Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #7: Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern (1983)

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.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I’m Tequila Mockingbird. And I did actually cry, rereading this one.

Lleu: Yeah, so today, we’re talking about Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, which I also cried while rereading. Moreta is a prequel, and it’s set during the Sixth Pass. So just under a thousand years before the main series books, and it follows the title character, who is the Weyrwoman of Fort Weyr — so, the rider of the senior queen dragon at Fort Weyr — as she, and everyone else on the planet, deals with the impact of a flu pandemic. Which has swept across the continent, killing, in some places, entire Holds, in other places 90% of the population. A few areas are untouched by the plague, but much of the planet is severely affected. Moreta, and a cast of supporting characters — so, Alessan, the Lord Holder of Ruatha Hold; Capiam, the Masterhealer. Uh. Who else are major characters…

Lleu: Yeah. So, K’lon, who’s a blue rider who’s one of the first victims of the plague, but also one of the first to recover from it. B’lerion, who’s a bronze writer from High Reaches Weyr, and a few other people are involved in a mass vaccination campaign to prevent a second wave by rapidly vaccinating the entire surviving population of Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s crucial that they are doing both the humans and also the horses.

Lleu: Yes, because runner beasts are also affected by this flu, which came to the Northern Continent, where everyone lives, by way of a feline of some kind who was retrieved from the Southern Continent by some fishermen who should not have been there. Due to some Weyr politicking, Moreta is enlisted to help deliver the vaccines in the area where she grew up, in Keroon, and because her dragon, Orlith, has recently laid a clutch of eggs and refuses to leave the Hatching Ground, Moreta is flying on Holth, the dragon of Leri, who is the recently retired former senior queen rider, Weyrwoman, at Fort Weyr. After a long day of traveling back in time in order to make sure that all of their deliveries arrive in a timely manner and everyone can be vaccinated promptly, Moreta and Holth go between one last time but both are too tired to clearly visualize their destination, and they never emerge. And then the novel ends with a really harrowing scene with K’lon watching Leri at the moment when Holth dies, and then with the hatching of Orlith’s eggs, and Orlith and Leri leaving together to go between themselves and die.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where has this been all along, Anne? If you could write books like this, what were you doing in the last three books?

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s frustrating more from a plotting and conceptualized sense. I don’t know that I think this book is better prose than other books in this series, or better from a craft perspective. It’s got a little tighter of a plot, because it’s pretty contained, it’s in a pretty short span of time. It just covers the pandemic and then the aftermath and the vaccination ending with Moreta’s death. It’s a fairly tight narrative.

Tequila Mockingbird: But, just conceptually, she’s doing so many things that are so much more interesting and so much more adventurous and transgressive than she has been so far in the series.

Lleu: Yeah, among other things, there is a romance — Moreta and Alessan, the Lord Holder of Ruatha, are briefly involved — but obviously it doesn’t go anywhere, because Moreta dies.

Tequila Mockingbird: And even if she hadn’t died, there’s a mutual understanding that he has to get married to someone who is not a dragonrider and have kids and be a Lord Holder. And she is going to keep having at least sexual relationships with dragonriders when Orlith rises to mate, even if she does not have an emotional, romantic relationship with them. And that’s also what’s really interesting and transgressive here, is that Moreta is not in love with her Weyrleader, the dragonrider whose bronze flew Orlith. She kind of dislikes him!

Tequila Mockingbird: And we meet some of her past sexual partners, and she’s like, “Yeah, he was nice.” But it’s very much not, I would say, a planetary romance in the way that the adult books, definitely, have been.

Lleu: And it’s a really striking counterpoint to the emphasis on monogamous heterosexual relationships. Moreta is serially monogamous, yes, but she’s not looking for that kind of committed, long-term relationship that Lessa and F’lar have, or that Menolly and Sebell develop, or that F’nor and Brekke have — none of that. That’s just not her thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: She is emotionally committed to her dragon, and truly that’s it. She likes Alessan a lot, but she doesn’t regret Orlith for a moment.

Lleu: Yeah. And she wouldn’t want to be with Alessan forever, is my impression, anyway.

Tequila Mockingbird: To me, there was a little bit of a shadow of the more traditional book that could have been, because we are told that Alessan was supposed to be a dragonrider. He had been Searched, but he was the heir, and so his father was kind of like, “Eh, you can’t take that one,” and they’re like, “Oh, that’s fair.” They do point out, like, “Oh, he would have impressed a bronze…” And it sort of felt like the shadow of the book that wasn’t, where Alessan is this bronze dragonrider and they can have this more sort of narratively traditional romance arc or relationship.

