Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #18: The Skies of Pern (2001), part 2

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

Tequila Mockingbird: And we’re still talking about The Skies of Pern, and it’s frankly a good thing that this is the last full-length novel, because we’ve lost the ability to talk about the full-length novels in a reasonable framework of time.

Lleu: Yeah. One of the problems is that there’s two separate threads of stuff going on in this, and the other problem is that the last — well, Masterharper, we were just all over the place, and that’s on us. But Dragonseye and Skies of Pern both, I think, justify their double episodes, in the same way that Dragonsdawn did, with “There’s just so much going on.” And it’s making so many changes to things, right? So, in the early episodes, we could coast on some of the world-building stuff, ’cause we’d already done the world-building episode. You could just listen to that and know where we’re coming from. But now we have to talk about how everything is different from the world-building episode. So.

Lleu: One of the — potential, anyway — follow-ups from the feline attack is in-text follow-up from the feline attack, which is the book’s treatment of disability. Tai and Zaranth, as I mentioned, are both somewhat injured, and F’lessan and Golanth are both seriously injured in the feline attack.

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re not sure that they will live. They’re very dubious that Golanth will be able to see or will be able to fly again.

Lleu: Yeah, and it’s not clear whether F’lessan will ever recover full or even, really, significant use of his injured leg.

Lleu: Yeah. So one of the things that’s interesting is the negotiation of recovery. We spend a bunch of time with characters who are like, “We have to convince both F’lessan that Golanth is gonna be fine and Golanth, that F’lessan is going to be fine” — because if Golanth thinks F’lessan is going to die, he might go between prematurely. That’s something we’ve been told happens in other books: if a rider is seriously injured, the dragon may panic. Meanwhile, F’lessan believing that Golanth is going to be fine will help Golanth be calmer, because it will make F’lessan calmer. And if both of them are calm, Golanth’s recovery will go more smoothly, and F’lessan will be able to take the time that he needs, rather than feeling like he has to be rushing and panicking.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s an interesting thread there, where both this book is celebrating the technological advancements in medical technology, where they talk about the fact that, like, hey, if they hadn’t happened to be researching how to deal with abdominal wounds surgically, then it’s unlikely that F’lessan would have survived his internal injuries —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but also the privileging of dragonrider intuition and personal experience over medical expertise, in the sense that they’ve sewn Golanth’s injured eye closed to give the membranes time to heal, but he’s able to telepathically communicate to F’lessan that it’s itching and he wants it off, so F’lessan sneaks down in the middle of the night and cuts the stitches out without talking to a Healer. And that’s sort of narratively presented as the right decision to make.

Lleu: Or at least as not the wrong decision to make. The healers weren’t necessarily wrong, but F’lessan is also not wrong. It’s just a different approach, and F’lessan’s maybe more responsive to what Golanth feels.

Tequila Mockingbird: — they’re itchy, and sometimes the answer is not to remove them.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause there’s also the way that Tai’s instinct whenever she’s injured, both in an early Abominator attack, where she gets beaten badly trying to prevent them from destroying the Healer crafthall in Landing, and after this is to go into the ocean. She feels very firmly that saltwater is healing. I’m not sure that I agree.

Lleu: Everyone knows salt water’s healing! You have a cut, you go in the ocean, and it helps it heal.

Tequila Mockingbird: And all that algae is great for you. Yeah. My understanding is that ocean water is not actually great for open wounds, but I’m not a doctor.

Lleu: I also grew up knowing that saltwater is good for you, so I’m with Tai on this.[1]

Tequila Mockingbird: Really? Well, who can say. So, she does that, but it’s always met with pushback. Initially, F’lessan’s like, “Hey, what are you doing? Get out of the water; you’ve washed off all your numbweed!” And then the Healers — she’s sneaking out, and they’re like, “What are you doing?” And yet, again, narratively, it’s very much presented as Tai is correct. This is what you should be doing. So I just think there’s an interesting tension there — yes, this high-tech healing is great, and we respect the Healercraft Hall, and it’s terrible that they’re being attacked by the Abominators —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but also, individually, you should tell your doctor to go fuck themselves if you disagree with their medical decisions.

Lleu: Again, it’s the commitment to homeopathic remedies on Pern, right?[2]

Lleu: The medical advances are good, insofar as the medical advances are making it possible for them to deal with conditions that they wouldn’t have been able to previously — cancers, any kind of internal medicine, serious wounds that involve surgery. There’s some back-and-forth about stitching, and it’s like, “Well, we’ve been doing that for at least 200 years.” Like. Only 200 years?

Tequila Mockingbird: When did you spontaneously, halfway through the long interval, re-realize that stitching wounds was a good idea?

Lleu: Yeah. That was a little weird. So there’s a tension between — obviously you need scientific medicine for serious things, but if it’s some bruises and cuts, go for a swim. That’s fine. Put some numbweed on that. You’re all good.

Lleu: Although we are, interestingly, told — one of the healers is like, “Even if you have numbweed, you can still hurt yourself, because you can’t feel that you are hurting yourself.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I did really appreciate that, because that’s very true and a serious issue with a lot of people who have a limited sensation in some part of their body or lose sensation in part of their body.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it was cool to see that show up. Numbweed is great! But it’s not actually fixing anything.

Lleu: Well, it maybe is fixing things, but it’s not instantly fixing things — it is also implied at some point that numweed —

Lleu: — in addition to having the numbing effect, has some kind of healing effect as well. Just not in any kind of specific way.[3]

Lleu: Anyway, we’ve talked extensively about ableism in these books, and in particular, how truly horrible they are about any kind of intellectual or developmental disability. She’s been better, typically, about physical disabilities, and I think this is maybe one of the best portrayals of a physical disability in this series, because it is something that, unlike Menolly or even unlike Readis, who we see mainly —

Lleu: — after the point where he has recovered as much as he’s going to and has the… assistive technologies that he needs, namely a runner to help him move long distances when that would be too tiring for him —

Lleu: — but who fundamentally can walk fine for his day-to-day needs. He can swim, most importantly, without a problem. And it’s not clear that either of those things will ever be the case for F’lessan. It sounds like they think he’s probably always gonna need a cane and/or someone to help him walk.

Tequila Mockingbird: I agree that I think it’s a really solid portrayal. I think we see that this isn’t easy for F’lessan, but that he’s also fundamentally optimistic about the future. The most concern that he feels is about the future of mating flights and flying Thread —

Tequila Mockingbird: — the realization that he will not, realistically, ever be able to fight Thread again is one that’s really tough for him and for Golanth. I feel like the narrative is pretty clear on, that’s not gonna happen.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s possible that, with telekinetic support, either from other dragons or just with him and maybe Zaranth to kind of fly functionally, independently, he might be able to do regular flying and possibly even a mating flight, but combat flying is just not a good idea.

