man.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because what we saw early in the series was green dragon as a punishment from the universe. In Dragonquest, the fact that the bully of the weyrling class Impresses a green is something Felessan is crowing about. He’s like, “Hahaha, he only Impressed a green! That serves him right.”

Lleu: Yeah, and meanwhile, in “The Smallest Dragonboy,” when K’vin[1] is thinking about dragons, he’s like, “Well, I’d really like a brown. But I guess even a green would be better than no dragon,” because, yeah, being a dragonrider is, higher-status than being a non-dragonrider, but also we know there’s this hierarchy and that something about greens is not desirable.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so then, to come to this book, where we have two female green dragonriders as the only green dragonriders with lines? That’s not technically true, but they’re the only two real characters with lines, anyway.

Tequila Mockingbird: We’ve shifted in this book. My mental picture is still probably a guy —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because I’ve read this whole series, but if I just picked this book up cold, would I know that there are male green dragon riders?

Lleu: I’m not sure. I don’t think any named male green dragonriders show up at all, let alone having speaking roles. We don’t know that many Ninth Pass male green riders anyway, to begin with. We know, like…S’len?

Lleu: Yeah. S’len. G’sel. I’m drawing a blank on anyone else. I mean, T’reb, but he’s an Oldtimer and so presumably is long retired at this point or just dead.

Lleu: Yeah. The other dragonriders that we get in this are T’gellan, T’lion’s back, T’lion’s brother is back — they seem to have reconciled; they sleep in the same bedroom when they’re crashing at Honshu, because Monaco is underwater.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, I can’t help but think it’s a little convenient that this…

Tequila Mockingbird: — of the green dragon is coming at the same time as the green dragon becomes female.

Lleu: Yeah. We talked about this as long ago as The White Dragon, that introducing Mirrim as a green rider provides at least a theoretically safe outlet for Jaxom’s interest in mating flights, even though the mating flights that he’s involved with and his own fantasies about mating flights.

Lleu: And he doesn’t like Mirrim. F’lessan also doesn’t like Mirrim, but in a much more, like, “Oh, my god. We grew up together, and I cannot stand her. We had to go to school together for 12 years! Never again!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, it definitely gives the least favorite cousin vibe, and I actually love that for them. I think that’s really fun.

Lleu: Yeah. It creates an interesting dynamic, too, because Mirrim and F’lessan haven’t lived in the same place for the last ten years, question mark?

Lleu: So Mirrim doesn’t know F’lessan as an around-30-year-old. She knows F’lessan as a teenager and a 20-year-old.

Tequila Mockingbird: She just remembers him as an obnoxious teenager and definitely thinks he hasn’t changed.

Lleu: Yeah, and so one of the things that’s happening early in the book is that Tai is like, “Huh, F’lessan’s really different than what Mirrim described.” Yeah, ’cause Mirrim described who F’lessan was 10-15 years ago and hasn’t really interacted with him that much since then.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I do appreciate that, yes, F’lessan doesn’t like Mirrim, but I think Mirrim isn’t awful in this book; F’lessan just doesn’t like her, which I think is a good distinction.

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s complaining that she’s bossy, and I’m like, well, she’s managing an evacuation. She’s allowed to tell people what to do.

Lleu: Yeah. To pivot back to green dragons, one of the other things that’s going on here is the telekinesis thing.

Lleu: And the way that dragon telekinesis is discovered slash rediscovered slash worked out in detail is because Tai realizes that Zaranth has been moving bugs that are crawling on her, or that are about to crawl on her, and telekinetically redirecting them in another direction, so that they will not bug her, as it were. It takes her a while to put the pieces together, and then it takes Zaranth and Golanth some experimentation to be able to do it actively and accurately, but it’s interesting that this new development is coming from a green dragon — and the book itself signals to us that this is surprising, because we get a bunch of Ramoth in this book, and Ramoth is constantly like, “Wow. I can’t believe I learned this from a green dragon! That’s wild!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Ramoth is such a snob, and I really enjoy it, honestly.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s really interesting the way that other dragons learn about it. So, Zaranth and Golanth have been practicing on their own. Then the feline attack happens, and they call for help telepathically. Ramoth and a bunch of other random dragons show up. The felines are both too fast and also they’re worried about injuring the other dragons or the humans if they intervene by grabbing them physically. But Zaranth has been throwing the felines away from her telekinetically, and Ramoth and the other dragons earn how to do it in that crisis scene, under that pressure, by, as Ramoth puts it, she “sees” (quote-unquote) what Zaranth was doing and is able to imitate that. And then it takes a lot more practice for them to figure out how to do iton command, outside of a crisis situation.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because there is, repeatedly — and I think this has been very consistent — the idea that a dragon can do whatever a dragon thinks it can do.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so, in an emergency, when you’re just like, “I have to save a fellow dragon,” is a lot easier than, “Hypothetically, what if I could lift that rock?”

