Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #2: Dragonquest (1971)

Lleu: — one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I read Dragonquest once when I was ten and then never again, ’cause it was in a giant anthology that was too annoying to travel with me, so the second time was… yesterday.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I have read this book many times, but mostly not as a child, because we didn’t have access to the audiobook. So, our relationship with this one is slightly different than it was with the first book in the series.

Tequila Mockingbird: Not hitting quite that same good, good nostalgia, but also, I think you notice different things when you come to a text for the first time as an adult.

Lleu: You sure do. So, Dragonquest is the second book in the series. At the end of Dragonflight, Lessa, our main character, one of our main characters, had traveled back in time 400 years in order to bring 2500-odd dragons, their riders, and support staff into the future in order to help protect the planet from Thread, this alien organism that consumes any organic matter that it touches.

Tequila Mockingbird: Dragonquest picks up seven years later, and, shockingly, there have been consequences to these actions, notably that the “Oldtimers,” as they are called, are not adjusting super well to 400 years of social and technological innovation, and the community, both the dragonriders who were originally in the present time and, more importantly, the non-dragonrider Holder and Crafter communities, are chafing at that.

Lleu: Yeah, so the novel is largely about those tensions, following in particular but not exclusively F’nor, who is the younger half-brother of F’lar, the very boring other protagonist of Dragonflight.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I was surprised to realize that actually F’lar gets quite a lot of protagonist time in this one, too.

Lleu: Yeah, so if you’ve read Dragonflight for some reason, and you really wanted to see more of Lessa and F’lar, don’t worry, they are still major characters in this, and Lessa gets a little less page time, I think, than F’lar —

Lleu: — but she’s still important. Anyway, the bulk of Dragonquest, is really about political maneuvering. Very little quote-unquote “happens” until, finally, at a wedding for some of the Lord Holders, the leader of the Oldtimer dragonriders challenges F’lar to a duel. F’lar is forced to kill him…

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s a significant power shift because of that, mirroring what happens in Dragonflight, three-quarters of the way through the book he’s put in charge…

Tequila Mockingbird: …in a way he hasn’t been, and gets to execute his monomaniacal plans.

Lleu: Yes. So, we’ll talk, I think, more about F’lar’s plans and political everything. And then, at this point, the other two big plot things happen, which is… F’nor has been pursuing a romance with another queen dragonrider named, depending on whose pronunciation you adhere to, Brekk-ee, Brekk-uh, Brekk,[1] and her queen dragon begins a mating flight for the first time, and F’nor is trying to get to her, but another queen dragon is too close while this is happening and also goes into heat, and so both of them are flying at the same time. They fight and they disappear into the otherworld —

Lleu: — between that dragons use to teleport, and they never return. So Brekke loses her mind over this and is catatonic for a while. So that’s the second of the three big plot things, and then the third of the three big plot things is that…

Tequila Mockingbird: F’nor teleports to another planet to try and see if they can fight Thread on the Red Star—

Tequila Mockingbird: And shockingly it doesn’t go well. He is subject to intense atmospheric forces and heat, and he survives, but only barely. Brekke also survives, but only barely, thanks to having Impressed a fire lizard, who brings her back from the brink.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, we’ll notice that we kind of summed up three big plot threads of this book, and it is notable that the first one takes about 250 pages? The second two are crammed into the last —

Lleu: There’s also one more, to be fair, that I almost forgot about because the pacing of this book is so weird, which is that, if you remember at the beginning of Dragonflight, Lessa was attempting to reclaim the Hold of her birth, and was encouraged to relinquish her claim in order to become a dragonrider. She relinquished her claim to the conqueror’s son who had a kind of distant blood relation to her family and so had some political legitimacy. So, now, seven years later, this child is… sorry, now it’s been about ten years since that time —

Lleu: — timeline inconsistencies in this book, in this series. He comes to attend a hatching at the Weyr, and he is aware of the circumstances of his birth, and particularly the fact that he was born by C-section.

Lleu: And his mother did not survive. So at the end of the hatching there is one small —

Lleu: — egg left that’s still shaking, but the dragon hatchling inside can’t seem to escape from it, and Jaxom identifies with this, jumps down onto the hatching ground, and kicks the egg open and helps the dragon out, and so Impresses the dragon, psychically bonds with it, which creates a political crisis that has significant consequences that we will talk about in —

Lleu: — when we get to another book. So, for now, just know that that happens.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I think, worth talking about the fact that the pacing of this book is batshit. It’s batshit.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s interesting because I didn’t notice it as much while I was reading it. It took me a little longer to get into it, the first 100 pages, 50 pages or so, I was kind of like, okay, there’s been a knife fight, that’s exciting, but other than that, like, duh-duh-duh… But I think she does a good enough job with the sort of world-building and the politics and the… scientific innovations that they’re trying to make, and again dropping those little easter eggs of dramatic irony for the reader who knows what a microscope is, and are like, “Oh, cool! It’s a microscope!” That you are really engaged, and then the last quarter of the book just punches you in the face.

Tequila Mockingbird: Suddenly this is like a high-octane action thriller, when it’s been, like, a political… slow-moving…

Tequila Mockingbird: Up until that point. And it’s just… it’s fascinating what you could get away with in the 1970s?

Tequila Mockingbird: Um, in terms of, I don’t think that it would be publishable today.