Lleu: Yeah. He’s not fully blind in one eye, but his field of vision is significantly limited in one eye, and he won’t be able to do the kind of precision flying that you need to do during Threadfall, even if he is able to fly normally in other cases where specific, precise vision is less important, which presumably would include a mating flight, especially if you and your partner have arranged it so that it’s just the two of you.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I thought that was brave, narratively, and I really appreciated that. I did have some, maybe, lingering reservation about the way that, prior to this happening, there had been this narrative — “Oh, but he’s a bronze dragon rider, and he’s throwing himself away on a green dragon?”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Is that really gonna be the endgame here?” And then there felt like maybe a little bit of the narrative evening of the scales. Honestly, it reminded me of the end of Jane Eyre, where it’s like, “It’s fine that she’s poor, ’cause now he’s blind and has the hand injury, so they’re equal!”

Lleu: Yeah. This something that comes up repeatedly in the book, is characters — most notably Lessa — looking at Tai and being like, “Huh. Really?”

Lleu: Yeah. And, eventually, to their credit, coming to the conclusion, “Oh, actually, Tai’s great.” But there is this question, and I feel like it probably is at least partly connected to the fact that green riders are typically gay men, and so the idea of F’lessan settling down with a green rider is still registering to some people as, like, “But F’lessan’s a straight guy, and green riders are slutty gay men.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, we’ve even had, previously, textually from F’lessan, this idea that practicing with green dragons is cheating for the real challenge that is a gold dragon’s mating flight.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I think I would have really liked it if that had been more directly addressed — F’lessan maybe thinking about that, if there’d been a little more of the, like, “Oh, actually, no.” But they didn’t have time for that in this 450-page book.

Lleu: Yeah, there’s too much other stuff going on. It’s only 434 pages in my edition, so…

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh. Mine’s 456 exactly. I did also appreciate that there is a beat where F’lessan has this renewed respect for Lytol.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah! Other people have pointed out, “Wow, that was really tough,” or “It’s hard to keep going.” But the only other dragonless character we see is this horrific, like, “Well, he’s a dragonless man, so he doesn’t care anymore, he’s just murdering people, and obeying Thella.” It’s in Renegades of Pern, and it was a really unsympathetic portrayal, so it was nice to have a little vindication for Lytol, of, like, yeah, his entire life was destroyed, and he very deliberately made the choice to rebuild it and keep going and raise Jaxom and help Ruatha and come to Cove Hold and reinvent his life again — that takes a lot of courage. And I do appreciate it, because I feel like at other points in the series — and we’ve talked about this — there’s sort of a privileging of suicide, or of suicidality? That leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth of the “Well, if you’re not sad enough to die about it, get over yourself” attitude when it comes to grief and loss.

Lleu: “Abruptly another revelation occurred to him. Lytol, with his scarred and seamed face! He had been dragonless for Turns, ever since his brown Larth had died in a routine training flight at Benden: a training flight during which R’gul had allowed his dragon a chance to chew firestone and flame. Only Larth had caught flame in the face and so had Lytol. The dragon had managed to land his gravely wounded rider with the last breath in him. That should have been the end of the rider, as a person—a dragonless man.

Lleu: “Tradition said dragonless riders suicided rather than live without their dragon. But Lytol had defied that convention and had become far more than a dragonrider. He had been a Lord Holder for Jaxom’s minority; he had then turned his hand to help Master Robinton and D’ram to manage Landing as a major Hold to the satisfaction of everyone involved. Now, Lytol and D’ram, in addition to bearing blind Wansor company, had accepted yet another role for which they were unusually qualified: as wise consultants for the complex society of the planet. Briefly F’lessan wondered, even as his soul cringed at the thought: would he have had the courage to build a new life—lives, in fact—as Lytol had done, if Golanth had succumbed to his injuries.

Lleu: “F’lessan gave a snort of disgust for his self-absorption. The time he had wasted. As Tai had said, there would be a way. Lytol had made several, and the example of the man’s quiet heroism rebuked him.”

Lleu: Yeah, Lytol did fully reinvent himself several times in the face of this incredible tragedy, and that is amazing! That was one of the most satisfying moments in the whole book for me, frankly.

Lleu: I hadn’t even fully thought about it, previously, and then F’lessan did this, and I was like, “Oh, my god, yeah! Everyone has been selling Lytol short —”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s a very satisfying ending. We’ve talked about this before: the woman knows how to write an ending.

Lleu: Yeah. Even some of the stuff before the ending, as they’re coming to terms with this, and there’s this moment where all of the dragonriders who have been plotting this — someone suggests it, and they all kind of sit there and are like, “Whoa. We have a future again.” And I’m sitting there, like, hand over my heart, like, “I get it; they do have a future again! This is amazing!” And that’s not even the end of the book, which is even more satisfying. So, speaking of social transformation and self-reinvention, we haven’t talked, really, about the Abominators plot.

Lleu: Despite the fact that its a bit anticlimactic, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff going on here — I alluded to this in our ’90s retrospective, is some of the historical resonances. I think, in particular, one of the things that jumped out at me is the fact that when they’re criticizing the Abominators, the way that that’s framed is around choice, the idea that the Abominators are attempting to deny people the ability to make an informed choice about what kinds of technologies they want in their lives. To me, especially in a book that’s coming right out of the ’90s, that reads as extremely about anti-abortion violence and right-wing Christian violence in the US in the ’90s.

Lleu: That this is meant to be a kind of vindication of science and a vindication of “progress,” quote-unquote, against the Abominators as this deeply reactionary force.

Tequila Mockingbird: I also think that framing is in contrast with a lot of the usual, or the common, framing around technological advancement in science fiction? Which I thought was fun, ’cause it doesn’t feel cyberpunk. We are very much not in that realm, and we’re very much thinking about these technologies as a communal technology, rather than an individual technology.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which I think is fun, first of all, because a lot of these are very low technology, as things go — we’re talking about the idea of surgery and a printing press and shatter-resistant glass, rather than the computer that you put in your brain.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we do see that within the Abominators — a big category — there’s a lot of different types of objection, or a lot of different feelings, where some of them are just, “I don’t think this is real. I think it’s a lie or a trick.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Some of it are, “I think it’s real, and I think that it’s bad. I think any kind of progress is bad; it should just all stay exactly the same.” Including, “Thread is actually good,” which I’m just, like, baffled.

Tequila Mockingbird: Some of them have been lied to, so have, like, an incorrect understanding of what’s going on — are being told, like, “Oh, surgery is just cutting people up for fun. That’s gonna happen.” And some of them are deliberately manipulating this political unrest, because they see a profit advantage. I don’t think Toric is actually worried about technology —

Tequila Mockingbird: — he just thinks it’s a useful political tool. We, yes, see the variety, but also all of those abominators are treated exactly the same way, both diegetically and extradiegetically. There’s no, “Hey, maybe we could educate these people who genuinely are being preyed upon and are just ignorant of what’s actually happening.”

