Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #5: The White Dragon (1978)

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

Lleu: And today we’re talking about The White Dragon, which is either the third or the fifth or the sixth book in the series, depending on how you count — something that we’ll talk about later.

Tequila Mockingbird: I honestly never read this one as a kid, because I had it in a giant omnibus with the first two books, Dragonflight and Dragonquest, and it was really bulky and hard to transport.

Lleu: I almost certainly did read this at least once as a child, but I don't really remember details of it until when I reread most of the series in 2013.

Tequila Mockingbird: And frankly, there's not a lot that's worth remembering. As a plot summary goes, it's a little tricky, because the plot is very…incoherent? But there are three main plot threads that interweave throughout the book. The first, and I would say the biggest, is, this is Jaxom's coming-of-age story. This is the young son of Fax, the conqueror, who inherits Ruatha after Lessa gets his father killed, and who accidentally Impressed a dragon at the end of Dragonquest. This was an egg that wasn't gonna hatch, and Jaxom was seized with pity, remembering his own mother dying giving birth to him and his own Caesarean section birth, so he helps the dragonet hatch, and it turns out it's a white dragon and clearly different, smaller than the other dragons. And this provides something of a complication: is he a dragonrider or is he a Lord Holder? Can he be both? Etc. This book sees him growing up and coming into his power as a Lord Holder and answering that question. Other important elements are, the Oldtimers who have been exiled to the Southern Weyr are now getting a little bit complicated. They're getting a little uppity; they’re not happy with their exile, so they attempt to steal a queen egg from Benden. Jaxom retrieves it. The reason that they steal it is they have no more young queen, and their queen dragons are too old to rise to mate. Because of this, or just generally because of their unhappiness or political leanings or spite — it isn't really clear — they show up at an open meeting flight in Ista and attempt to have their elderly bronze dragons catch the queen, Caylith. This doesn't go well. T’kul’s dragon dies; he then challenges F’lar to a duel and gets killed. There's also the fact that Jaxom is sent to explore some of the Southern Continent more broadly. He gets very sick with “firehead,” a Southern Continent disease, but they do end up discovering some remnants of the original Pernese colonists’ settlement in the Southern Continent and start exploring their own history. That’s mostly driven by Masterharper Robinton, who also has a plot-relevant I guess heart attack — it’s not textually completely clear, but some kind of emergency medical condition involving his heart — and has to retire to the Southern Continent for his health. And that is very much a gateway to the rest of the series, which is mainly gonna be preoccupied with this exploration, rediscovery of Pern’s past.

Lleu: Yes. This book was published in 1978, so a year after Dragonsinger, a year before Dragondrums. Dragondrums takes place, chronologically, overlapping with the first two chapters of this book, and some significant things happen in Dragondrums that make aspects of this book make somewhat more sense, I would say.

Lleu: This book is the third book of the “original trilogy,” quote-unquote — Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon. McCaffrey had a contract to write those three books...

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, I think she had the first book, which was, as we've talked about, a short story, and then when it was successful as an individual book, I think she got a contract for the second two books in the trilogy.

Lleu: Yeah. Also, she wrote, separately and with a children's publisher, Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, and then also, it seems like, had a contract for Dragondrums, but because The White Dragon was longer-awaited, or because of other vagaries of the publishing industry, The White Dragon ended up being published first, despite the fact that chronologically it takes place mostly several years after Dragondrums. So, the result is that this is the third book if you are reading the original trilogy and then reading the Harper Hall trilogy, which complements the original trilogy — “original trilogy” in quotation marks; it is the fifth book if you are reading them in publication order, as we are; and it is the sixth book if you are reading them in chronological order. This is only the beginning of the chronology problems, because the other big one is, how old is Jaxom, exactly?

Tequila Mockingbird: “How old is Jaxom?” This is the question that we are constantly asking ourselves, and I'm not even kidding; I feel like we messaged back and forth multiple times in the course of our reread being like, “Wait, how old is Jaxom?”

Lleu: Yeah. The White Dragon to its credit, lines up more or less with the timeline implied by Dragonflight. Jaxom is 18 at the end of this book, which is set mostly in the 15th year of the Pass. Jaxom was born three years before the beginning of the Pass. That adds up.

Lleu: The problem is Dragonquest, which is set in the eighth year of the Pass, in which we are told Jaxom is 12, which is already a problem, because he should only be 11.

Lleu: However he also is at the Hatching with his friend Felessan, who is, you know, a couple years younger than him, but not…seven.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It definitely does not seem either like Felessan’s dialogue is written as a seven-year-old child or like their friendship is the kind of friendship that a 12-year-old and a seven-year-old would have.