Lleu: It’s… Yeah, it’s so… weird. So I read/reread this book in maybe 2013, the first time that I came to it as an adult, and then subsequently I’ve mainly listened to it as an audiobook, and it’s truly, it’s really striking when you’re listening to the audiobook and you look down at the time and suddenly you’re like, I’m eight hours into this book and we haven’t gotten to any of the things that I think of as, like, these are the big plot points in Dragonquest, what has been happening? And the answer is —

Tequila Mockingbird: It kind of reminds me of Emma, in that, to quote a friend’s tenth-grade recital, this is a book in which nothing happens, and at one point it seems like something is about to happen, and then it doesn’t happen. Except that in Dragonquest, something does happen —

Tequila Mockingbird: — you just gotta wait for it, and I think it speaks to an interesting confidence in McCaffrey’s part that you will wait, right? She’s like, you’re here, you’re going to finish this book, even if I lead you on a bit of a maze to get there.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which… I do think she’s a compelling writer, right? She’s gripping. I was there, I was in it, even though… wow.

Lleu: Yeah. I also think that this is — oop, typo in her, in the book, apparently.

Lleu: Uh. Yeah, unsurprisingly. And the leader of the Oldtimers’s name has changed with no explanation between the last book and this book. It just is different for some reason.

Lleu: One of the things that in this book in particular is markedly different for me than many of the later books is the focus on characters —

Lleu: — and interpersonal interactions. Obviously she’s very interested in the politics, but we start off with —

Lleu: — this, yeah, this very close perspective on F’nor as he goes off to do an errand and then gets in a knife fight with some Oldtimers, and then we get an equally very close perspective on F’lar as he’s going to a meeting with the other leaders of the other Weyrs and is kind of running through, like, oh my god, now I have to deal with all of the consequences of this on top of all the other bullshit I’ve been dealing with, and he’s running through all of —

Lleu: —this in his head, and how he’s going to manage this, what he’s going to do to… appease the Oldtimers who are going to want to sweep this under the rug, but also he doesn’t want to just let it go. She does a very good job of keeping the political stuff which in later books I find gets a bit abstract grounded in the characters and in their interactions with each other.

Tequila Mockingbird: And to that point, I think some of what she’s doing with this 200-odd pages of nothing is introducing a fuckton of characters, many of whom are completely new from Dragonflight, and even the ones who get mentioned in Dragonflight get a lot more development and internality in this one, and she manages to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like a exposition dump, right? And I do think if you rearranged this book or tried to… reshuffle it to be paced in a more normal way, you would run into the problem of, by the time we get to that wedding and we get to the climactic events, you do need to know who Larad is, and who Asgenar is, and the way that they’re politically aligned but a little bit, one is a little bit more conservative than the other, and that they’re both much more liberal than Raid or Sifer, but Raid is… Like, you have to actually know all that, because then she’s able to really pack a lot of impact into these very short, intense scenes where it’s like, boom, boom, boom, this politics is happening, that’s happening, these guys are aligned — oh, wait, he’s turned on him. And you’re following all of it because you’ve had 200 pages to very gradually, through interaction after interaction, show not tell, get to know all of these different stakeholders and all of these different players.

Lleu: Yeah, and the payoff is… so worth it. Dragonflight is a mess. This book is also a mess, and you probably still shouldn’t read it, but also I think this book is significantly better than Dragonflight in spite of the bonkers pacing.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, but this is two books in a row where you’ve been like, “Don’t read it, but also… don’t read it…”

Lleu: I know. Listen, I’ve sent multiple friends my, “What if we… haha… unless,” but it’s, “What if you read all the Dragonriders of Pern books? Haha, just kidding. Unless…” This book in particular has what I think is for me one of the most effective scenes in all of science fiction at conveying to me the way that I would feel this particular event or sequence of events if I were part of this setting, when it’s something that I have absolutely no real-world frame of reference for. When the two queen dragons both are rising for their mating flights and they start fighting, I’m like, “Oh, my god, I, I get it, this is horrifying,” in a way that, like —

Tequila Mockingbird: It feels viscerally wrong, because you’ve had so much time to acclimate to the world and to the way that these characters respond to normal stuff and even normal emergencies, right? Because there have been emergencies in these books; there have been a lot of emergencies. There’s been knife fights, there’s alien organisms falling from the sky trying to devour all that they touch, this is not a calm world. But then there’s a level of horror, of really visceral horror, that you get in those sequences, and unnaturalness, that, I think, yeah, she does it really well, and she’s earned it by the time she gets there.

Lleu: Yeah. And also, to be fair, in addition to the intense emergencies, one of the things that I think is interesting in this book is that there’s also some very normal emergencies, like, F’lar, after the knife fight, he’s been wounded, and it gets infected, and he has flu symptoms, essentially, for a while, and Lessa’s trying to take care of him, and F’lar’s like, “I’m dying, bring my followers so I can tell them what, what they need to do after I die,” and Lessa’s like, “I’m a little worried, but also, rest and hydrate and you’ll be fine, probably,” um…

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think to that point, you really do actually get to see — a lot of the payoff of their romantic relationship is coming in this book.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because their relationship is a hot mess in Dragonflight, and I think in a way that does actually make sense in a romance novel as traditionally structured, the climax of the book is you realizing as a reader, “Oh, they do love each other, and they’re going to build a, uh, somewhat functional partnership together.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Inasmuch as it’s going to happen, it’s kind of that, “Oh, thank gosh!” But you don’t get to actually see a lived-in partnership, and in this one you do, right? You get to see them working as a married couple and functioning as partners, again, inasmuch as they ever actually respect and trust each other in full partnership, which is, I would say, sss…