Lleu: Well, there is that, because one of the things that’s going on in this book, in particular, is that when they’re trying to locate the Abominators, physically, they do this by tracking Runner messages, basically, and they’re able to identify, the Abominators are mainly living among the (quote-unquote) “hill folk” in Keroon, who live in relatively isolated communities and who have historically been anti-education and anti-Harpers, and so have not either been informed adequately about new developments or have —

Lleu: — rejected that information and fallen prey to misinformation, yeah. Part of that is, there’s a certain amount of, “Ah, those stupid rural people who are just naturally conservative.” But also, one of the things that they’re grappling with is how do we communicate effectively with these people who have been underserved? One of the things that they identify as a concern of the Abominators is that some people are not necessarily opposed to these technologies but are not convinced that these technologies are actually going to be accessible to them, and that they’re just going to make the lords more powerful — which is a real and legitimate concern. Certainly that’s what Toric is interested in, is the way that the technologies that he thinks can be useful to him will make him, personally, more powerful. The problem is that the book then throws that concern away and doesn’t deal with it anymore. But it is present.

Tequila Mockingbird: They say that, but all of the Abominators get exiled exactly the same way.

Lleu: Oh, my god. In a very normal-for-Pern way, the Abominators say, “We have rights!” And Lord Groghe says, verbatim:

Lleu: What? What do you mean by that? Anyway, I think one of the things that we’ve talked about in the past is the extent to which Pern is kind of moving towards a kind of liberal, bourgeois revolution as industrialization advances, as these new technologies get deployed, and one of the things that we’re seeing here is, there’s kind of two strands among the Abominators. One is people like Toric, who are opposed to AIVAS technologies because they’re concerned about it limiting their own power. Certainly, that was sort of what was going on with the first group of Abominators — Norist, Sigomal, etc. But Toric is like, “I’ve been cheated of my rightful things by everyone, so now I’m being evil out of spite, because I want the money and the land and the power that I feel like I deserve. The more technologies are democratizing things, the less ability I have to exert control over my Holders.” And, in part, one of the things I think he’s concerned about, although it doesn’t, I don’t think quite go into detail about this, is the same thing that we talked about before. If there’s no more Thread —

Lleu: — then he has nothing to offer his Holders, right? He’s no longer in charge of shelter. And then, on the other hand, you have people like the Hillfolk who have either been misled, or are conservative rural voters, who are opposed to social change or “concerned” about social change because it disrupts their way of life, and that’s a real phenomenon that she’s identified.

Tequila Mockingbird: I was curious about how that might be read very differently in 2001 than I’m reading it in 2025.

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially this idea of, “It’s okay, we’ve solved the problem of misinformation, because now we have printed material.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I’m like, well, you still have a monopoly on printed material; that definitely means that all of the printed material will be material that the Printers’ Crafthall agrees with.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I would be very curious about how much the early internet was influencing McCaffrey’s thoughts on the dissemination of information here and of true information versus rumor.

Lleu: Well, meanwhile, I’m also thinking about to what extent the 2000 election was influencing how she was thinking about demographics and social variation.

Tequila Mockingbird: She was pretty involved with online fan forums, at least…

Lleu: Yeah, and I will note that the dustjacket for this book from 2001 does say, “Visit the author online at www dot annemcaffrey dot org.” So, she was —

Lleu: — thinking about the internet. She’s kind of written herself into a corner where she can’t actually have them have anything like the internet, because —

Tequila Mockingbird: She was writing about the space future in the ’80s, yeah.

Lleu: — she already set the technology level in Dragonsdawn. So, in terms of internal social variation, we do get a fun and extremely perplexing passing comment: in addition to the hill folk in Keroon, one of the other places that they are speculating that the Abominators might be is with the (quote-unquote) “desert nomads” in Igen. I’m sorry, who?

Tequila Mockingbird: You know, the desert nomads. They just haven’t come up in any of the previous books. Like the dolphins! Don’t worry about it.

Lleu: Yeah. We know that there are some itinerant populations on Pern. It’s mainly been the traders so far. We know from the beginning of Renegades that that has been —

Lleu: — ’cause it’s a logistical problem for both travelers and also for dragonriders, right? What do you do if a caravan is caught out during Threadfall? Dragons catch most Thread, but they don’t catch all Thread, even when they know what the boundaries they’re supposed to be protecting are. That’s a big question mark for me here. Okay, there’s desert nomads in Igen. Are they following established routes? Do they have established shelters that the dragonriders are protecting? What? What is this? Who are they?

Lleu: And then the other question, since it was, as we discussed in Dragonsdawn, pretty much stated that all of the (quote-unquote) “ethnic nomads” died in the first Threadfall, are these new people who, over the past 2,500 years have adopted an itinerant lifestyle in Igen? Are these maybe another group of Tuareg who survived the first Threadfall? Where did these people come from? What’s the deal?

Lleu: And we don’t get any information about this, other than that they apparently exist.

Lleu: Oh, yeah, and the Far Western Continent. I know that it becomes extremely important in the Todd books.

Lleu: Yeah, so there’s a Western Continent, and they’re gonna set up an observatory there.

Tequila Mockingbird: Not the desert nomads of Igen, but I did appreciate seeing social variation in other ways, and the degree to which Pern is not a unified society and is not a society that agrees about everything —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in a way that I think does make it feel very real and very lived in. Frankly, I would have appreciated a little less mob violence, because whenever the Abominators get caught, they kind of throw it to the populace, who are always unanimously like, “Just murder them extrajudicially! Quick, do it right now! I’m totally fine with this!”

Lleu: N’ton, Jaxom, and Tagetarl have to be like, “No, no, no. We will not summarily execute them now; we will just sentence them to exile, where they will die of Threadfall or disease or natural disasters.”

Lleu: So, we’ve been thinking since Dragonseye about the question of citizenship, and whether it exists on Pern and what it entails. And one of the things that comes up repeatedly in this book is a question of jurisdiction over individual criminals.

Lleu: Yeah, or sentence to death by hard labor. One of the questions that comes up at the very beginning of the book is, a group of Abominators have attacked a bunch of Healer Halls around Pern, including the Healer Hall at Fort. Oldive and Sharra are there; Oldive is in shock a little bit, I would say, based on the description here.

Lleu: Yeah. Lord Groghe shows up once he gets word that this has happened, and Lord Groghe essentially asserts his legal jurisdiction over the criminals.

Tequila Mockingbird: Here. Sharra tells Oldive that he has to go sit down, he’s not dressed for the weather, “this has been a terrible shock to you.” And:

Tequila Mockingbird: Oldive asserts that he needs to stay and observe. The discussion continues; it goes back and forth. Then Groghe is talking with N’ton and his son about what’s happened and the situation. And then he says:

Tequila Mockingbird: “Take B into the small room. N’ton, Sebell, we’ll question him there. Will you attend, Master Oldive?”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, not, “Will you be in charge?” but “Will you participate?”

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘I must oversee…’ The Healer waved vaguely at the hall.?”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Yes, yes, of course, you’ve better things to do with your time.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And then they just fully move into, Groghe’s in charge, he’s gonna manage this. And he says:

Tequila Mockingbird: “I shall deal with that rabble to the fullest extent of my power as Lord Holder.”