Lleu: Yeah. But it’s also — the question of lifting and being able to carry as much as you think you can is something that comes up in the disaster scene already that sets up the telekinesis stuff later on, because when F’lessan and a couple other riders are evacuating this Sea Hold, F’lessan has been explicitly told, “Don’t let them convince you to move a boat.” And the Sea Holders are like —

Lleu: “What if it’s one small boat? We need something; this is our entire livelihood.” And F’lessan’s like, “Ugh. Fine, okay, we’ll do it.” And they’re like, “Okay, how much can Golanth carry?”

Lleu: And F’lessan’s like, “I don’t know how to answer that question. That’s not relevant.” And it turns out, in fact, that he’s right. What matters is less how heavy the boat is and more whether they can carry the boat in a sling without knocking it into the cliffside or kind of shaking stuff out of it, or otherwise damaging it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that scene does also highlight — one of the things that I really enjoy about F’lessan in this book is the connections he makes with non-dragonriders.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I think this is the most we’ve really seen of community work from a dragonrider.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think he’s also just a naturally warm and friendly person, but that was really fun, because often, previously, dragonriders have been very siloed —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and sometimes very adversarial towards other non-dragonriders on Pern.

Lleu: Yeah. The interactions with Holders that we see mainly are, Fall ended and F’lar’s like, “Ugh, okay, I’ve gotta go meet with Lord Asgenar and talk through the Fall,” or in Dragonsong, we see that T’gellan chats with Yanus after Threadfall, but in a way that’s, like, this is still work. And, obviously, F’lessan is doing work here, too, but it’s a different kind of work.

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s doing work when he does the evacuation, but when he comes back to check on them —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and when he has dinner with them. And when he’s talking to the people near this Hold, and is like, “Hey, do you want me to show up? I have a dragon; I can hunt some felines for you,” and then, “We can maybe thank you for bringing the food,” and, like, a potluck situation. That feels more like community-building.

Lleu: Yeah. And we do get to meet the lovely matriarch of this little Sea Hold.

Lleu: First, he’s like, “You’ve got to start evacuating stuff. Bring only what you need.” And a teenager shows up dragging this giant rocking chair, and he’s like, “That’s not what you need.” And they’re like, “No, no, it’s Lady Medda’s!” And he’s like, “Okay…”

Lleu: And then he sees her, and he’s like, “Ah, okay, she’s the key. If I get her on board with this, everyone else is gonna fall into place.” So they bring the rocking chair up and install her on the cliff, and she —

Lleu: — gets everyone organized while she’s sitting, rocking in her chair, watching the tsunami approach. It’s extremely fun.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also, just personally, extremely relatable. This is how grandmothers act. There is also an interesting question in this book about green riders and gold riders, and when they are interchangeable and when they are not, because we also get Mirrim, functionally, being the Weyrwoman of Monaco?

Tequila Mockingbird: Even though she isn’t, because she’s in a personal romantic relationship with T’gellan.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it seems like Talina simply is not interested in fulfilling a lot of the political and social responsibilities of being Weyrwoman, so she just lets Mirrim do that.

Lleu: Unfortunately, the book frames this in moralizing, like, “Well, yeah, Talina’s kind of lazy, so of course she doesn’t do anything.” Or, when they’re doing the astronomy stuff and giving a tour of Honshu to show off the telescope and talk the other dragonriders through the process that they’re imagining. Talina’s there, and F’lessan’s like, “Yeah, Talina was there, but not really there; kind of checked out. She has this way of being present in a group, but not actually part of the group.”

Lleu: It feels kind of judgmental, but I do think it’s interesting, because it is something that we’ve gotten kind of hints, in other books, that most of the other Weyrwomen aren’t really that politically involved. The Weyrleaders show up to meetings, but Bedella? Lessa thinks she’s stupid. Mardra is horrible. They’re notionally in charge, but the degree to which they are actually in charge seems to vary. I mean, even at Southern in Dragonquest, right? Kylara is the Weyrwoman, but Brekke is the one who does all the work, with maybe some help from Ranelly filling in for Kylara.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think… Hm. There is some cool space to play around in with this idea that, you know what? Shockingly, sometimes having the dragon that rises to mate first after an arbitrary event, i.e., the previous Weyrleader retiring, does not mean you are personally cut out for political leadership. Wild!