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s also interesting to me that, I hadn’t read this book in…almost twenty years, and what had stuck in my mind was, “Oh, this is F’nor and Brekke’s romance book.” This is the book where they get together, and that’s…true? But that’s really not the focus of the book, and we really spend a lot more of our romantic relationship…plot time with F’lar and Lessa, and F’nor and Brekke get, towards the end again they sort of show up, and you get one…romance scene, which… Again, it’s so clear to me coming back to these books, as an adult, that McCaffrey is deliberately seeking that particular flavor of, “I don’t want to have sex with you, but I’m going to have sex with you, having sex with you is great, but, oops, I don’t want to have sex with you.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s not a unique flavor; it’s something you see, I think, broadly across romance novels in the… ’80s, ’90s, even early 2000s, this… I would say, narrative cop-out of, your female character is supposed to have fun with the sex, but she’s not supposed to want the sex, because you as a reader or you as a writer don’t want to reckon with genuine female sexual agency. So if it’s, like, “Oh, oops,” you know, “I’ve been kidnapped by the pirate!” Like, “Nothing to be done!” And then you’re allowed to have a great time, once you’ve put up the token resistance, kind of…

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is rape culture writ large, but I see it here because it’s so artificial. She’s spent, at this point, a book and half telling us all about how in the Weyrs sexual promiscuity is fine, everyone’s just having sex, and there’s no stigma, and there’s no moral hangups, and then—

Lleu: Although coincidentally all of my main characters will end up in monogamous heterosexual relationships.

Tequila Mockingbird: —right. But also, all of my main characters don’t feel that way. There’s no reason for Brekke to feel deeply morally complicated about recreational sex, because it doesn’t serve any narrative point other than getting you to that sex scene, where Brekke is saying, “No, no, no, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and then having sex.

Lleu: Okay, it does serve a narrative point, and the narrative point is giving you a broader sense of the world-building.

Lleu: —Brekke crucially is not from a Weyr. She grew up in a Craft, and we’re told—

Lleu: One of the crucial elements of the world-building that we’ll talk a lot more about later, and also in later books, is this marked difference between Weyr morality, and especially Weyr sexual morality or sexual mores, and Hold and Craft sexual practices and attitudes about sex and reproduction, and so I think that Brekke’s attitude is intended, among other things, to indicate how dramatic this different this attitude is, that F’nor, truly is like, “I don’t understand what the problem is, ’cause I’ve only ever grown up in a Weyr, and, by and large, most of the women who come to the Weyr, and choose to stay there—

Lleu: —are seeking that out, or at least are appreciative of it once they realize that this is available to them. And F’nor can’t wrap his head around the fact and responds… badly as a result. The fact that Brekke genuinely is stuck in these Hold and Craft attitudes towards sex. I think it’s narratively important because this book is so much about sex and sexuality and the management of sex and sexuality, and so, this is a core important world-building thing, I think.

Tequila Mockingbird: I am perfectly willing to believe that it is doing valuable work, but to me, I think there would be ways to convey that that don’t require you to end up with exactly the same sex beats—

Tequila Mockingbird: That, to me, says that she was working backwards from, “That’s the vibe that I want.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, “That’s the scene that I want; why is that, how can I make that useful?”

Tequila Mockingbird: And, again, she’s dead; we don’t know. But to me, just the degree of similarity was surprising.

Lleu: The first time that F’nor and Brekke have sex, it is truly… F’nor runs through basically exactly the same thought process—

Lleu: 169? Yes. Let’s just read it. Brekke has finally confessed to F’nor that she’s in love with him, something that we have known, I think, actually, since…

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s subtextually given to you, but I don’t think it’s actually textually been said.

Lleu: —right from the beginning. And F’nor’s not uninterested in her but hasn’t paid her a ton of attention previously, and then finally Brekke has revealed… “Oh, my god, I do love you.” First she’s a little oblique, she’s like, “I met a dragonrider…” And then finally she’s like, “And it was you, F’nor!”

Lleu: And F’nor’s like, “Oh!” And so she’s really worried about this, especially because she knows that… So, F’nor’s dragon is a brown dragon, second-tier…

Tequila Mockingbird: And they are not generally the ones who fly queen dragons, so…

Lleu: So she’s worried about what this will mean, because she’s like, “I want you; I don’t want whoever…”

Lleu: A random bronze rider. And F’nor’s response to this is to make the same assumption that F’lar makes about Lessa, which is, like, “Oh, the problem is that she’s a virgin–”

Lleu: “He held her tightly as she seemed to shrink with revulsion from him as well as the imminent event. He thought of the riders here at Southern, of T’bor, and he experienced a disgust of another sort. Those men, conditioned to respond to Kylara’s exotic tastes,”

Lleu: “F’nor glanced round at the low couch and rose, Brekke in his arms. He started for the bed, halted, hearing voices beyond the clearing. Anyone might come.

Lleu: “Still holding her, he carried her out of the weyrhold, smothering her protest against his chest as she realized his intention. There was a place behind his weyrhold, beyond Canth’s wallow, where the ferns grew sweet and thick, where they would be undisturbed.

Lleu: “He wanted to be gentle but, unaccountably, Brekke fought him. She pleaded with him, crying out wildly that they’d rouse the sleeping Wirenth. He wasn’t gentle, but he was thorough, and, in the end, Brekke astounded him with a surrender as passionate as if her dragon had been involved.

Lleu: “F’nor raised himself on his elbow, pushing the sweaty, fern-entangled hair from her closed eyes, pleased by the soft serenity of her expression; excessively pleased with himself. A man never really knew how a woman would respond in love. So much hinted at in play never materialized in practice.

Lleu: “But Brekke was as honest in love, as kind and generous, as wholesome as ever; in her innocent wholeheartedness more sensual than the most skilled partner he had ever enjoyed.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s exactly the same emotional beat. And, again, you’ve got to assume she’s doing that on purpose, right? You’ve got to assume she’s getting something out of that narratively.

Lleu: Mm. The crucial difference is that afterwards Brekke’s like, “Yeah, this is fine now.”