Lleu: That’s true. That’s interesting. Hm. I absolutely think that if Alessan were a bronze rider, yes, they would be in a committed, long-term, monogamous, heterosexual relationship. Since he’s not, their different experiences have shaped both of them, and I think, even leaving aside the political exigencies, Moreta just doesn’t have that…

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s already in a committed emotional relationship — with a dragon.

Lleu: Yeah, and even the weyrmate relationship — there’s no kind of formalized marriages in the Weyr, so being weyrmates with someone represents a longer-term, or somewhat longer-term, anyway, commitment.

Lleu: Both sleeping in the same place, your dragons are sleeping in the same place — but also there are references to people changing weyrmates, so that’s still not necessarily a permanent relationship, even if for the characters in the series prior to this book it has been.

Lleu: Anyway, my point is just, even if she’d survived, I don’t think Moreta and Alessan’s relationship would have continued, and I think not just for political reasons.

Lleu: Alessan’s looking for more than it seemed to me that Moreta was looking for, and I think if they were both dragon riders, it would maybe be different, in part because Alessan would also have his dragon —

Tequila Mockingbird: See, I personally would say that if she had survived he still would have married someone else, possibly even Nerilka, and then they also would have had a relationship. Maybe not forever, maybe not all the time, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: I felt like she was pretty into him. And Orlith thought he was cute, which definitely helped.

Tequila Mockingbird: It felt like in the previous books McCaffrey has talked the talk of, “Oh, the Weyrs have these non-monogamous…” and now it feels like she’s actually walking the walk in this book, in a way that was really fun.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think it is worth pointing out that this is the point at which McCaffrey is a lot more financially stable. She has earned enough money to build her own home in Ireland, and, in fact, this book is, sort of unusually, signed off as from “Dragonhold, 1983.” And so I think it is interesting to consider: is she feeling more comfortable being transgressive or boundary-pushing because she now is not like a single parent trying to earn a living in publishing in a way that many women were not doing but now both she has a home, she has an established reputation, her books are selling, I assume, pretty solidly, and there’s also just a lot more women in the speculative fiction and genre fiction scene.[1]

Lleu: Yeah. It feels markedly different, and surely the financial aspect has to be a factor in that. She’s no longer writing the book because she needs to fill out a contract, for example, as was the case with both The White Dragon and Dragondrums.

Lleu: So it does feel like this is kind of the book that she wanted to write. At least the book that she wanted to write when she wrote it.

Lleu: It is fascinating as a transition point in the series. In the Harper Hall trilogy, and the quote-unquote “original trilogy,” ending with Dragondrums, and The White Dragon, we’re ending with this sense that Pern is balanced on the edge of something new.

Lleu: They’re doing archaeology. They’re rediscovering their history. And they’re also in the middle of, slowly and painstakingly, a bunch of other broad social changes. And then we get this book, which is set — I’m looking actually at the timeline in the back of mine, and it says 903 years before the beginning of the Ninth Pass. So this is our first real glimpse of that history beyond the little prologues at the beginning of the books that summarize the early history of Pern in the development of Pernese society.

Lleu: And here I think we really see, again, she’s back to the questions that she posed at the beginning of Dragonflight: When is legend legend, when is myth myth? We see people arguing about this history that they still very hazily have, but records are vague —

Lleu: — and there’s disagreement about things. For example, there’s a ongoing argument throughout the book between Capiam, the Masterhealer, and Tirone, the Masterharper. Capiam believes that there were two “Crossings,” with a capital C. The Second Crossing was the move from the Southern Continent to the Northern Continent, and the First Crossing was the arrival on Pern. And Tirone disagrees and thinks there was only one Crossing from the Southern Continent to the Northern Continent. They don’t really go into detail about this argument, but clearly this is an ongoing dispute and something that is sort of more generally disputed in this scholarly environment. But, crucially, in the Ninth Pass they don’t know about any of that.

Lleu: Yeah. And one of the things that this book is interested in is how information is lost.