Lleu: Yeah, although, you know what? It does occur to me there that it’s Groghe, N’ton, and Sebell, so they have a Lord Holder —

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. So, there’s no explicit discussion of, “Hey, should this be the Healer Hall?” But I think it’s fair to say that Oldive is clearly not stepping forward and saying, “Yeah, the Healercraft Hall will deal with this.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And neither is Sharra, who might also have kind of a social right to do that by virtue of being both a Healer either Master or Journeywoman at this point and the wife of a Lord Holder.

Lleu: Well, yeah, since question mark(?) can she vote at Conclave? We’ll get back to that question.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, I think it’s fair to say that Groghe ends up with jurisdiction, but also nobody else wanted it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And he does have the quorum of a Weyrleader, a Craftmaster, and a Lord Holder on the spot.

Lleu: Yeah. I guess we take that to mean that they have effectively granted Groghe legal jurisdiction to deal with this specific group — in part maybe because there are groups in a bunch of other Holds. Rather than dealing with everyone collectively, Groghe can deal with the ones at Fort, and —

Tequila Mockingbird: And that there is also some discussion of the fact that they don’t know which Hall these Abominators are from, or which Hold, and they are refusing to say.

Lleu: Yeah, and that comes up much more clearly in the second attack on the Printer Hall, which is foiled, during which, essentially, Menolly arranges for Jaxom and N’ton to show up there. And then, once again, we have a Lord Holder, a Weyrleader, and a Craftmaster — Tagetarl being the Masterprinter — so, legally speaking, they have everything that they need in order to make these decisions, but much more explicitly.

Tequila Mockingbird: They question whether, actually, Lord Kashman, the Lord Holder of Keroon, should have jurisdiction here:

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Shouldn’t we send for Lord Kashman?’ someone shouted from the crowd. ‘He’s our Holder and he’s supposed to deal with peace-breakers, thieves, burglars, and such.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘For general Hold matters,’ Pinch said quickly.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And “Pinch” is Master Mekelroy, the Harper who’s in charge of the spy situation here.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘This is a Harper Hall matter. However, if any of you…’ and he addressed the captives, ‘is from this Hold you may step forward and I’m sure Lord Kashman will keep you comfortably enough.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘As I was saying,’ Pinch continued with a faint grin, ‘if you are of this Hold, you can be transferred to the Hold to await Lord Kashman’s judgment.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Name, hold, hall, and rank, if any,’ N’ton said, stepping with authority beside Pinch.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Then, since they have been caught in an illegal entry and in the willful destruction of an authorized Crafthall, Master Tagetarl, Master Mekelroy, how will you deal with them?’”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, they are explicitly setting aside the possibility that the Lord Holder of Keroon should have authority above their own, since they’re under his auspices here in Keroon.

Lleu: Well, and, in fact, possibly that not just the Lord Holder of Keroon, but that another Holder or Craftmaster, if anyone claimed affiliation with another Lord Holder or Craftmaster, might have jurisdiction over them or at least would have jurisdiction to speak on their behalf, which is something that seems like it might have been relevant for the trial in All the Weyrs of Pern, that lords are supposed to be able to speak as legal advocates or are supposed to have legal jurisdiction over or legal responsibility for. Again the question of to what extent Holders are free or have freedom of movement, versus whether they are, in some way, the property or —

Lleu: Yeah, he feels that, at the very least, Jaxom has usurped his right, that he should have been the Lord Holder who was called in to adjudicate, and possibly that the three of them collectively usurped his right and this should have entirely been an internal Keroon matter, and then has to have it pointed out that it didn’t involve Keroon; it involved the Printercraft, which is autonomous, ostensibly.

Tequila Mockingbird: Maybe his first argument has more weight than his second one —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because when we do see Lord Groghe is involved, but it also happened in Fort.

Tequila Mockingbird: “Menolly’s fire lizard happened to be here and happened to notice something and happened to let us know!”

Lleu: Yeah, so it’s very obviously contrived. I don’t blame Kashman for being a little bit, like. “Bro.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. All of the problems that we have previously discussed around Pern’s (quote-unquote) “justice system” are back in full force.

Tequila Mockingbird: We love to exile people. If we haven’t exiled anybody, we just don’t think our day is any good.

Lleu: Yeah. The other aspect of this is the question of autonomy, because it seems like autonomy might be on the way out, something that we have suspected and seen the…

Lleu: Yeah, the signs of, in previous books as well. And here, it is most apparent in the Council scene. Lord Sangel of South Boll —

Lleu: — he’s finally died. He’s been the oldest lord for a very long time. He was already old in, in Dragonflight, and this is 35 years later.

Tequila Mockingbird: He was already old in Masterharper, wasn’t he? They were trying to convince him to deal with Fax, and he was like, “Whatever.”

Lleu: That’s true, yeah. So, Sangel is really old, and for the last while, his wife Marella and his granddaughter Janissian, who was his steward, have been managing the Hold by themselves, for all intents and purposes.

Tequila Mockingbird: There are two male relatives who could hypothetically inherit. One of them is his great-nephew, and one of them is his first cousin.

Tequila Mockingbird: The great-nephew has very much disqualified himself, because when the tsunami happened he panicked and ran and didn’t take care of anyone else — refused to help manage the evacuation. So he’s pretty clearly unfit.

Tequila Mockingbird: The other one’s just not politically ambitious, basically.

Tequila Mockingbird: His children have worked for the Hold, but he hasn’t. So they’re like, “Hey, if he doesn’t want it, then we’re not giving it to him for nothing.”

Lleu: And he isn’t, but there is some debate about whether Janissian, because she’s a woman, can be Lady Holder, and they’re like, “Well, Emily Boll was Holder in her own right!”

Lleu: I don’t think that happened. I think she was dead. I think it was Pierre de Courci who was Holder. But, anyway, setting that aside, crucially, in contrast to All the Weyrs of Pern, where we had some extremely perplexing voting, that we were trying to track the numbers of and none of them lined up with the number of Lord Holders who were there, now we maybe have an answer for why that was, because when the votes are cast, even though there are only 16-17 major Holds, there are 45 votes cast in this Council. So, who’s voting? The answer appears to be not just all the Lord Holders but also all of the Weyrleaders; several, but not all, Weyrwomen, because some of them are not particularly politically involved; and a number of, but not all, Craftmasters.

Lleu: Especially because, ostensibly, it’s only been 2 years since All the Weyrs of Pern. Which means that they have radically reworked the way their planetary government works.

Lleu: Yeah. So this implies that they have done away with the concept of autonomy. Now, I think there are also good reasons to think that this is not actually two years after All the Weyrs of Pern; I think that timeline does not make sense.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, remember, there are AIVAS-adjusted years, so who knows when anything is happening?