Lleu: “What if it’s another bronze rider, some random bronze rider,” but it—

Lleu: —in contrast to Lessa, who afterwards is like, “This was horrible and bad. Don’t do this again.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think that also generally plays into their personalities—

Tequila Mockingbird: —as they’re being characterized, and I think… on the topic of Kylara, although we might not be ready to hop over yet…

Tequila Mockingbird: Um. This is really interesting, because we really have a villain here.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is very different from Dragonflight, where it’s very much, Thread, right, is the villain.

Tequila Mockingbird: Circumstance is the villain. R’gul is annoying, but ultimately, he—

Tequila Mockingbird: —he kind of gets in line. Right. And same with the Holders who are rebelling, it’s an obstacle, not a villain, where Kylara is a villain.

Lleu: —yeah. So, in Dragonflight, one of the things that they did when they were trying desperately to plan things was establish a kind of outpost of the Southern Continent, which has previously been uninhabited, for complicated historical reasons—

Lleu: —as severely. So, they’ve been using the Southern Continent now as essentially a hospital, so any wounded dragons and riders go down to the Southern Continent and can recuperate in a nicer climate where there’s less Thread and less danger.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also where they can support themselves with food without a Hold tithing to them.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause that’s really crucial, that Southern just has an abundance of crops and food that you can access very easily.

Lleu: And the land appears to be particularly fertile, for reasons that they don’t fully understand but are trying to figure out. So…

Tequila Mockingbird: And so they’ve sent Kylara, who is another queen rider, to Southern Weyr, specifically because she’s awful and they don’t want her around.

Tequila Mockingbird: One of Lessa’s few hatreds where I’m really like, “Yeah, girl.”

Lleu: So, Kylara has this kind of longstanding on-again-off-again relationship with another bronze rider named T’bor, who’s the notional Weyrleader of Southern Weyr, although he doesn’t have that much political power. But Kylara is also having an affair with Meron, who is the Lord of one of the Holds on the Northern Continent.

Lleu: He is one of the people who came to power after Fax, the conqueror, was deposed, so he has no “Blood” status; he was one of Fax’s minions or agents in the Hold and he was able to get his political position secured because there was no-one else. He and Kylara are basically scheming to fuck everyone over in a variety of ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s very interesting because when you step back from the text it doesn’t make a lot of sense, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s kind of, like… Do they have a plan? Do they have a goal? Is there a reason? And it’s… no, they’re just awful, like…

Lleu: Yeah, they’re just awful and in a kind of weird fucked-up love with each other, and they’re like, “Yeah, we can just burn down everything else, ’cause they’re boring and we’re great.” That’s kind of the vibe.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, it’s a very narcissistic… Yes, you can argue that Meron doesn’t think the dragonriders are necessary or resents their power, but it’s, like… he does very much want them to protect him from Thread, right? Like he doesn’t want to get rid of them.

Tequila Mockingbird: He just doesn’t want to have to be polite to them…question mark? That’s the reason that he’s planning a wide-scale global political destabilization? And Kylara really is just this narcissistic child.

Lleu: I mean, it’s funny that you say that, because the way that she’s introduced to us in Dragonflight is that… So, part of the elaborate setting up a base in the South, is that they sent them back in time so that the young dragons would have more time to mature. And Kylara, we are told, spends most of her time attempting to observe her past self, because she wants to look at herself when she was even younger and more beautiful than she already is. That’s our introduction to Kylara’s personality.

Tequila Mockingbird: We spend a fair amount of time in her point of view — and just to note generally it’s close third person —

Lleu: Close third person, but all over the place with many different third persons.

Tequila Mockingbird: — third-person omniscient, kind of… So, you’re over her shoulder, and she’s just spoiled and willful… And I’m describing her in a way that you would describe a badly-behaved child, and in a way that I, as someone who works with children, would actually never describe a child because it’s this very controlling… But she just seems to want to be the center of attention and to fuck everyone else over because she can.

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that doesn’t really feel psychologically stable, and we’re sort of hinted at that, and that her only stability comes from her dragon, and this relationship that is both wholly affirming and Prideth loves her unconditionally but also Prideth doesn’t… compromise, she’s a dragon —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and she’s like, “I want this to happen,” and so she’s the only thing that Kylara cares about other than herself.

Lleu: Yeah, and crucially, unlike some of the other dragons, where F’lar’s dragon Mnementh can sometimes talk sense into F’lar when he’s being stupid about Lessa, Prideth doesn’t do that. So even though Prideth is able to be like, “I’m hungry; you need to feed me,” and Kylara will respond to that, she can’t be like —

Lleu: — “You’ve got to calm down.” Even Prideth cannot make Kylara stop being Kylara. In part because that’s how the dragon-rider relationship works, right?

Lleu: The dragon and rider love each other unconditionally, and that, the…

Tequila Mockingbird: You don’t go into a loving relationship trying to change someone.

Lleu: Yeah, the nature of that relationship is reflective of the rider’s personality as much as the dragon’s, and so, Kylara is unwilling to be changed and so Prideth cannot change her.

Lleu: Whereas F’lar is at least somewhat willing to be changed, and so Mnementh can sometimes change him.

Tequila Mockingbird: Though it does also feel like Mnementh — and Ramoth, but Mnementh mostly — are smarter than Prideth and other dragons?

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t know how much that’s a deliberate choice that McCaffrey was making and how much that’s just, “This is the main character’s dragon and I want him to be able to have more substantial conversations or character interactions,” versus this one-note villain character who doesn’t need to have that more complicated interiority.

Lleu: It’s hard to know in part because we get so few other internal things—

Lleu: — I think any dragon that’s paired with Kylara is going to come off looking stupid, because it’s Kylara.

Lleu: We almost never, I don’t think, see Brekke interacting with Wirenth except during the mating flight scene when everything’s out of control.