Lleu: When 90 to 100% of the population is dying of this flu pandemic, you’re losing a lot of information. You’re losing a lot of knowledge, both local knowledge and also historical knowledge, and also ability to interpret historical knowledge even when things are written down. So, for example, Capiam discovers or remembers vaccination based on a lecture that he heard 30 years ago. That he had made some notes during. But if he had died of the plague — because he remembered this while he was recovering from the plague —

Lleu: — they wouldn’t have been able to vaccinate, because no one would have remembered that this was possible.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s worth asking, yeah, was he the only one at that lecture who’s still living at that point? Because part of the danger of a pandemic like this is that you lose a lot of Healers, because they’re trying to help people, and we are repeatedly reminded in this book that many people who nursed the sick die themselves and that that is a loss that significantly affects the Craft and many skilled Craftspeople. She chose to go back into her own mythology in a cool way, because we have actually heard about Moreta in one of the Harper Hall books: we get the fact that the “Ballad of Moreta’s Ride” is a known history song. And I think that’s always, to me, a really cool and interesting way to do tragedy, is to make it a prequel —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because then you have both the dramatic irony of, a reader who is really closely attuned to the world-building knows going into this book that it doesn’t go well for Moreta.

Lleu: Yeah, because, in fact, we get a very detailed version of the “Ballad of Moreta’s Ride,” a kind of prose summary of it, as Menolly is conducting the chorus at the Harper Hall during Threadfall in Dragonsinger.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s kind of a fun place, then, for McCaffrey to go back and build out this world and enrich the culture of Pern, which — I think we talked about this at some point earlier — doesn’t seem to have a lot of fiction. Almost all of the narrative art that we see is history.

Tequila Mockingbird: And Moreta is actually a very good story, as we have been experiencing when rereading it. So it’s easier emotionally to handle a tragedy as prequel, because you know what comes next. You know that the Ruathan bloodline and their runner beasts do recover in the end, and that Moreta is going to be remembered and heroized, and that maybe softens the blow or makes it a more interesting emotional experience. Other similar works that have done it is Rogue One, the Star Wars film —

Tequila Mockingbird: — which is very much relying on that emotional resonance to make the tragedy more compelling.

Tequila Mockingbird: Also the Last Herald-Mage books, by Mercedes Lackey. It’s something that I find particularly emotionally effective.

Lleu: Yeah, this one in particular, I think especially because the summary in Dragonsinger is so detailed, she did create some problems for herself —

Lleu: — the next book, Nerilka’s Story, which is a companion novel to Moreta.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s some flexibility there, because the “Ballad of Moreta’s Ride” is a story —

Tequila Mockingbird: — it doesn’t necessarily have to be completely accurate to what happened.

Lleu: — is that essentially Tirone, the Masterharper who composed it, was requested to memorialize Moreta in this specific way and to elide certain things that were potentially inconvenient.

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm; that is also a really interesting look at the role of Harpers as history-keepers but also history-shapers.

Lleu: As they’re developing their vaccination plan, Capiam says, “We need to ha-, this needs to happen fast, and the only way for it to happen fast is for dragons to go back in time and deliver all of the vaccines on the same morning.” And every dragonrider that he proposes this to is like, “How the fuck do you know that dragons can go back in time? That’s supposed to be a secret that only bronze dragonriders and queen riders know.” And Capiam says, “Well, it’s in the Healer Hall records, because, of course, healers bred dragons,” which…

Lleu: A little dubious, but that’s sort of the received wisdom at this point 1,500 years after humans arrived on Pern. And we’re told that Capiam has agreed, as kind of a condition of going through with this plan, to conveniently “lose” or “misplace” the records that contain this information, that dragons can travel through time.

Tequila Mockingbird: On one hand, they are so sad about the loss of expertise and the loss of knowledge, and they’re talking about it and worrying about it. And, on the other hand, they’re blithely contributing to it, because we, as the reader, know, yeah, that knowledge gets forgotten, not just by the Healer Hall, but by the dragonriders, because when Lessa rediscovers it in the Ninth Pass, she rediscovers it organically, and accidentally. So clearly somewhere along the way —

Tequila Mockingbird: — bronze and queen riders have also forgotten this, which is fascinating. I have to assume it happens after all of the Oldtimers jump forward to Benden Weyr, because if everyone is on the planet, it seems weird that they would all lose that.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I could see Benden Weyr, especially when you get down to, like, one queen for several generations, that seems like it could get lost more easily.