Lleu: Maybe, yeah — that’s probably why. That would explain a lot of the confusion. We’ll maybe talk briefly about some continuity errors at the end of the episode, and…they’re fun. But this means that Holds are no longer autonomous, in the sense that Holds, Crafts, and Weyrs are no longer —

Lleu: — independent but interacting political systems. Yeah. If everyone, and not just the other Lord Holders, has a say in who becomes Holder at Boll. Which is really interesting, and makes sense.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I do think that we kind of saw the first step of this when the dragonriders, the Weyrs, were asked to take over authority on distributing land claims in Southern, because that’s a Hold question!

Lleu: Yeah, well, and when Landing was given to Lytol, D’ram, and Robinton to manage collectively — that implies a collective government involving all three groups, rather than each group operating independently or semi-independently.

Tequila Mockingbird: And they do make a point of stating in this book that, even though Robinton has passed, Wansor is now living there, so there’s still a Craft representative at — in that Cove Hold.

Lleu: Yeah, although it sounds like it’s Esselin and Erragon who are the ones who are actually managing Landing.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that’s interesting in what it suggests about the future of Pern —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because, to your point, there’s a degree to which the Lord Holders themselves are becoming obsolete alongside the dragonriders.

Tequila Mockingbird: And as the dragonriders are kind of transitioning into a Craft, instead of a separate thing — they’re not going to be receiving tithes anymore; they’re gonna be the Starcraft Hall —

Tequila Mockingbird: — as opposed to just the dragonriders. That maybe suggests a ve-, an interesting potential future of Pern, where it’s all just Crafts.

Lleu: Pern might not have a violent bourgeois revolution, but we’re definitely moving towards a situation where merchants, businessmen, industrial leaders, etc., are the driving power on Pern, and landowners are not, because there’s enough land that we’re now going to be back in a situation, in 16 years, where people can just go somewhere else. And there’ll be a legal process for distributing that, but it’s also going to be managed by people who are in charge of a Craft, who are themselves going to be entering into a skilled trade and making money that way.

Tequila Mockingbird: One, are we just pushing that down the pike? Because that’s how Dragonsdawn started, too — “There’s so much land; we don’t need to worry about this. Everyone just gets land and it’s fine.” And, yeah, that solves the problem for a hundred years, even a thousand years, but eventually even the Southern and, apparently, Western Continents will run out.

Tequila Mockingbird: But, also, we do get some more hints about Holders in this same Conclave scene, because they’re talking about the fact that, “Well, Janissian, she’s competent and she’s of the Blood.” And Lessa’s kind of sarcastic about it — she’s like,

Tequila Mockingbird: “Isn’t it a good thing [...] that Janissian happens to be well qualified.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Because she’s also literally the only blood relative they can find. And F’lar says:

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Hold blood’s getting thin after twenty-five hundred Turns. And with the end of Threadfall…’ F’lar murmured.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Holding began with Fort, with Paul Benden. There’s nothing wrong with Fort’s Bloodline. But that form of inheritance is not in the Charter, you know.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “F’lar regarded her in mild surprise. ‘No, actually, it isn’t. Holders and all those traditions came later.’”

Lleu: Okay, so there’s a couple problems here, continuity-wise. One, Paul Benden was the first Lord Holder at Fort, but he was not succeeded by his child; he was succeeded by Joel Lilienkamp camp. We know that from Chronicles of Pern.

Lleu: Yeah. Second, we know from All the Weyrs of Pern that, even if the rights and privileges of Lord Holders are not in the Charter, blood inheritance is in the Charter, and, in fact, that every land grant, per the Charter, is supposed to be entailed, so it’s not supposed to be able to pass outside of a family. We’re explicitly told that in All the Weyrs of Pern. So the question that thi- — so maybe the question here is, is F’lar implying that, even though we know Groghe and many other Lords have bazillions of children and grandchildren, that eventually the Holder Bloodlines are gonna die out, and the land will just, I guess, maybe, devolve to the people who actually work it? Is there a mechanism for that in the Charter? Who knows!

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we haven’t yet run into the problem of, there’s genuinely no one of the blood available — even with Fax, it was able to be like, “No, no, it’s okay; we found the long-lost second cousin who was up in the mountains.”

Lleu: That’s not true — the one exception is Nabol. But there, it seems to be that they couldn’t find anyone of the blood, and, by the time they realized that —

Lleu: — Meron had already established himself, and they were like, “We’re not touching that. Fine.”

Lleu: — from that, anyway. But Meron was Fax’s steward, not of the blood.

Lleu: Yeah. But everywhere else, I believe, went to someone who was a distant relative or the younger son, in Bargen’s case in High Reaches.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I also think that is looping back around to the question that we had before, which is, is the “Charter” that they’re talking about just this document that we saw in Dragonsdawn? And it seems more and more likely that it is.

Lleu: Because we see them consult the Charter in this. It’s a physical document.

Lleu: It Stev Kimmer’s physical, hand signature on it, because — the reason F’lessan is in the archive, where he meets Tai for the first time, is because F’lessan is trying to figure out what happened at Honshu. He has found some things that are inscribed with the initials “SK” and has narrowed down the field and concluded that Stev Kimmer’s the only person that can be, and he’s trying to confirm that the initials that he’s found are Kimmer’s, and Tai’s like, “Well, have you checked the Charter?” And F’lessan’s like, “Oh, my god. It never occurred to me that I could go look at the physical Charter that we have with everyone’s signatures on it.” And he looks at it and is like, “Oh, yeah, I guess it is. That’s Kimmer.” Which is fascinating, because it means that they’ve had the physical Charter buried in the archive at Fort Hold — I guess? — for a long time. And the reason that it survived is because — we’ve had references in previous books to “plasfilm” —

Lleu: — as something that they were using for writing, and they were running out of, and based on the description of the Charter, plasfilm appears to be lamination and not some new plastic material. So I think, based on the description, it sounds like the Charter is a piece of paper that all 6,000 colonists apparently signed — giant piece of paper —

Lleu: — and then they laminated it, and now it’s on display at Landing. Great. I love lamination.

Tequila Mockingbird: That means that if you shake the charter, it will make a wub-wub-wub-wub sound.

Lleu: Yeah. Now, in my head, the Charter will forever have the vibe of a fourth grade art project.

Lleu: Laminated construction paper — that’s how I’m envisioning the charter now. It’s purple.

Lleu: In Dragonseye, they talk about Lord Holders’ rights being in the Charter.

Lleu: And the question that we had is, does that mean that they’ve revamped the Charter? Or are they just talking about the land inheritance stuff that we already know from All the Weyrs of Pern exists? And it seems like they’re just talking about the land inheritance stuff that we know from All the Weyrs of Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think this suggests that my theory that the Lord Holders are the ones who are descended from charterers versus contractors is borne out.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because F’lessan notes that distinction when he’s flipping through the different pages.

Lleu: I agree. I don’t know it’s the only reading, but it feels intuitive.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it does make more sense to me that there would have been something about inherited land clauses written into the Charter about these charterers, because they are presumably paying astronomical amounts of money in exchange for land rights on this future planet, and you’d want to be sure that, if you trip and die the second you walk off the spaceship, that that doesn’t evaporate, and your spouse or your children can continue.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because they are very much seeing this, right, as a colonization project. It seems that more of the charterers are coming with a whole family, versus contractors who are just single adults coming by themselves.