Lleu: Yes, and also, prior to having the lesson we're told that Lessa had some unsuccessful pregnancies, and that her pregnancy with Felessan was difficult. Given that she and F’lar only started sleeping together nine years before the beginning of Dragonquest, the timeline is a little difficult.

Tequila Mockingbird: How is he supposed to be ten? How is he supposed — okay, here's what it is. When she got pregnant, she went between time and went back in time. For reasons. And then handed her past self a three-year-old.

Lleu: We're going to ignore the fact that we know from Dragonquest itself that going between while pregnant causes spontaneous abortions.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, this was the problem, actually, because she kept — Okay, so she went between time and got pregnant and then had to stay there.

Lleu: So that's probably what happened, yeah. There continue to be questions over the rest of the series about everyone's ages, but Jaxom in particular is a problem.

Lleu: For so many reasons. So this book is Jaxom's coming-of-age story, or at least the main thread in this book. In that respect, we’ve come full circle in the original trilogy. Dragonflight starts with Jaxom's birth and ends[1] with Jaxom being officially confirmed as a Lord Holder. It's nice closed arc. And then she was able to write more books in the series, so it stops being closed. But that aspect of it is quite satisfying. Unfortunately, Jaxom's coming-of-age… Around Jaxom's life there have always been these questions: is he — well, always, since he was 12-ish. Question mark — been these questions —

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, no, I think it's fair to say that there have always been questions and complications, because he is the son of this kind of looming villain, who is not really the bad guy of the story, because he's dead in the first chapter of Dragonflight, but there is some complication, and we do get a little bit of a taste of that here, where it's a little weird to know that your dad was a horrible person that your mother did not want to have a baby with, and caused her death and the death of many other people. It's a weird situation to be in!

Lleu: Yeah. One of the moments that I think is most interesting, and it's so brief and isn't followed through on, but there's some real pathos there, is, while they're doing some of the archeology at the end, Lessa is going through digging through volcanic ash, and she's like, “Huh, I haven't done this in, like, 20 years.”

Lleu: “— the day you were born. I was cleaning out the ash pit at the Hold when your mother arrived.” And Jaxom has this moment where he's like, “Oh, my god! No one ever talks about either of my parents. But my mother…” Truly he's like, “I had no idea.” ’Cause he knows the story in the abstract, but for many reasons people don't like to think or talk about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is a shame, because Gemma seemed great, right? That's why Lessa was okay with Jaxom inheriting in Dragonflight. She's like, “Okay —”

Tequila Mockingbird: “— I don't want to think about Fax’s child inheriting, but Gemma of Crom's child inheriting I would be fine with, because she's part Ruathan, way back on the distaff line.” And she was just an interesting and compelling woman.

Lleu: They don't have a chance to pursue this — Jaxom doesn't have a chance to ask any follow-up questions or anything, but there is this moment of, like, “Oh, that's right. Jaxom had a mother. He hasn't just been raised by Lytol, this former dragon rider, who's very —”

Lleu: “— dour.” Yeah. There's also a single moment where Fax is directly evoked, which is —

Lleu: So, Jaxom falls in love with this woman, Sharra. She is the sister of Toric, who is the very ambitious Holder who has been governing the Hold on the Southern Continent, Southern Hold. And Toric does not approve of Sharra and Jaxom's relationship and so kidnaps Sharra, essentially, in order to marry her off to someone to suit his own plans, and Jaxom has to go rescue her. And as Jaxom is telling someone, “I'm gonna go rescue Sharra,” I forget whose perspective it is; I think it might be Robinton's? Is looking at Jaxom, and is like, “Huh. In this moment, he does look a little bit like his father.”

Lleu: The expression on his face, the kind of determination. And it's like, ooh.

Lleu: I'm not sure that's a good thing! But again, it doesn't really follow up on this.

Tequila Mockingbird: So many things; so many things about Jaxom that could be really interesting and could have a much more complicated and engaging plotline and then simply don't.

Lleu: Yeah. So this then comes back to what I was gonna say earlier, which is, in terms of Jaxom's coming-of-age, as a conclusion to the arc of this original trilogy, it is narratively satisfying. As a conclusion to Jaxom's arc, specifically, it's pretty frustrating, I think, because Jaxom's life has been surrounded by all of these questions, about his parentage, about the fact that he has a dragon, is he a dragonrider, is he a Holder. Who's he going to be? And the answer at the end of the book is like, “Oh, he's just gonna be exactly who everyone expected him to be the whole time and conform perfectly to all of their social expectations. He just also will have a dragon.”