Lleu: I’m trying to think if we see we see Jaxom and Ruth, but Ruth is different. Do we see Mirrim and Path? Not really. Okay, you know what, we do see T’lion interacting with Gadareth —

Lleu: — in The Dolphins of Pern, and Gadareth also I think seems relatively smart.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, again to a degree, if you’re going to make the dragon interaction with the rider a key element of your story, you want the dragon to be intelligent, right? Like, yeah —

Lleu: Oh, I mean, and Canth, obviously, but Canth also is high emotional intelligence —

Tequila Mockingbird: So, it does feel a little bit like, “Oh, this is a villain character, I’m deliberately minimizing or making her a little less compelling.” It’s fascinating to me that we get this book, and Lessa is this complicated, interesting protagonist, and then you zoom out and are like, okay, who are the other female characters in her world? And the answer is: Manora, who is F’nor’s mom, and her job is to be a mom, she doesn’t really… get a lot of interiority. She’s just a mom.

Tequila Mockingbird: But… we don’t really get her complicated interior life.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then we get Marda,[2] who is one of the Oldtimer queen dragon riders, who… in a sort of inexplicable… she’s sort of sympathetic at the end of Dragonflight and in this book has made an absolute reversal and is just… hates Lessa because… Lessa’s also from Ruatha?

Tequila Mockingbird: And she’s jealous of her? And it’s, yeah, it’s this sort of boring, sexist, kind of one-note, like —

Tequila Mockingbird: — “Suddenly she’s such a bitch!” And we have Brekke—

Lleu: We should note also Mardra’s other distinctive characteristic is that she’s explicitly extremely promiscuous.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. We’ve got to demonize her. And then she gets summarily dismissed to the Southern Weyr at the end of this book —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and kind of, “Haha,” there’s sort of an, a poisonous last little phrase about, “Oh, she’s, she’s surprised to learn how few riders want to come with her,” and it’s a little sting, and it’s like, okay? Why is this necessary? What was this accomplishing?

Tequila Mockingbird: Other than to make the Oldtimers an easy, like, “And then we get rid of them. Yay!” And then we get Rannelly, who is Kylara’s serving-maid, very much in the Shakespearean Nurse of Juliet model —

Tequila Mockingbird: — of nutty old lady who’s subservient, and, like, “Oh, madam!” You know, “Young mistress! Blah blah blah.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And also feeds I think into the very, aristocracy and servants energy. Um…

Tequila Mockingbird: Um. Yeah. And some of Kylara’s arrogance comes from the fact that she is a Lord Holder’s sister.

Tequila Mockingbird: Full-Blood sister, as she repeats multiple times. So she was raised in this aristocratic tradition and then became a queen dragonrider. And in her defense, yeah, she gets whatever she wants.

Tequila Mockingbird: She always has. No-one has ever told her no. You can see how that might produce someone like Kylara.

Lleu: Yeah. I think the specific contours of how that’s presented are… badly handled—

Lleu: — I think it’s fair to say. But I think that probably Anne McCaffrey was attempting to do something that would be at least someone critical of these social structures, especially because changes in these social structures continues to be the running theme of the series for the next, what —

Tequila Mockingbird: And then we get Brekke, who is… sweet? But she doesn’t…

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, she’s like, “Oh, I’m just hardworking, and I want to help everyone, and I never stand up for myself, and, oh, F’nor!” Like, she’s —

Tequila Mockingbird: — a damsel in distress. And she doesn’t really get — I mean, interesting things happen to her. But does she have any meaningful agency up until the point of this book where she refuses to Impress the new queen dragon?

Lleu: Which she also doesn’t entirely do of her own free will. No, she does not.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, she’s sweet, and then Mirrim, honestly, is the most interesting female character in this book, and she’s not even interesting in this book; she’s interesting in later books.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Here she’s just a spunky little child, and it’s like, “Ah, okay, she’s a plucky youth,” right?

Tequila Mockingbird: TM. And that’s it. And it’s also crucial, none of them are friends with Lessa? Even Brekke, Lessa’s just like, “Oh, Brekke, she’s so quiet and polite, yeah, huh.” Like, she just…

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s no female solidarity, there’s no meaningful female friendship, there’s no… it’s just very much, “Here I am, the *hair toss* protagonist, badass ladygirl, in this world of mean, tough men!”

Tequila Mockingbird: “And evil promiscuous women that I must overcome by being better than them and rubbing it in their face!” And it just, it’s interesting to see how much even a writer who as you said in the last episode, the first woman to win a Hugo and a Nebula — she was genuinely breaking ground for white female American speculative fiction writers — is kind of stuck in this very tired, I think very boring, “Here are the options for female characters.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don’t know how much that’s just internalized misogyny, or how much that’s a… frankly perhaps more clear-eyed read on what the reader was willing to engage with.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’71? And I also wanted to bring into dialogue a very interesting scientific study that was done in 1970 — so, I don’t if she read it, but it was out there for her to read — about ploughing and women’s rights. And this was a theory that was proposed in 1970 by Ester Boserup. It’s a book called Women’s Role in Economic Development, and it basically suggests that traditional forms of agriculture have an influence on women’s role in society, and, specifically, cultures that use plough agriculture, where upper-body strength is significant and it’s a lot harder to do sustained plough architecture[4] while taking care of children, women had much less ability to participate in the economic life of the society, and therefore even hundreds of years later had fewer kind of political and social rights. There was a follow-up in 2011 that did a real serious deep dive and, really controlled for a lot of factors and found that, with the possible kind of question mark of religious implications, which was harder to control for, it does actually seem to hold true beyond, kind of…