Lleu: Yeah. The other thing that that, unfortunately, does suggest is that the colony was conceived as having a permanent underclass of people descended from contractors who were always going to have to work off a term of indenture in order to earn their stakes. How does that difference inherit, is the question.

Tequila Mockingbird: If they’re extrapolating an entire feudal structure out of that and referring back to the Charter, it does seem to imply that there is less of that ironclad protection for the stake that a contractor can buy once they’re on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that might also maybe connect back to what confused us about “The Ford of Red Hanrahan” and this idea that all of these random other people would be joining their claim to Peter Hanrahan’s in order to found Ruatha.

Lleu: Yeah. So this maybe pivots us to other economic questions. There’s some perplexing stuff here. An offhanded comment that the mining facility where Shankolin and company have been doing hard labor — that 20 marks is more than their annual income, which seems baffling, because Robinton gave Menolly two marks to spend on a belt at a Gather.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, to be fair, the cost of skilled artisan-made goods is artificially low in our contemporary world, so we might be earmarking that wrong, mentally, right? Like, a worked leather belt probably would be pretty flippin’ valuable. And it’s possible that that mine, in specific, since it seemed to function at least partially more as a form of incarceration and punishment than as an actual economic center, doesn’t have a super high profit —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because they have to turn around and pay a bunch of guards and feed people when presumably most mine workers would go home to their own smallholding and eat at home — something like that that might artificially deflate the profit margin of this specific mine.

Lleu: But still, we know — in Dragonsinger, 1/32 mark gets you three bubbly pies. 20 marks is only 1,900 bubbly pies. That doesn’t seem right for a year. I don’t think so. Something, at the very least, has gone wrong. That’s comically low, even if we assume that their profit margin is lower, that’s five pies a day.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, there are ways to explain it diegetically, right? We can say that the runner who made this comment, like, “More than they’ve earned in Turns” was exaggerating for effect, or had misunderstood, or is trying to artificially inflate the value of the meteorite because he also has a meteorite, and he wants to be like, “Wow, this meteorite is so special,” and it wasn’t actually all that impressive. Or we can extradiegetically just say, well, McCaffrey messed up her math. I think the latter is more plausible than the former.

Lleu: Yeah. This points us towards other questions about the way this book is dealing with economics. One is, for example, why is the Printer Hall at Keroon? In the plains, where we know it’s mainly the Beastcraft Hall and the hill folk, but all of whom seem to be essentially pastoralists? Why is it there and not, say, in Lemos Hold, where we know there’s trees and wood production, because that’s where the Woodcraft is, or even in Bitra, where we know forestry is the only non-gambling industry that’s ever been mentioned there. On a purely resource distribution perspective, that makes no sense. It’s not even like Keroon is particularly centrally located for distributing news.

Tequila Mockingbird: If I’m an unpaid defense lawyer for Anne McCaffrey’s ghost, I could construct plausible reasons. But I would be doing that work. This would be the fake good version of Pern that lives in my head. I might say, they didn’t want to put a craft hall in Bitra —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because it sucks to be in Bitra, and you can’t attract good people.

Tequila Mockingbird: I could say they didn’t want to put two new Crafthalls in the same Hold at the same time, if they’re starting the Woodcraft Hall and the Printercraft Hall, and the Plastic Hall, they very deliberately spread those out, so one’s at Lemos, one’s at Southern, one’s at Keroon. You might even say that there was a political “Hey, Keroon deserves, east coast deserves a new Crafthall, too!”

Tequila Mockingbird: And maybe that was some kind of political dealing with trying to pork belly, get the Crafthall established.

Lleu: Although then the question is, why not put it at Nerat, where there are no Crafthalls?[4]

Lleu: Whereas Keroon already has one. The other explanation that occurs to me is that they’re doing it intentionally, that the inefficient distribution of artisanal production versus resource extraction is a conscious decision that they are making in order to, essentially, limit industrialization and —

Tequila Mockingbird: And there might be something — who was the previous Lord Holder of Keroon?

Tequila Mockingbird: And we didn’t really like him, right? He was conservative?

Lleu: Yeah, he was conservative and sympathetic to the Abominators, but not himself an Abominator.

Lleu: He was the person that, when we were talking about the unhinged legal proceedings in All the Weyrs of Pern, we were like, why didn’t they just get Corman to speak on their behalf? ’Cause he agrees with them, just didn’t participate in the plot.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, then that might have been a very pointed decision to put the Printercraft Hall in his Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: Either as a “fuck you” to him or in a very deliberate, “Okay, we want to make sure that there’s someone who has authority in that jurisdiction who’s not Lord Corman.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Having a Crafthall there gives you some weight to “No, actually, I’m under the auspices of my Craftmaster, not of my Lord Holder.”

Lleu: It puts two more progressive Crafts there, also, because we know that the Beastcraft —

Lleu: They call her “the Beastmaster,” which I love for her, and the new Masterweaver is also a woman.

Tequila Mockingbird: So that’s possibly a very intentional counterweighting.

Tequila Mockingbird: Um, and also, again — this is purely me being an unpaid defense lawyer, but — there’s a degree to which it’s like, maybe Rosheen’s family’s from Keroon, and she was like, “I want to go home. My mom’s getting old.”

Lleu: Maybe Tagetarl’s from Keroon — we don’t know anything about him.

Lleu: That maybe points us towards a broader question of communication and trade, and the distribution of anything on Pern, because one of the things this book follows up on is “Runner of Pern.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, my gosh. None of my questions from “Runner of Pern” were answered.

Tequila Mockingbird: All of my questions from “Runner of Pern” are more intense, and I know that they are not going to be answered, and we’ve really doubled down on the, “Actually, the Runners have been here, like the dolphins and the desert nomads of Igen, the whole time, and you just didn’t get to know about it.” Because there is — and I think I really appreciate this — a point to which the Runners are not super enthused about the Print Crafthall and about the fact that dragons might be carrying messages and conveying cargo at literally instantaneous speeds after the Pass ends —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and they’re feeling like some professional anxiety about that that makes them kind of sympathetic to the Abominators.

Lleu: Yeah. The Runners, on the one hand, are non-violent, I would say. So they’re not actively supporting the Abominators —

Lleu: — and they have been, we’re told, taking Abominator pamphlets out of circulation, for example. But when Halligon, Groghe’s son, who we met in “Runner of Pern,” is sent to talk to the Runners, because people know that he’s involved with Tenna and they have a sympathetic relationship —

Tequila Mockingbird: And I love the fact that this is, what, 30 years after “Runner of Pern” takes place?

Tequila Mockingbird: Which means that they’ve just been casually hooking up for a couple of decades now. And that’s amazing! You go, Tenna! Follow your life plan of not stopping your career for this cute boy!