Lleu: Okay!? Uhhhh. So, it's a very, I would say, conservative coming-of-age story, where it seemed like there was a lot of potential for Jaxom to —

Tequila Mockingbird: The most interesting part of this book to me is Jaxom's relationship with Ruth, his dragon, and what that says about broadly the relationships between dragons and people.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is — it's tough, because, on one hand, I am glad that McCaffrey talked about this, because I think it's an interesting thing to talk about. On the other hand, sometimes when McCaffrey talks about things I'm like, “Actually, maybe don't talk about it. Actually, I wish you'd never said anything about this, and I could have imagined in my head that what you would have said would have been different and better.” Because Ruth is not interested in mating flights. Ruth… you could make an argument, I guess, Ruth as an asexual dragon; Ruth, as a, you know, dragon without a libido. And this means that, unlike every other romantic relationship with a dragonrider (question mark) in these books, his romantic relationships are not mediated by his dragon injecting him with telepathically-induced lust against his will.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because we can't get away from that idea, because that is in large part what McCaffrey wants to talk about with these books.

Lleu: The book begins with Jaxom losing his temper at some of the fosterlings, and also just other people at the Hold, including his guardian, for their, essentially, as he sees it, condescension about Ruth. He's self-conscious about the fact that Ruth is small, and so when people make comments that imply that like, “Oh, is Ruth healthy today?” “Yes, he's been healthy every single day of his life. Stop asking me this question.” Or when the fosterlings at the Hold are rude about like, “Ruth’s just an overgrown fire lizard,” that really gets to Jaxom, and we're supposed to feel bad for him because of that, which I kind of don't understand, because when he grows up he's gonna have the power to summarily exile any of these people at any time, if he were so inclined. But, anyway, we're supposed to feel bad for Jaxom because of this. And this anxiety about Ruth, about whether Ruth is a “real dragon,” quote-unquote.

Lleu: Yeah. There's something there also about, is Ruth a “real dragon” / are dragonriders, especially like green riders, “real men.”

Lleu: Anyway, so Jaxom is extremely anxious about this, because he wants Ruth to be a “real dragon.” He wants to be a dragonrider, fundamentally, is what it comes down to. And the problem is that, for political reasons, he can't, but he's hoping to find ways to access this status anyway, and one of the ways that he hopes to find this is by participating in mating flights.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is where it's very interesting that Mirrim, who we met in Dragonquest as Brekke’s foster-daughter, Impresses a green dragon. This happens in Dragondrums, but here we're just sort of presented with it as, like, everyone knows that this has happened. So she Impresses a green dragon, and I personally end up feeling like the reason McCaffrey makes that choice in this time and in this context is because if Mirrim was not there as a female green dragonrider, Jaxom's repeated interest in or curiosity about, temptation of, the idea of Ruth flying in a green mating flight would be very explicitly an interest in or curiosity about then having sex with a man. And because Mirrim is now there as a female green dragonrider, she can be put in that narrative position.

Lleu: Yeah, I don't disagree, although I also think it's a bit more complicated than that. But I definitely think that one of the functions of Mirrim Impressing a green dragon — something that we are told about at the beginning of this book but is only shown in Dragondrums, so that's a little fun timeline thing — is in part, yes, to open this possibility. The thing that gives me pause… So, Jaxom sees the meeting flight begin:

Lleu: “With a challenging snarl, the green dragon was airborne, the blues and browns after her while she repeated her taunting challenge. Quicker, lighter than any of her prospective mates, her facility strengthened by her sexual readiness, she achieved a conspicuous distance before the first male had become airborne. Then they were all after her. On the killing ground, their riders closed into a knot about the green’s rider. All too quickly, challenger and pursuers dwindled to specks in the sky. The riders half-ran, half-stumbled to the Lower Caverns and the chamber reserved there.

Lleu: “Jaxom had never witnessed a mating flight of dragons. He swallowed, trying to moisten his dry throat. He felt heart and blood thudding and a tension that he usually experienced only as he held Corana’s slender body against him. He suddenly wondered which dragon had flown Mirrim’s Path, which rider had—”

Lleu: And then that line of thought breaks off. So, on the one hand, yes, he is thinking about Mirrim in connection with this. But also, it's not, “which dragon had flown Mirrim’s Path.” His attention is not on “Mirrim’s Path” — his attention is on “which rider had.” In a weird way, he's not thinking of himself as the person whose dragon is having sex with Path, and so who is then having sex with Mirrim. He's thinking about himself as Mirrim —

Tequila Mockingbird: “Jaxom thought of the skyborne beasts. Unwillingly he thought of their riders in the inner room, linked to their dragons in an emotional struggle that was resolved in a strengthening and fusing of the links between dragons and riders. Jaxom thought of Mirrim. And of Corana.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So it's interesting both in what it says about Jaxom’s sexuality, or his interest in sexuality, but also in the way that it describes a mating flight as being a strengthening of the bond between a dragon and a rider.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which, yes, in the sense that they are more close — what we see during a meeting flight really is that the Venn diagram overlap telepathically becomes more of a circle.