Lleu: Yeah, which is also a question that we’ve seen in other books, right? Moreta was thinking about leadership, and that Sh’gall would be a bad peacetime Weyrleader, during the interval, but is a good Thread Weyrleader, because he’s good at organizing people during Threadfall and leading people during Threadfall. But that he’s not as good at some of the other political stuff, and that’s maybe why she’s more politically involved than she might otherwise have been, because she’s covering for Sh’gall’s tendency to be gruff and off-putting.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think with Moreta it’s interesting that she’s very deliberately thinking about this, and thinking, like, “Okay, so I’ll choose someone different when Orlith rises to mate after the Pass is done.”

Tequila Mockingbird: That there’s an active personnel management side to that, which, obviously, this is the fake good version of Pern that only exists in my mind, but I would love to believe that Talina is just not a joiner, and so she was like, “Great, T’gellan has that incredibly bossy weyrmate, doesn’t he? Perfect!”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I think it actually is working out kind of well for them, and I am in favor of anything that is not strict heterosexual, monogamous, romantic fidelity between dragonriders, because we’ve been told that that’s not how it has to work, and so it is fun to see it not work like that.

Lleu: Yeah, and it fills in a gap that we identified in Dolphins, which is, when T’lion gets in trouble for hanging out with Dolphins, the people who show up to discipline him are T’gellan and…Mirrim, for some reason, and it’s like, well where’s the Weyrwoman in this? Why is Mirrim here?

Lleu: Yeah, exactly. Talina’s decided that this is not her problem. T’gellan can do what he wants.

Lleu: And presumably fulfilling their obligations during Threadfall of leading the queens’ wing.

Lleu: And presumably she’s signing off on the administrative stuff. We know that the Weyrwoman’s supposed to keep the records — maybe she keeps the records and Mirrim does the day-to-day management. They’ve divided the labor in some way, that’s apparently —

Lleu: — suitable for everyone. Everyone’s comfortable with it. Yeah. Which is fun. Okay, so speaking of space to play around in, let’s talk about dragons in space. I love this concept!

Tequila Mockingbird: We were cheated! We were cheated of dragons in space in this book!

Lleu: I know! We know that after this book, the plan is that they’re gonna start using the Yokohama again. The dragons are going to install satellites over the Northern Continent. Hello? That rules.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, so you’re like, “Well, what would the next book even be about? There’s nothing more to say about the dragons.” Dragons in space!

Tequila Mockingbird: Dragons in space. I don’t need a conflict. We’re in space. There’s dragons.

Lleu: Okay, fair enough. My memory of this book going into it was very vague. I remembered the specific scene where Tai catches Zaranth moving bugs. I remembered the feline attack; I did not remember the details of it, or that anyone was seriously injured. And I remembered that the dragons were gonna be doing astronomy. And I was like, “Okay, that’s kind of goofy.” And I believe we summarized this — I don’t remember whether it made it into our listener Q&A with onlysunscreen, but we did summarize it for them, and they were like, “Excuse me? What?” Which was kind of how I felt about it going in, also. And then I read the book, and I was like, “No, this rules, actually. This is so good. This is what I wanted.” Especially because there are these gestures towards, not only are dragons gonna protect Pern, but also they’re gonna maybe do some space exploration? Are dragons gonna go to the other planets in the Rukbat system?

Lleu: I want this so badly. I would love for Pern to find out about the beacon.

Lleu: — shut it off! Initiate contact with other people again. ’Cause who knows what the galaxy’s like 2,500 years later.

Tequila Mockingbird: The delight that it would give me for other Earth humans to rock up and be like, “Oh, cool, lost colo- — you have what!? Dragons!?”

Lleu: Yeah! It would be so cool.And it won’t happen, obviously, because, of course, “Not all new technologies are good, and we need to make sure that we stay at a sustainable pre-industrial level.” That’s not gonna happen, as evidenced by things that are happening in this book, which we will talk about. But it opens the possibility.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s cool to see the telekinesis functioning as a form of technology.

Tequila Mockingbird: — both in that it is unlocking their access to these higher technological feats of space travel and satellite access and all of the stuff that would not be possible with their technological capacity otherwise.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also, to see it used in-universe as this new social technology that the dragons have access to, the way that it is providing them with a new professional opportunity and giving them kob security, in some ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the way that it’s being used as assistive technology, or it’s teased as an option for assistive technology —

Tequila Mockingbird: — for F’lessan and Golanth, because, as Lleu mentioned, they are both significantly physically disabled by the end of this story. But Zaranth and Tai are able to kind of start to use telekinesis to move F’lessan around before he’s able to safely do as much walking as he would need to do to get to Golanth.