Lleu: I mean, honestly, also, you go, Halligon. Resist the pressures to marry someone and settle down and establish a (quote-unquote) “normal” Holder life for yourself.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause I do think they’re in their late 40s or early 50s at this point, and they’re just making out in alleyways, like you do.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think McCaffrey probably had not thought about the amount of time that had elapsed, but I’m choosing to believe that that’s a fun transgressive decision she made on purpose.

Lleu: It is more fun that way, but I agree, it’s almost certainly that she just wasn’t thinking about the timeline when she wrote Skies of Pern, because it’s a little sketchy.

Lleu: The Runner Stationmaster that he talks to, when Halligon is asking, like, “Can you ask around and find out where these weird messages are coming from?” Like, “we would appreciate the favor.”

Lleu: And the Stationmaster’s like, “Hm. Maybe… I’ll let you know.”

Lleu: And then Halligon has to talk him through it and basically argue, like, “No, no, there will always be a need for Runners” — and this is reiterated later on by Lessa, in a conversation when the Runners do, in fact, bring them information. Basically, the Stationmaster that they’re talking to is like, “Well, I heard some things,” but is kind of like, “I need some assurances from you.” And Lessa’s like, “There have always been Runners. There will always be Runners. We’re never gonna replace Runners.” Well…

Lleu: You have fire lizards. You’re working on walkie-talkies, we know, and potentially phone systems.

Lleu: You’re gonna have a bunch of bored dragons, and we know that green riders carry messages even in the Ninth Pass. That’s something we’re told now — Tai makes money by killing felines and selling the skins and also by carrying messages and sometimes even by conveying passengers, it sounds like. The sort of “higher” dragon colors don’t do that, but greens and blues do. So it actually seems extremely reasonable for Runners to be concerned that they’re going to be rendered obsolete. And by the end of the book it seems like that’s probably no longer an issue, if the idea is that all dragonriders, or at least most dragonriders and in the future all dragonriders, are gonna transition into...

Lleu: But it’s a real question early in the book, and the answer is: “That won’t happen.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially when you look at the history — I mean, the Pony Express, right, gets all the press and all the PR, ’cause it’s so cool; it’s so fun, like, “Oh, they’re riding through the night with the fast message” — you know how long the Pony Express lasted?

Tequila Mockingbird: Two years, because the year after it was established, they invented the telegraph.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would feel like a lot more practical a reassurance would be pivoting Runners into something that maybe is more likely to endure, because what we do also see is that runners are kind of the first newspaper distribution here —

Tequila Mockingbird: — where they’re taking things printed from the Printercraft Hall and disseminating it, not immediately like a dragon, but you don’t need it immediate — you need it in the next four or five days, as a Runner moves through your area. And now that they have these printed messages, you don’t have to memorize it quite so much. Always there would have been the function of asking a Runner, like, “Hey, what’s going on? What’s the news from the bigger city now that you’re in a more rural area?” But the fact that they can now carry newspapers, I would think, making them the mail seems a lot more plausible, because that’s kind of what they were already.

Lleu: Yeah, which is exactly what I was gonna say — it feels like the much more plausible explanation to be like, “Even if dragons are transporting messages from Hold to Hold —”

Lleu: Yeah, there’s never gonna be enough dragons to do all of that, which is something that I think they maybe vaguely gestured towards, but don’t really fully deal with. Even if dragons are doing bulk mail delivery —

Lleu: — an individual dragonrider is not going to be popping around to every single smallhold in Fort to drop off 50 different pieces of mail. You’re always gonna need a system for local distribution.

Lleu: In a context where it doesn’t seem like they have plans to implement a planet-wide telegraph network or cell phone service, for example. Although who knows — if they have dragons putting satellites in, maybe there will be satellite phones. But, either way, it seems like there’s an obvious local need for Runners, even if there’s less of the “We’re running across the whole continent.” So, a significant change, but not an end.

Tequila Mockingbird: The other question that I had is, we do see, at the end of the book, a Runner arriving on Southern, with a bunch of messages, and I’m like, so there’s a trace? They put in a trace across Southern? When did they do that?

Tequila Mockingbird: When did they specifically plant this weird type of moss and allow it to grow and carve out these specific paths to everywhere that they need to go in Southern, which is rapidly being settled? Again, the logistics do not line up for me.

Lleu: But that should be, if anything, a reassurance to Runners — your Craft is growing right now.

Lleu: You are not, in fact, going to be replaced within two years, or even within 16 years by the end of the Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. As we’ve mentioned previously, we are starting to see the hints that Pern 400 years after the last Pass is going to be a very different place than Pern 400 years before the last Pass.

Lleu: Yeah. One thing that we both had noted but that you had picked on more is the portrayal of Tai, physically.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, because unlike, I would say, pretty much every other Ninth Pass character, she seems to be narratively signposted as a specific race. She’s East Asian, probably mixed race, because it’s pointed out that she has green eyes, but the text specifically goes out of its way to talk about the fact that her eyes have an unusual slant — both F’lessan and Lessa notice this independently — and that her skin has a golden tone.

Tequila Mockingbird: And especially given Dragonsdawn and the fact that we know there were a lot of East Asian people on Pern, that does seem to suggest that she is descended from some of them. But it’s just interestingly marked? When we had been bending over backwards to be like, “So, does this mean that Briala is, perhaps, Black?” We’re doing all of this detective work in a way that does seem different from Tai is portrayed.

Lleu: Yeah. I’m sort of back at my little, was Kenjo planning to be the Showa Emperor of Pern, but we’re told that idea was that not just Kenjo’s family — that there would be an East Asian community, generally, at Honshu —

Lleu: — that that was sort of the idea. So maybe the implication is that, at least in some areas, specific ethnic or racial communities did stay grouped together.

Lleu: Maybe, yeah. One of the other weird character choices in this is the fact that we have this Harper spy named Pinch, or Mekelroy, who is a Masterharper, but just, you know, wanders around doing spy stuff. And obviously we know that this is a thing that has existed in the Harpercraft for a while, because Nip in Masterharper of Pern is also a Masterharper, I believe, but whose job is just to be a spy. The thing that I was grappling with is, why is it not just Nip again? Or, since this is 30 years into the pass, why is it not Nip’s apprentice, who would be in his mid-40s right now, the appropriate age to be doing this kind of spy work. But it’s not. There’s a passing reference to Nip and Tuck, his apprentice, and the fact that there are other spies. But I was confused about why she felt she needed to introduce a new character specifically for this.

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially because she loves to reintroduce old characters.

Lleu: Yeah — not only are we told that the new Masterweaver is a woman, but she has to specifically name-drop, “Oh, yes, Zurg, the old Masterweaver, is dead.” I obviously know who Zurg is, but we didn’t need the name drop. In fact, the fact that I know who Zurg is makes me need it less. Like, you could have said —

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think that does speak, maybe, to the next question, which is this question of, how old is anybody ever?

Tequila Mockingbird: And how long has it been since the events of Masterharper and the events of Dragonflight, which are in some way the same time, because one ends when the other begins —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because…Manora is here! She’s chilling! She’s flying from one continent to another! How old is Manora?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because she was an adult woman and F’nor’s mom 30-something years ago.