Tequila Mockingbird: They are subjectively experiencing the world as a dragon, rather than as a person, in those moments. So, yes, it is in that way of strengthening of the bonds. But that's also an interesting way to describe it? But also Jaxom has never experienced it. So I might see that as more of Jaxom just making assumptions about, “Okay. Here's a way that I could be more of a dragonrider, even closer to Ruth, understand it better, this thing that I do not have access to and have never had access to.”

Lleu: Yeah. And I think that's really a lot of what's going on here in a way that is kind of partly about queerness and the prospect of queerness, although that's also something Jaxom is explicitly afraid of and anxious about, and also partly just a like kind of a gender and status thing. Jaxom wants to be a “real dragonrider,” like —

Lleu: — F’lar, like N’ton, like all of these straight men who ride bronze dragons, and is frustrated that he can't be that.

Lleu: “With a groan, he sprang on Ruth’s neck, fleeing the emotional atmosphere of Fort Weyr, trying to flee from his sudden realization of what he had probably always known about riders but had only this very morning assimilated.”

Lleu: So he’s also, as someone who grew up in a Hold, surrounded by the homophobia that we know exists in Holds, is alarmed at this prospect and is disturbed by the idea of this, but also what happens then is that Jaxom tells Ruth, “Take me to the lake.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I think we need to zoom out for a moment and talk about Corana first.

Tequila Mockingbird: The Corana who has been mentioned a couple of times in these scenes is a young woman whose father is a smallholder that owes feudal allegiance to Jaxom. And he initially starts flirting with her because he wants an excuse to be away from the Hold and away from the supervision of his guardians, so that he can try and teach Ruth to firestone and breathe fire and be a “real dragon.”

Lleu: Which I also think is very funny, because the only reason Jaxom begins, textually, to really explore heterosexuality is as an excuse to give other people to distract them from the fact that he's teaching Ruth to do dragon stuff.

Lleu: Yeah, when the prospect of Jaxom, you know, hooking up with someone more consistently and maybe having a child with someone — which, wild things to say to an 18-year-old — is first brought up, it’s Menolly, who we met in Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, teasing him about it, and Jaxom being, like, offended by the possibility that he might be having sex. And Menolly does fairly explicitly ask him, like, “Jaxom, do you masturbate?” Which I… I don't know why this scene happens. I mean, I do know why this scene happens. It's because the whole original trilogy is about the management of sex and sexuality. There's other stuff going on too obviously. But that's clearly what McCaffrey is most interested in and most consistently interested in. Anyway.

Tequila Mockingbird: He meets this young woman and does end up picking up a sexual relationship with her, in this very droit de seigneur kind of a way, and it brings us to an interesting facet of the world-building here, where we know that Hold morality or Hold sexual mores are a lot more conservative than Weyr sexual mores, and you're not supposed to have recreational sex as a woman. Unless, it seems, you're doing it specifically with a Lord Holder —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in which case it's totally fine and normal. And it isn't clear to me whether the idea is then, okay, and then Corana is living in Jaxom's household and having his children, and just isn't married to him, or whether it's, like, yeah, and then she can go on and get married and have her own nuclear family, or whatever, and just also raise his child. Because it very much is fine, socially, for this to happen, and we get a great scene when Jaxom first shows up right when her mom is totally cool with this, and is like, “Oh, yes, my daughter is down by the river. *nudge nudge wink wink*.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I don't think that there's any thought from their perspective that Corana’s gonna marry Jaxom.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s clearly socially, politically, economically advantageous to them if she ends up having his kid.

Lleu: Yeah. And we see some of the immediate benefits of their relationship: when Jaxom comes back to be like, “Hey is Corana around?” for the first time, he brings with him some extra seed for their fields, which it turns out that they —

Lleu: — needed, or at least wanted, and hadn't felt like they could ask for, and Jaxom only brought them really as an excuse, but also…

Tequila Mockingbird: But it does seem like there's a little bit of quid pro quo going around here.

Lleu: Yeah, there's some immediate material benefit to them even before Jaxom and Corana have kissed for the first time, just from his interest. We also should mention something that comes up very briefly in Dragonquest.

Lleu: And, frankly, I don’t think that McCaffrey considered the full implications of this. I think she was kind of still thinking like, yeah, this is generic medieval feudalism. At the beginning of Dragonquest, as Master Robinton is reflecting on the state of the world, by way of giving us a summary of the events of Dragonflight and telling us how things have changed in the last 8 years, he does refer to Lord Groghe’s feudal clients as his “chattels,” quote-unquote, which implies a much stronger feudal relationship than I had previously thought of, or than I generally think of Pern as having.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because there is this very libertarian vibe, this idea of complete autonomy that the whole point is, well, you're a Holder, and even if you're not a Lord Holder, you have complete autonomy in your Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: But the idea is that you are very independent from the higher authority until, okay, there's Thread falling and you need them to shelter you for the duration of that Threadfall.