Tequila Mockingbird: Where if you’re doing kind of hoe-based agriculture, right, you can do a little bit of weeding and then stop and take care of a kid, you know, and that, you know, even 2-, 300 years later, even accounting for economic factors and migration factors and all kinds of stuff — you can read the whole paper, it’s very interesting — people in those countries that had that plough-based agriculture were much less likely to respond to questions of, like, “Women should be elected into government” or “It is just as important for a woman to hold a job outside the home as for a man to hold a job outside of the home” and other questions like that.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I could believe — I’m not saying that I do — that McCaffrey is genuinely trying to engage with and advance an idea of how Pernese culture might cause a regression from a sort of egalitarian ideal to a patriarchal society. I think the way that she actually does it is pretty clumsy…

Lleu: I think the fact that in particular — and, I just can’t get over — the two things we know about Kylara and Meron’s relationship, that we know for some reason, and I wish we did not: one, Kylara likes being hit during sex; and, Meron has a big dick. Those are the two things we know about their sexual relationship. And I think the fact that that those are attached to Kylara as signifiers of her badness suggests that this is not as sophisticated as that —

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, yeah, no, and I… Ugh, yeah. Uh, it’s… so much of reading this book, these books in general, is like, “Wow, there’s all this interesting stuff that you could have been doing, and instead you were doing —

Tequila Mockingbird: — something else that wasn’t nearly as interesting.” And I, and I do think — and we will talk about this later in the series — there are interesting ways to engage with how, basically, going from a high-technology culture and society to a low-technology one very rapidly in the middle of overwhelming social upheaval and trauma might and would have an effect on social mores and gender roles —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and sexuality and, you know, like, all kinds of things. But I don’t know that she’s actually engaging with it deeply, critically, and interestingly, and I think especially in terms of the actual characterization, yeah, Kylara’s kind of a bad caricature, and everyone else is an archetype. And Lessa’s a really interesting character, but she’s kind of on her own.

Lleu: She kind of is, yeah. I mean, I think F’nor is much more interesting than F’lar, but he also does suffer from many of F’lar’s other flaws, he’s just a little more… engaging to read about.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And Lessa’s not alone across the entire series, right? We’re going to get to Menolly next, and… love Menolly.

Tequila Mockingbird: But… in terms of these first two books, which I think are very much a duology, they’re kind of a unit.

Lleu: Yes. The one thing I was going to say that we haven’t talked about — which, to be fair, is a somewhat important plot point, except that it’s not really that important in this book; it becomes more important in later books — is that the first thing that happens in this book, in fact, after F’nor gets in a knife fight and is sent down to the Southern Weyr is that he and some other dragonriders who are there, and also Mirrim, who’s the plucky youth, encounter creatures that were believed to be mythical, which are fire lizards. They are essentially miniature dragons, and we later learn —

Tequila Mockingbird: They suppose that dragons were originally bred from fire lizards.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it actually gets a lot of pushback in this book, of, like, “Don’t be ridiculous! The, how could that happen?”

Lleu: Yeah, “Can’t be possible!” So, one of the other things that’s going on through this book, and in different ways through the rest of the series, is using fire lizards both as a political tool, because they’re, appealing: they psychically bond with you like dragons, and they’re very pretty, and they’re intelligent —

Lleu: — they love you, so they’re useful political tools that you can give, fire lizard eggs as gifts and then people will have their fire lizards, but also that access to fire lizards is connected with some of these tensions between the Weyrs, and the dragons and their kind of privileged, their — well, their very explicitly politically privileged status, and also the social freedoms that are afforded to them, they have this sexual liberty that people in Holds and Crafts, all these things. So fire lizards get used as a way to…

Lleu: But also as a way to… explore that and to give people access to that in ways that I think are really interesting and get explored more later. In this book it’s kind of —

Lleu: — they’re more focused on the political use of, like, “Yeah, we’re going to give people some eggs.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But they also do start to think about the ways that — because fire lizards can also teleport, they can go between — being able to instantaneously send messages is potentially going to revolutionize their culture and and their society, and they do start experimenting that.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause this is also where Fandarel sort of invents —

Lleu: Fandarel being the Master of the Smithcraft, which is basically just, all science has gotten lumped together. So they do blacksmithing and whatnot, but they also do, chemistry and physics. And so he’s among other things working on developing a telegraph. This book is the real beginning of the technological revolution that comes to fruition in later books in the series in much more complicated ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: And in a lot of interesting ways — I was saying this earlier — she kind of, yeah, lays out her thesis for the rest of this book series in Dragonquest. ’Cause Dragonflight, it’s fun, it’s an adventure, we’re fighting Thread, yay, dragons, but this one really says, “No, this is actually going to be a book series about the vast changes that are wrought on this society as they try to… redevelop and re-access what they lost —

Tequila Mockingbird: — when they lost all this technological information,” and that even gets you to that final point of, “And they’re going to go to space with their teleporting dragons and fight a planet!”

Lleu: Yeah. So. Okay. We’re going to change tack completely now, because the other thing that I really want to talk about is homosexuality and the way that it appears in this book, because. Here’s the thing. The reason F’nor gets in a knife fight at the beginning of this book, in the first chapter, is that he has gone to the Smithcraft Hall and the Smiths have been refusing to turn over a lovely decorative knife that is destined for a Lord Holder to some random dragonriders from Fort Weyr. These random dragonriders are two men. One of them rides a green dragon — green dragons are female. The other one rides a brown dragon — brown dragons are male. Their dragons are in a committed long-term relationship; implicitly — and the green dragon is about to rise for her mating flight. Implicitly, the two men are also in a committed long-term relationship. The green rider kind of loses it, stabs F’nor, gets dragged away, it’s this whole drama.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s later explained with, “Oh, his dragon was about to get, like, you know how people get, you know that it’s kind of hard to focus and concentrate, he’s not fully responsible for his actions —

Lleu: So, what I think is interesting, and the reason that I am focused on Brekke’s attitudes towards sex as crucial to the world-building and to the plot structure of this book is because the result of this is, F’lar has a meeting with the other Weyrleaders, and the meeting is, how do we deal with this political crisis that–

Lleu: — has resulted from dragonrider sexual mores coming into the public eye in a really embarrassing public way. Holds, we are repeatedly told are not comfortable with homosexuality and with the idea that two men might have sex. But in Weyrs it’s extremely common and normal. Green dragons also have mating flights, and they are approximately fifty percent of the dragon population, so men in Weyrs are regularly having sex with other men. And the Weyrs are like, this is fine and normal, we understand this —

Tequila Mockingbird: And it was very much, like, this political conversation is: this fight between dragonriders is embarrassing, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not anything to do with T’reb himself; it’s, like, “Oh, shit, dragonriders got in a public fight and stabbed each other; that makes us look so incompetent.”