Lleu: Yeah. I’m thinking about it logistically — the Benden Weyrleader is the only person who attends the meeting with Lessa and co. at Fort Weyr.

Lleu: It makes conceptual sense, now that we’ve read Moreta, to think that part of this whole arrangement was that he was instructed to either tell people or not tell people, so my assumption now is that at this point the Benden Weyrleader explicitly told people not to pass this information on to new bronze and queen riders.

Lleu: Because if your goal is, nobody can know what happened, you have to make sure nobody can know what happened.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that feeds into something I wanted to talk about, this fatalistic attitude to time travel that we see —

Tequila Mockingbird: Where a significant portion of this book, as you mentioned, is engaged with time travel, and who knows that the dragons can do it, and all of that. But they never even propose, “Oh, if only we could time travel and stop the pandemic! If only we could time travel and save some of these lives and stop them from bringing the feline back, or warn people earlier.” That’s not even suggested, which is really interesting, because it seems to indicate to me that they are so fully aware of closed-loop time travel, the idea that you can’t change anything that has quote-unquote “already happened.”

Lleu: Yeah. K’lon, the blue rider, who is a POV character for I think two segments of this, has independently discovered the ability to travel through time while attempting to visit his weyrmate, a male green rider at Igen Weyr. And he is explicitly told, “You have to be extremely careful. The reason we don’t tell people about this is because it’s dangerous.”

Lleu: Specifically, we’re told you could “meet yourself coming or going,” in a way that suggests that this has happened in the past.

Lleu: And they know what the consequences of it would be, and that it’s bad.

Tequila Mockingbird: It must be truly awful, because we also noted, while reading this, that there continues to be a blithe disregard for the fact that several teenage boys die every time you have a new batch of dragonriders, because they mess up going between.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, so how much worse would time travel deaths be? If the real risk is just that you’ll mess it up and die, that’s not so bad, ’cause you’re so chill about that happening. They’re just like, “Oh, yeah, it does bum out the dragons when that happens; such a shame.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Rather than being sincerely stricken by the death of these teenagers. So clearly they must feel like whatever would happen if you met yourself would be much worse than that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you pointed out, we do get a little bit of a very creepy hint, because in the course of trying to make the vaccinations, Moreta and her merry band do end up time traveling forward six months to pick needlethorns so that they’ll have enough, at the time that they’re ripe again. And at that point Moreta is already dead and she feels this weird euphoria, this dissociation, the whole time she’s in the future there.

Lleu: And then when she comes back both her dragon and Holth, Leri’s dragon, are freaking out because they’re like, “Where were you? We couldn’t feel you. We couldn’t touch you. We couldn’t sense you.” And we know from Dragonflight and some later books that dragons’ awareness of their riders and of other people and other dragons does, in fact, extend some distance through time. Ramoth is able to sense Canth and company when they’re ten years back in time in Dragonflight.

Lleu: So what I now have to conclude is that that is possible, in some way, because either dragon or rider is alive in that timeframe.

Lleu: Such that, after Moreta’s dead, Orlith can’t feel her if Moreta goes into that time.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and also that Orlith is dead in that future time.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it could be that the way it works is that Orlith is linking up with Orlith’s own future self, normally, or past self, to have that sense, and Orlith doesn’t have a future self there.

Lleu: Yeah. That was…a lot to a lot to realize as I was rereading it; I was like, “Oh, my god! No wonder she feels bizarre!”

Lleu: And she doesn’t fully register it at the time, but she’s not, in that moment, connected to her dragon.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. To me that was almost more effective tragedy than the actual scene of her death. The scene after her death at the hatching — that is sad; I cried. But I think in terms of effectively giving us the horror of her death —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that scene picking needlethorn was more effective to me than the actual final flight.

Lleu: I wonder, would it have been as effective if I hadn’t pointed out that realization beforehand?

Tequila Mockingbird: I think so, because I did know she was gonna die going in.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’d already read it. I think it definitely doesn’t if you don’t know she’s gonna die.

Tequila Mockingbird: But if you read the Harper Hall books and you remember them, you know coming into this story that Moreta isn’t gonna make it.

Lleu: Yeah. And regardless of the euphoria and the dragon question, knowing that she’s gonna die, it is heartbreaking. They travel forward in time and it’s this beautiful, sunny fall day in tropical Ista. And they’re all joking around, Moreta and Alessan have sex for the first time, and they’re all genuinely happy in this moment.