Lleu: Yeah. And even when you are sheltered and whatnot, you have rights —

Lleu: Except that we also do get moments throughout the series — not just this use of chattel, but also at several other points where, for example, I think it is in this book and not in Dragonquest, Lord Groghe, at one point is like, “It's not right to turn a man out when he's been a loyal Holder for 20 years, or whatever, and his father was, too.” It's like, okay, but that implies that you actually do have the power to do that. You are —

Lleu: There's no actual political structures that prevent you from just summarily kicking someone out. Which raises a whole lot of questions about how consensual Jaxom and Corana's relationship is because, on the one hand, it does seem like she's genuinely attracted to him.

Lleu: Right? She is expressing attraction to him before he even vaguely considers the possibility. She seems to be a more or less enthusiastic participant in all of their sexual encounters. But, you know…

Tequila Mockingbird: I think there's also, from a, from a very practical standpoint, maybe she's thinking of this as, “Okay, sex with a Lord Holder is really good for me economically —”

Tequila Mockingbird: “— and at least this one is kind of my age and clean. He's not some 50-year-old dude.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think there is a broader context in which she's not making a sexual decision in a vacuum —

Tequila Mockingbird: — right? She's not just deciding whether she wants to have sex. It's in a political context. And a framework that I think is useful for talking about this, although it's not really designed for this, is the distinction between enthusiastic and willing consent, which I believe was originally developed on the internet for use by ace folks but then has been also used to talk about sex work and other contexts, in which, again, you might not be giving enthusiastic consent, but you are intentionally giving willing consent. You're saying, “I've decided on purpose that I want to have sex with this person, and maybe it's not because that sex is pleasurable and desirable to me qua itself, but it is because I think this is the right choice for me right now.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that is very relevant as we come back to that scene we were talking about, where there's this green mating flight, and Jaxom is feeling very uncomfortable, and he leaves, and he tells Ruth he wants to go to the lake, and it specifically is like, okay, he wants to jump in the lake. It's a cold lake. The quote is, “immerse himself in the cold waters, and let that icy shock cure his body and chill the torment in his mind.” So he's very much like, “Oh, this is making me feel uncomfortable. I want to go cool off.” And Ruth instead, brings him to Corana.

Lleu: Yeah. So Ruth drops Jaxom off at Corana. Jaxom's like, “Ruth, I told you to take me to the lake,” and Ruth says, “It is better for you to be here right now. The fire lizard says the girl is in the upper field.”[2] So, at this point, is severely affected by the telepathically-projected dragon horniness and cannot really control his actions. He arrives; Corana is there, and Corana's like, “I'm working, Jaxom,” and Jaxom's like, “I'm too dragon-horny to respond to this,” kisses her and starts assaulting her essentially. And then at this point, either from Jaxom's “innate telepathy abilities” or mediated through Ruth — it's not entirely clear — Corana also is apparently affected by the wild dragon-horniness, and they have wild, lustful sex.

Tequila Mockingbird: “Somewhere in the back of his mind was a green dragon, shrieking her defiance. Somewhere, too close to his need, was that vision of dragonriders in an inner room, waiting until the green dragon had been captured by the fastest, the strongest or the smartest of her pursuers. But it was Corana he was holding in his arms, and Corana who was beginning to respond to his need.”

Lleu: “They were on the warm ground, the dampness of earth she had just hoed soft under his elbows and knees. The sun was warm on his buttocks as he tried to erase the memory of those riders half-stumbling toward the inner room, and the mocking taunt of a green dragon in flight. He did not resist or deny Ruth’s familiar touch as his orgasm released the turmoil of body and mind.”

Lleu: So, he is explicitly, the whole time he and Corana are having wild dragon sex, thinking about two men having sex.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yup, that is, that is what happened. But I do think there's a conversation to be had here about consent, because it seems very clear that neither Jaxom nor Corana is 100% giving good consent; dubious, at best, consent here. And also I wouldn't say that Ruth is intentionally making a conscious decision to abrogate their consent? I don't know that Ruth understands what sexual consent is.

Lleu: Yeah. Ruth understands what sex is, but he clearly doesn't have a real concept of consent. And also… dragons are still kind of animals. They don't really have a grasp of these kinds of moral questions.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. I don't know that any dragon really has a concept of sexual consent.