Lleu: But I think that part of that anxiety is connected specifically to the fact that the only explanation —

Lleu: — that will elide the political tensions that actually underlie this is, “Oh, T’reb’s dragon was close to mating.” But the problem is that that then draws attention to this aspect of Weyr life that Holds are deeply uncomfortable with.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think it also, it has a flavor of… the sort of feminization of hysteria.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right? This, like, “Oh, well, he’s, you know, a green dragon, he’s not, in his masculine control of himself.”

Lleu: Something that comes up, something that comes up repeatedly throughout the series even into the ’90s. And we see this also leveraged by Kylara, right?

Lleu: So when she’s mad at T’bor, the bronze rider that she’s sort of on and off with… So, in the kind of sexual hierarchy of Pern, bronze riders are all heterosexual men, and brown riders are either straight or bi, and blue riders are either bi or gay, and green riders are all gay. We’ll talk a lot more about this in the future, probably.

Lleu: But, when Kylara is mad at T’bor, the first insult that she turns to is calling him a “boy-lover,” so she associates dragonriders at this basic level with kind of “deviant,” quote-unquote, sexuality.

Lleu: And she was raised in a Hold. We are learning a lot about Hold sexual values in this, and I think the management of sex and sexuality is really the throughline of the first, like, two-thirds of the book, basically.

Lleu: Which is why I think it’s thematically important that Brekke feels the way she does about sex, even if it also has this kind of broader generic —

Lleu: — generic value. Also, in connection with this, all of the handling of sexuality in this series drives me insane, but the other specific moment that I am really deeply stuck on is at the Hatching at Benden Weyr, where young Jaxom Impresses the dragon that he helps break out of the egg. One of the things that happens at the beginning of this is, he is with Lessa and F’lar’s son, who is a couple years younger than him but knows all of the Candidates and is like, “Yeah, we’re rooting for my friends, they’re going to Impress good dragons” —

Lleu: — And Felessan has been pointing out — also, names in Pern are all basically just combinations of parents’ names, so F’lar and Lessa’s son is named Felessan.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is a very normal and calm way to do things that definitely will not cause problems for us later.

Lleu: She commits to it, and it holds throughout the series, and it’s bonkers. Anyway, Felessan is pointing out people on the Hatching Ground, and at the end after everyone has Impressed, Felessan’s like —

Lleu: “‘Didja see, Jaxom? Didja see? Birto got a bronze and Pellomar only Impressed a green. Dragons don’t like bullies and Pellomar’s been the biggest bully in the Weyr. Good for you, Birto!’”

Lleu: The implication of this is that Impressing a green — we are told repeatedly throughout the series: dragonriders love their dragons unconditionally, their dragons love them unconditionally, this is the deepest, most powerful relationship that you could ever possibly have.

Tequila Mockingbird: And getting to come to the Weyr is amazing. The people who are randomly — ’cause they choose Candidates from randomly throughout Pern — are thrilled and it’s access to this amazing life, and it’s, wow, it’s a real privilege, it’s a real honor. It’s basically jumping to the aristocracy from being a peasant.

Lleu: Yeah. This implies that Impressing a green dragon is, first of all, bad, second of all, specifically a punishment for being a bully. And it’s very difficult for me to read this as anything else than, yes, the fact that Pellomar will then be involved in his green dragon’s mating flights and men will be having sex with him, since implicitly your role in penetration is parallel to your dragon’s role during mating flight sex, that in and of itself is the punishment. Which is…

Lleu: First of all, wildly homophobic, obviously. Second of all, makes no sense in the context of the world-building of the rest of the series, except insofar as even within the Weyrs there is this strong sense of sexual hierarchy, where bronze riders are… obviously all dragonriders are good, but bronze riders are the best, so these straight men are the most manly, or later on they’re referred to, sometimes referred to as, like, they’re the “real men,”[5] unlike green riders and blue riders.

Tequila Mockingbird: And also just literally, their dragons are bigger, their dragons are faster, it’s like… you get the biggest, shiniest prize.

Lleu: Yeah, so, I’m going to keep bringing this up throughout the series, because it keeps coming up in different ways, um...

Lleu: It does not get more hinged. It only gets more unhinged, in fact, I would say. And I want to be fair to McCaffrey — I think there’s also, for example, a sympathetically portrayed green rider character; during the whole mating flight crisis —

Lleu: — a green rider intervenes in an attempt to bring Kylara back to her senses and get her to rein in her dragon, and he’s not able to, but his account of what happened that he gives to F’lar and Lessa I think is actually quite powerful and makes him seem pretty sympathetic. And there continue to be sympathetically portrayed green and blue and brown dragonriders who are involved with men in various ways over the course of the series, so it’s not unabated homophobia. But it is also wildly homophobic. But also I’m kind of captivated by the series as a result, because the takeaway is, like, well, it’s weird, and the politics of the Weyr are… weird and still homophobic, but also, there are explicitly gay characters in this book. In 1971, there’s room for me to be gay in this world, in a way that is not often the case in pre-, well, in a lot of older sci-fi. I don’t want to put a specific date.