Lleu: Apparently. F’lar is now described as 63 in the 31st year of the Pass. So…

Lleu: Yeah. So, assuming that Manora was in her early 20s when he was born…?

Lleu: I guess? She’s not the only person that we were perplexed by. Over the course of the book, R’mart of Telgar Weyr retires with the Telgar Weyrwoman, and then the High Reaches Weyrleaders, M’rand and Pilgra also retire. We’re told that the only two remaining Oldtimer Weyrleaders are G’narish of Igen, who is young and we like him — although he’s now old, or older, anyway — but he’s about the same age as F’lar and Lessa.

Tequila Mockingbird: And as we know, when they get old, everyone becomes evil.

Lleu: And then. G’dened of Ista, who is D’ram’s son. And G’dened is described as being 20 years older than F’lar. Excuse me?

Tequila Mockingbird: This is fascinating, because when he took over in Ista he was described as a young, new, up-and-coming —

Tequila Mockingbird: “Wow, D’ram’s so confident he just threw it open to any rider, but his son’s such a great kid.”

Lleu: I think we’re told, in fact, explicitly, that he was born in the old time but grew up mainly in the present. I thought, anyway. That was my impression.[5] And now, suddenly, he’s supposed to be in his 80s? In order for that to be the case, that would mean —

Lleu: Yeah. And, on top of that, that would mean that G’dened, when he was the young, new Weyrleader, quote-unquote, would have already been —

Lleu: I don’t think so, sorry! Certainly people in their 70s can still have vigorous sex lives. I don’t know that I’m convinced that someone in his 70s is having such a vigorous sex life that hours after the mating flight, while the Weyr is in crisis because Robinton is dying and all the dragons on Pern are trying to keep him alive, Salth just died, T’kul is dead — I don’t think that someone in his 70s is having wild sex for eight hours under those circumstances, oblivious to everything that’s going on outside. Sorry, I don’t believe that.

Lleu: Even if he’s, you know, a vigorous dragon rider, I don’t believe that he would have the energy for that.

Tequila Mockingbird: All of this — it’s all trumped by the fact that D’ram is his dad and is still alive!

Lleu: Yeah, it’s all very perplexing. The only in-world explanation that I can think of is that G’dened was with Jaxom’s group going into the past to drop off the engine, and, like that one guy who we hear about, mistimed it on his way back and lived 20 Turns in the past and then came back to the present, and everyone was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s G’dened. That’s fine. He’s 20 years older? Don’t worry about it.” But that seems like a stretch, I would say…

Lleu: So it’s all very perplexing. How old is anyone? Sometimes we don’t want to think about it — don’t want to know how old F’lessan is, because I don’t want to know how old he was when he had kids. I do kind of want to know how old G’dened is.

Lleu: Yeah. What is happening there? ’Cause it suggests a wildly different relationship with age on Pern that I don’t feel like is borne out anywhere else in the series.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think we just need to accept that we had AIVAS-adjusted turns, so everyone is 14 years younger or older — because that’s definitely how renumbering your years works — and don’t worry about it.

Lleu: You know what? Maybe there were extra turns in the Eighth Pass, and they miscounted G’dened’s age in the Eighth Pass as a result.

Lleu: And that’s what the issue was when they adjusted it. On paper he’s 50, but actually he’s 70, and they just misplaced 20 years in the Eighth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. And I think we’re gonna have to end on that note — with a small question. So we do get a casual mention of the “Ghosts,” which are the annual meteor shower, that are perceived to be the ghosts of old dragons. And, again, this is very much presented as, like, “As, of course, you know, as has been happening this whole time.”

Lleu: I think this means that when Lytol and AIVAS were having an argument about religion on Pern, that AIVAS was going to argue that Pern did not have religion and Lytol was going to argue that actually Pern did have religion and superstitions, just in a form that AIVAS either wasn’t yet aware of or didn’t understand or didn’t perceive as a religion. ’Cause if they believe in ghosts, or if they have a belief in ghosts, even if it’s a childish belief –

Lleu: Right — that means they have some kind of sense of the supernatural, which is not something we have ever seen previously in the series.

Tequila Mockingbird: So that’s an interesting retcon, and it’s possible that it was an intentional groundwork-laying for “Beyond Between.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Gentle reader, we will be putting up a poll to discuss this topic, and so, I guess, we’ll get there, or we won’t. Please tell me we won’t.

Tequila Mockingbird: As we’ve already mentioned, you really shouldn’t read Skies of Pern. Instead, and if you have already read our recommendations from the previous episode, what about these?

Lleu: My recommendation is a bit of a stretch, frankly, but we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of my ability to come up with books that are connected to Pern after fifteen novels and a bunch of short stories. My recommendation is The Gilda Stories, by Jewelle Gomez, which is a classic Black lesbian vampire novel from the early ’90s. If you’re interested in books about social change, although in this case over a long haul, from the early 19th century up into the future — I think the last section is around 2100, but mid- to late 21st century, in any case. It’s really interested in the development of Black culture in the US and shifting attitudes around race and also in technological developments in the near future that it imagines. It’s also, as one might expect from a vampire novel — although it is a very atypical vampire novel — interested in sexual violence, consent, violence in general. It’s not, perhaps, the most obvious pair with The Skies of Pern, but I think it’s a really good book, and it might scratch some of the same itch, depending on what you liked about Skies.

Tequila Mockingbird: My offering is a little farther afield, but thinking about natural disasters and the way that they have a serious effect on communities, thinking about, too, the stratification of Pernese community and the ways that culture and family are transmitted, I would like to recommend The Yellow House, but Sarah M. Broom, which is actually nonfiction. It is a memoir of several generations of the author’s family history, and specifically centering on the house that her mother owned that was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. So it’s a really beautiful exploration of Black culture in New Orleans, and specifically in New Orleans East, a part of New Orleans that doesn’t really achieve a lot of cultural recognition.

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

[1] It is perhaps worth noting that Lleu acquired this knowledge from his mother, who was raised two towns over from where McCaffrey grew up.

[2] Lleu is using “homeopathic” here in the informal, inaccurate sense (if you’re unaware of how actual homeopathy “works,” it is…well); there isn’t really a good shorthand for Pern’s medical practices/attitudes — some combination of “traditional medicine,” “herbal medicine,” and “noninvasive medicine.”

[3] Lleu thinks he got this impression from other books, as well, though he’s not sure where, but he notes in particular F’lessan applying numbweed to scrapes on Tai’s hands early in Skies and saying “That’ll prevent infection,” implying that numbweed has some antiseptic or antibacterial properties, though these must be limited because other stuff in the book makes it clear that more comprehensive measures are necessary to prevent larger or more serious wounds from getting infected.

[4] This is wrong, actually — the Farmercraft is at Nerat.

[5] We do know from The White Dragon that he was “born in the old time,” but we don’t actually get a definitive indication of where/when he grew up. Jaxom’s perspective does, however, refer to him as one of “the younger Oldtimers.”