Lleu: I will say, though, that this does truly kill all of my appreciation of Ruth, this scene, because it's just so bad.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It's messy, definitely. [sigh] While I don't think that this was McCaffrey's intention, she does end up writing a commentary, or parallel, or idea that can be interestingly in dialogue with an asexual experience. And I can only, obviously, speak about my own specific asexual experience. But that anxiety felt very familiar to me, reading this. But I do feel like the — I was bringing most of that to the text, right? I don’t think that that is intended to be in the text —

Lleu: The last thing I want to flag, on this note — okay, sorry, two things. One: afterwards, we're told that Jaxom is relieved that Ruth did not participate, and towards the end of the novel there’s an explicit statement that Jaxom's like, “Thank god Ruth wasn't interested in mating flights so I didn't have to have sex with another man!” But also he does very much have a multi-page breakdown about the fact that Ruth's not interested in meeting immediately afterwards.

Tequila Mockingbird: “Jaxom was not pleased with himself. He was thoroughly disgusted and revolted by the way he had used Corana. The fact that she seemed to have matched what he had to admit was a violent lust dismayed him. Their relationship, once innocent pleasure, had somehow been sullied. He wasn’t at all certain that he cared to continue as her lover, an attitude that posed another unpleasant burden of guilt. One point in his favor, he had helped her finish the hoeing his importunity had interrupted. That way she’d not be in trouble with Fidello for shorting her task. The young grain was important. But he ought not to have taken Corana like that. Doing so was inexcusable.

Tequila Mockingbird: “She liked it very much. Ruth’s thought touched him so unexpectedly that Jaxom jerked straight.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Hmm! Well. So clearly Jaxom, is not feeling good about this experience in retrospect —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and some of that, I think, is this inherent misogyny of, like, Corana “shouldn't” have been sexually enthusiastic or it's “weird” that she was equally sexually enthusiastic. But some of it is, I think, his attempt to express emotionally, internally, that he didn't want to have that sex entirely, and he doesn't feel great about that.

Lleu: I agree. Nothing about this scene was good, and Jaxom can only rationalize that in the terms that are available to him which are (a) Corana shouldn't have been like that and (b) I shouldn't have done that, ’cause Pern does have some concept of consent. They do have an understanding of the idea of rape, etc. So it reflects well on Jaxom that he's uncomfortable with this situation.

Lleu: It also just is something that maybe he should have thought about before he started hooking up with this woman who he could kick out of her home if he were so inclined.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; yeah. And there's something to be said for the fact that I don't think you should actually give teenagers feudal authority over the lives of dozens, if not hundreds, of other people. I don't know that you should give anyone that authority, but I definitely think you shouldn't give 18-year-olds that authority.

Lleu: Yeah, I would agree with that. Alright, since we're talking about gender and sexuality, we gotta talk about Sharra.

Lleu: Sharra is the sister of Toric, the Holder who's governing Southern Hold. She is a healer; I believe she is at some point, if not in this book then in another book, explicitly stated to be a journeyman healer, so she has rank independently of her association with her brother and is a professional.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we do meet her also in Dragondrums, and what we see of her in Dragondrums, and at her first appearance in this book, is in the context of her as a healer.

Tequila Mockingbird: She's gathering wild plants as part of her job in Dragondrums. She shows up here when Jaxom and Menolly get firehead, which is some specific illness that you are only exposed to on the Southern Continent, and she is caring for him medically, and she seems really competent and kind of interesting, and a little bit sarcastic and she has an authority; she has an interesting voice —

Lleu: Well, also, as soon as Jaxom hears her voice he's like, “Her face couldn't possibly be as beautiful as her voice. No one's could,” and is taking her hand and kissing her hand. And it's like, “Oh, my god! Where did this come from?” And part of the answer is, Jaxom is becoming exactly the person that he's supposed to be. Corana was not a suitable long-term romantic partner; Shara, whose brother is the Holder of a politically important Hold, is a much more suitable romantic partner for Jaxom, someone that he could marry.

Tequila Mockingbird: And there is this very old-fashioned — it reminds me of 19th-century opera, where you fall in love with the peasant girl, and then, gasp, it turns out she's secretly a princess, and it all works out. Or, you fall in love with a real peasant girl or sex worker, and she conveniently dies of tuberculosis, so that you can then marry a woman in your social class. This tidy impulse.

Lleu: Yes; I want to note that after Jaxom gets sick and starts recovering and meets Sharra, Corana never appears again in the book. She is only mentioned once, when Jaxom is like, “Hmm! I've got to find some time to be alone with Sharra, or else go back to Corana” — i.e., once when Jaxom is particularly horny.

Lleu: That's the only subsequent appearance of Corana. We don't even get the resolution of, like, Jaxom had promised her a fire lizard egg at some point. We don't even get to see Jaxom drop off a fire lizard egg and break up with her, or anything like that. Nope.