Tequila Mockingbird: And a bunch of dragons are able to show up and use telekinesis to help Golanth basically get enough height that he can safely go between.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause he’s still fine to go between, but we’ve been told in the past, and it is reiterated in this book, that it’s very dangerous to do that at ground level.

Tequila Mockingbird: Presumably because it interferes with your reference points and makes it harder on the dragon.

Lleu: I should emphasize, this is entirely speculation. We don’t actually get any explanation for why it’s more dangerous to go between at ground level; we just are told repeatedly that it’s dangerous.

Tequila Mockingbird: Fair. But once he’s up in the air, he can go between, and he can land pretty much on his own over water.

Tequila Mockingbird: But — and that that is an opportunity for physical therapy for him, for his injured wing —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that would not have been possible. There’s no way to get him to the water to exercise it. And so, both that this telekinesis might be an option for helping him maybe fly more safely if his wing never recovers, but that it is just literally bridging that gap and helping the chance of having a good recovery increase.

Lleu: Yeah. It is also is reconfiguring dragon relationships, because one of the things that they discover, in part through Zaranth and Golanth collaborating to learn telekinesis, is that it works better if two dragons are doing it together, and it seems like, basically, one of them is controlling the speed and the other one of them is actually doing the moving.

Lleu: So one of them is actually moving something telekinetically, and the other one is regulating the movement.

Lleu: Yeah, because that’s one of the things that they struggle with initially. So, first, when when Zoranth is teaching Golanth to do it —

Lleu: — the first few times Golanth tries moving bugs he squishes them, and Zoranth is like, “Not that fast.”

Lleu: When they’re trying to figure it out after Ramoth and all the other dragons have learned how to do it, ne of the things that they’re struggling with is, “Okay, when we were doing it with the felines, it didn’t matter how fast we threw them or in what direction we threw them; we just had to get them away —”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Or that they were disintegrating while we did it.”

Lleu: Right, “Or that they were falling apart because we were tearing them apart telekinetically, because they were attacking people, and so we needed to get them out of the way as fast as possible, and ideally incapacitate them or kill them. But, if we were trying to move people or material, that would not be viable.” So then they have to practice, and it turns out that the most effective way to do it is in pairs, and specifically gendered pairs, of course, so a female dragon and a male dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because if we can’t get heterosexuality into this book, we die.

Lleu: Yeah, but again, assuming that green dragons continue to be, at least some, gay men, we’ve still made gay men and close working relationships between gay men and other men a load-bearing part of the world-building. Again. Just without actually dealing with that here, because our focus is on Tai.

Tequila Mockingbird: And because editing Ma- — the Masterharper episode was a lot, we are going to call it on this one and see you again in our second episode about this book — because we’re not done. Why would we be done?

Tequila Mockingbird: Skies of Pern is actually not terrible. I think it falls in the same Moreta category, of, if you have read the Pern books, why not, but it’s probably not worth reading other Pern books in order to get to Skies of Pern. Instead, what about Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, which includes elements of protest movements that are, perhaps, going to extremes, although I think more nuanced and sympathetically handled than in Skies of Pern, and also thinks a lot about intergenerational relationships and parental relationships. If you were hoping that you would get a little bit more from the F’lar and Lessa and F’lessan dynamic than this book actually ended up giving us. It is the story of Yumi Fuller returning to her rural Idaho hometown when her father becomes seriously ill, after running away from home at the age of 14. In so doing, she makes contact with the best friend she left behind, and also a group of radical anti-GMO activists. And needless to say Ozeki’s handling of a Asian-American protagonist is also somewhat more thoughtful than McCaffrey’s.

Lleu: My recommendation is quite out there, and also it only just came out; it is Marietta S. Shaginyan’s Yankees in Petrograd, which has just been newly retranslated and published by MIT Press as part of their Radium Age series of science fiction from ca. 1900 to 1930-ish. So, it is a Soviet speculative adventure novel about a complicated fascist plot to sabotage Soviet industry and assassinate Lenin, which seemed apropos for the Abominators. It is wild. It has some dubious gender politics and racial politics, but it’s also really engaging and really interesting snapshot of an often-overlooked body of literature, namely, socialist popular fiction.

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.