Lleu: And obviously there are exceptions, and obviously this is not… the ideal version of that, but also… nothing is the ideal version of that. I’m stuck on this because, on the one hand, it’s so frustrating and, on the other hand, there’s still this tantalizing… there’s something here. There’s something weirdly utopian about this, in spite of…

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t know if I remember really noticing that element, which, you know, I was less likely to notice it.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause I feel like, for me, my memory was that the… Vanyel in Mercedes Lackey’s Last Herald-Mage was the first time I remember reading a queer character.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I was… ten. A lot of things were going over my head…

Lleu: Yeah, well, I mean, I should also — to be fair, it also went over my head as a child, except that I was extremely fixated on blue and green dragons, specifically, and the idea of having a blue dragon was like, I want that; I don’t want a bronze dragon. I was really into the bronze riders, like, I love N’ton — I’m still kind of obsessed with him; he’s great.

Lleu: Yeah, and he must be losing his mind about F’lar constantly, but he’s great. And, I love T’bor… Tragic… Anyway. So I wasn’t conscious-conscious of it, but also, on some level, I think I had processed that this must be how things worked.

Lleu: Yeah, only, later when I was going back and rereading Dragonquest did I finally realize, like, oh, my god.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I also had another thing that I noticed when I was flipping through in terms of broader sexual mores and that question, is, there is this very interesting scene where Meron, as kind of a political tactic, suggests that Robinton, the Masterharper and a big political ally of F’lar and Lessa, ’cause the Harpers are the bards if you will, but they’re in charge of all communication and education on Pern. Um.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. They’re the ones who are all talking to each other all the time, and talking to everyone, ’cause they’re in everyone’s household, playing music, teaching children, listening…

Tequila Mockingbird: Meron implies that Robinton is in love with Lessa and possibly trying to have an affair with her, specifically to discredit them politically.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘But it’s so obvious. Surely you can all see that,’ Meron replied with malicious affability and a feigned surprise at the obtuseness of the others. ‘He has a hopeless passion for—the Benden Weyrwoman.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “For a moment Lessa could only stare at the man in a stunned daze. It was true that she admired and respected Robinton. She was fond of him, she supposed. Always glad to see him and never bothering to disguise it but—Meron was mad. Trying to undermine the country’s faith in dragonmen with absurd, vicious rumors. First Kylara and now… And yet Kylara’s weakness, her promiscuity, the general attitude of the Hold and Craft toward the customs of the Weyrs made his accusation so plausible…

Tequila Mockingbird: “Robinton’s hearty guffaw startled her. And wiped the smile from Nabol’s face.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Benden’s Weyrwoman has not half the attraction for me that Benden’s wine has!’

Tequila Mockingbird: “There was such intense relief in the faces around her that Lessa knew, in a sinking, sick way, that the Lord Holders had been halfway to believing Meron’s invidious accusation. If Robinton had not responded just as he had, if he had started to protest the accusation…”

Lleu: So, this is also so funny to me — I was thinking about this scene before the episode, also, because, like… it makes no sense.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s also — yeah, he can be in love with her. Being in love with someone is free. In the Weyr, explicitly, you’re allowed to have as many partners as you want. And it loops back to, like, why is Meron doing anything that he’s doing? Just to fuck everyone up.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I feel like we’ve ended this on a note of, like, “And this book isn’t very good,” — I am compelled, reading it. You really do put up with… quite a lot of nonsense and politics because you’re getting to know the characters, and because the character relationships are interesting and compelling.

Lleu: Yeah, as I said, I think this is a significantly better book than Dragonflight, in spite of its many flaws. I also think that in many ways it’s better than, some of the later and more, kind of, neatly plotted books. I’m thinking about The White Dragon, which we’ll talk about in a while, which is sort of a Bildungsroman about one character, and… it’s good, but I find this book, in spite of all of its weirdness, much less frustrating than I find that one, and I think it is because she does just a really good job of balancing all of these perspectives, introducing us to the characters, introducing us to the world, in a way that really embeds us in the story, such that when she finally gets to the plot, I get it. And also makes it impossible to talk about the series without sounding insane, because in order for any of the plot to make any sense and to land, you have to be like, “Well, first you have to understand all of this stuff about dragons and the social structure” — which we frankly have not done a very good job of explaining — “and all of this other stuff,” but once you get that, there’s something that’s worth it even with all of the problems. Maybe. However…

Tequila Mockingbird: And to close, if this is making you think, “Well, maybe I should just read this book” — don’t. Don’t let nostalgia lure you into its clutches. Instead, try consuming one of these other, better pieces of media.

Lleu: Yes. My recommendation this week is Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords, which is from the early ’90s. If you liked the idea of these complicated political tensions and people trying frantically to avert giant, potentially world-ending political crises and also these ideas about social transformation, Ring of Swords might appeal to you — and also does have some wild sexual politics and some interesting ideas about alien gender and sexuality and does also have an explicitly gay character. Multiple explicitly gay characters. Heterosexuality is… an illegal taboo among the aliens in the book. So it’s great — I really enjoyed it; just read it a couple weeks ago. Highly recommend it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And my recommendation is Avatar: The Last Airbender, specifically because if what you’re interested in is a tortured, messy, ugly female villain whose psychological decline is compelling and tragic and at the same time you also want to watch her get her face stomped into the dirt, Azula is so much better than Kylara in every possible way.

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.

[5] The actual quotation Lleu was thinking of is from Moreta, where Sh’gall is described by the narration (through Moreta’s POV) as “fully male,” in contrast to blue and green riders. We’ll talk a bit more about this in our episode on Moreta, and again when we get to Red Star Rising / Dragonseye.