Lleu: She deserves it. So Sharra is professional, interesting, but also is The Love Interest. And unfortunately, the result of this is that Sharra… becomes rapidly much less interesting.

Lleu: She spends the beginning of the section of the novel that she's in extolling the virtues of Southern, being dismissive about People from the North, life in the North.

Tequila Mockingbird: About Ruatha specifically; she's kind of like, “Ugh.”

Lleu: And also about dragonriders. All things that apply to Jaxom. And by the end of the book, she apparently is willing to abandon the Southern Hold, abandon the Southern Continent, in fact, abandon her professional career, and move in with Jaxom in Ruatha and be his wife and have kids, and that's her life now.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it's not even that she has to make that choice, right? It's not even a, “Oh, I love you, but this is complicated, but I guess I love you more!” It's just never brought up. He's just like, “Oh, I want to marry you,” and she's like, “Oh, my brother will never allow it.” And then her brother pisses her off by trying to prevent her physically from marrying him, and she runs away and is like, “Ugh, I never want to see him again! I never want to see Southern again!” And it’s just — where did this come from? It felt so clearly like an overwrite of the characterization she had been given up to that point to suit the narrative convenience.

Tequila Mockingbird: Lessa and Menolly are complicated, interesting, fully developed characters.

Tequila Mockingbird: But then Brekke and Sharra really, other than the fact that Sharra is the feisty one and Brekke is the nice one… they're both healers, and they're both love interests, and that's really all that they get to do. Brekke gets to be sad.

Tequila Mockingbird: But there’s just all of these female characters who start out and look like they could be really interesting, and then ultimately get reduced to this very one-note narrative cog in a wheel, and it's disappointing.

Lleu: Yes, it's extremely frustrating. I do think that Sharra gets to participate in some of the fun science stuff that happens later on, in later books, at least. So that's some consolation.

Lleu: We’ll come back to that, yeah. That brings us to the end of the book. Jaxom gets really into archaeology. It's great to have hobbies.

Lleu: So they're exploring the Southern Continent, and in particular Master Robinton has been getting reports from Piemur, who has been wandering around the Southern Continent for the past few years, mapping the coastline, and also from some of Toric’s Holders who have been finding these abandoned sites of ruins and signs of earlier human habitation on the Southern Continent, and Robinton’s like, “I want to know more,” and they find it. They find a lot of it, in fact. They find, among other things, the shuttles that brought humans from the three round metal objects in the sky, which, it turns out are not stars, but are, in fact, geosynchronous, stationary, orbiting round metal objects of some kind. I wonder what those could be!

Lleu: They find the shuttles that brought humans from those to the surface 2,500 years ago and are able now, finally, to start kind of piecing together or starting to make sense of aspects of Pern’s history that had previously been opaque to them.

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is, I think, a really fun plot element, because, as readers, we have the dramatic irony — we know what's going on. We're sitting there going, “It's a spaceship guys! It's a spaceship!” as the characters are piecing this together, and it very much also lays the blueprint for what the rest of the books are gonna be talking about, because Robinton is now semi-retired to the Southern Continent. They build him this house because of his health scare.

Lleu: He has to go south to recuperate. And then, so, they build him this nice new mini-Hold, Cove Hold, where he can rest and also, as it turns out, where he can supervise the archaeological explorations, although he is frustratingly unable to participate in most of them. One interesting aspect of this is, there's a kind of new tension that's introduced here between, on the one hand, everyone who is in the Southern Continent being at least somewhat interested in archaeology — they want to find out what happened; they want to find out where humans on Pern came from — and, on the other hand, the fact that Pern has been undergoing its own technological development over the last 2,500 years. So, they lost a bunch of technology and they've been slowly working back to this level. So we have, for example, the Star-smith, i.e., astronomer, Wansor, who has developed improved telescope technology based on some things that they found at Benden Weyr. Fandarel, the Mastermith, has been developing a telegraph. So there are all of these new technologies, some of which have been helped along by archaeological discoveries, and some of which are truly just new inventions that functionally are rediscoveries but are based on Pern’s own internal technological and scientific development. And some people are not interested in the archaeology at all, and are more interested in that. And in particular, I think it's interesting that while everyone is meeting and discussing these new archaeological discoveries, the person who specifically says, “I don't really care about any of that. Like, we're doing fine. We live in the present; doesn't matter what happened 2,000 years ago,” is R’mart, one of the Oldtimer Weyrleaders.

Lleu: And he specifically is like, “You taught us, F’lar, that we need to live in the now. There's no point like trying to live in the past.” And now, suddenly, F’lar and Robinton and everyone are put in the position of having to be like, “No, actually, the past does matter! We should care about our history and traditions and all of these things!” So I think it's a really interesting inversion, and also it's an interesting tension that I think maybe underlies some of the things that happen in the future, where, on the one hand, there are these new technological developments, and also a lot of new technological developments that come out of the archaeology, and they don't necessarily mesh. A lot of the new things that come from archaeology lead to these kinds of world-shattering progressive, or potentially progressive, anyway, developments — this new sense of like, “Oh, we are like we came from somewhere else. When the ancient records say, ‘When mankind first came to Pern,’ they truly mean we came from another world. That's wild.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is interesting the juxtaposition here, because, yes, that is coming from archaeological discovery, but it feels much more futuristic, because —

Tequila Mockingbird: — it's remembering the past that to us as a reader is a future.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it's this fascinating look at, “Oh, yeah, Pern’s development is in a lot of ways backwards,” because they started high tech and with women's rights and things —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and then regressed to this faux feudalism and are now trying to figure out whether they are going to progress back to where they started or not, in some interesting ways.

Lleu: I think that creates an interesting tension between all of these archaeological discoveries, which feel, on the one hand, to some people in the world very like backward-looking and useless. But function as this massive leap forward —

Lleu: — both technologically and also in a bunch of social areas, versus, on the other hand, the slower development of new technologies that lends itself much more directly to the kinds of conservative social control that Pernese society is built around.

Tequila Mockingbird: It reminded me in some interesting ways of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books — which I've spoken about before, because I think they are clearly inspired by or in dialogue with Pern in some ways; they were written in the ’80s — in which again you have a… Earth Colony that loses contact and regresses to feudalism, and then catches back up, in that case because they reopen contact, but it's interesting to me that Bujold isn't actually super interested in the process of discovery. She jumps to 40 years later and is much more engaged with the ways in which that world of Barrayar is trying to make those jumps in social progressiveness and in social technology, of, “Okay, we have this feudal patriarchal structure, and now women have absolutely control over their reproduction,” and how does that suddenly set off a bomb in the middle of this world, and how do people try and manage that or react to that, in a way that McCaffrey isn't really doing. Even though they are achieving this technology, that conservative social structure is a lot more ascendant here, and a lot more prevalent and sort of —

Tequila Mockingbird: — lingers throughout, I would say, most, if not all, of the series. But we'll get there!

Lleu: Yeah. My instinct right there was to be like, “And I'm looking forward to it!” I don't know if I actually am. But we'll see.

Tequila Mockingbird: We'll have to decide once we reread them. But I think they are not going to be good, and as a result, if this made you curious, don't — don't read them and don't read The White Dragon. Really don't.

Lleu: My recommendations for this time around are, one, Samuel R. Delany's Nova, which is many things, but, among other things, a bit of a coming-of-age story about a protagonist who, at the beginning of the book, doesn't really know who he is, where he's going, what he's going to do, and by the end of the book has slightly more idea who he is, where he's going, what he's going to do. It's also just a really solid classic science fiction novel. It's pretty short. It is, I think, a great introduction point to Delany's work. Delany did write what I consider to be the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Nova is a lot of fun and I think might scratch at least a little bit of the coming-of-age itch. And there's even some wild politics going on in the background. My other recommendation is a little different, but thinking about space archaeology, Leigh Brackett’s short story “The Road to Sinharat,” which is in her collection The Coming of the Terrans, is about a mid-century before we'd fully grasped that Mars is not inhabitable, and certainly not inhabited, vision of Mars as a kind of panoply of ancient civilizations, some of which exist into the present. There are a bunch of different humanoid species. Interestingly, within the book, “humans” only ever refers to people from Mars. People from Earth are called exclusively “Terrans,” so there's some interesting inversions going on there. Anyway. “The Road to Sinharat” is a, I think, really interesting and in some ways, I think, quite ahead of its time, although it's still kind of a white savior narrative, story about this tension between past and present, and what kinds of understandings we get from the past versus the impulse to adopt or to impose new technologies, and thinking about colonialism, or de facto colonialism, in some unexpectedly interesting and critical ways for a short story that's from, like, 1961, I think, something like that. So I really enjoyed it. The rest of the collection is… has some ups and downs. Some of it is a little more critical, and some of it is a little like, “Oh, this is just like classic kind of racist pulp planetary romance.” But this story in particular, I think, is really good, and would maybe pair interestingly if some of the archaeology stuff here has been of interest to you.

Tequila Mockingbird: And for my recommendation I'm sticking more to the coming-of-age story and would point you towards Anger Is a Gift by Mark Oshiro, which is just a contemporary story about what it's like to be a queer person of color in Oakland and to be resisting police brutality, falling in love, and growing up in that context.

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

[2] This line is verbatim from the novel; the preceding is a paraphrase.