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re like, “We figured out. We did it. This is gonna save everybody.” Ugh. Ugh!

Lleu: The other specific thing that I wanted to draw attention to on the tragedy front is the scene immediately after Moreta and Holth die.

Lleu: Again, like the queens’ mating flight in Dragonquest, for me, one of those, “Oh, my god! I understand that there’s something viscerally wrong here, in a way that I have no real-world frame of reference for.”

Lleu: Which is, K’lon is in the middle of talking to Leri; they’re like, “Hm, shouldn’t Moreta be back by now?” And then suddenly Orlith screams, and in another context it would be funny — she does one of those false start cat jumps as if she were trying to reach somewhere high up, and then kind of faceplants. But it’s because suddenly she’s bereft, but she also can’t leave, because her eggs are still there, and K’lon’s dragon tells him, “Holth is no more.” K’lon is like, “Oh, my god! What’s going on?” And then his dragon says, “Leri,” and K’lon turns and looks, and Leri is —

Lleu: — clutching at her throat because her body has reflexively ceased to breathe.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. Yeah, very unsettling. That’s where I started crying. Not when Moreta died.

Tequila Mockingbird: It really is that same intensity as Brekke, that emotional moment, and I think McCaffrey captures really beautifully this overwhelming tragedy and this sense of obligation to try and stay and try and get Orlith through this, because that is what convinces Leri to keep living, at least in the short term, is that Orlith is also bereft and can’t die until her eggs have hatched. And I definitely misremembered, from reading this as a kid, and I thought Orlith hadn’t laid the eggs yet, and that was why she needed to wait, and why she hadn’t come along on the flight with Moreta. And I guess my tweenage self was like, “Uh, yeah, she can’t. Eggs are involved. I don’t…” It was not as crucial to remember.

Lleu: Yeah. I have a few small, mostly nitpicky, and one larger than nitpicky, complaint about this book, and this is one of the nitpicky ones, because we’re explicitly told in Dragonflight and Dragonquest, and then exacerbated in The White Dragon by the theft of the queen egg, that Ramoth’s commitment to being at the Weyr constantly and never letting her eggs out of her sight is a Ramoth idiosyncrasy and not an all queen dragons thing.

Lleu: — because now it seems like it’s just normal, because everyone’s like, “Ah, yeah, well, obviously, Orlith isn’t gonna leave the Weyr while her eggs are on the Hatching Ground.” It’s like, well, is it obvious? I didn’t think so, but now you’re telling me it is.

Tequila Mockingbird: I will offer — I don’t think I actually believe this, but — it’s possible that this is another piece of knowledge that was lost. That actually subsequent Benden queens post-the Long Interval were abnormally lax about their hatching process.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that Ramoth is actually a return to a more normal queen dragon paradigm.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think it’s likely; I think McCaffrey just forgot. But I’m offering it.

Lleu: The only other example we get is Nemorth, and Nemorth is in a unique position —

Lleu: But there’s also an implication, at least to me, that Nemorth is, on some level, aware of the stakes of this hatching.

Lleu: Anyway, it’s a small thing, but it did bug me a little bit as I was reading it.

Lleu: Especially because the one real narrative complaint I have about the book is that Moreta’s death itself, as you implied, isn’t actually quite as emotionally effective as it maybe should be.

Lleu: A lot of the things surrounding it, and especially other people’s reactions to it, are very powerful. But Moreta’s death — to me it feels like she didn’t trust that it was going to land the way it was supposed to, and so, as a result…

Lleu: Yeah. So she added in all of these extra things, like, oh, yeah, Moreta’s getting more and more tired, and Holth is a very old dragon, so she’s a little worried about taking off and landing so many times, so she’s actively checking in with Holth and being like, “Are you okay? Do you need water? Do you need food? Do you need rest?” And Holth is like, “No, no, I’m fine.” And then they do their last delivery.

Lleu: “Thanking her profusely, the man began to hand out the contents of the net to his handlers.”

Lleu: And she’s offered the opportunity to stay over with a few different people, and she refuses because she’s like, “It’s fine. We’ve got to go home…”

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think you are maybe supposed to see some of that as fatigue, as that she’s not making smart choices. But yeah, I think it would have been much more emotionally effective if you didn’t have that and instead you really made the reader feel the fatigue and the exhaustion of doing this so many times. Because it’s sort of a montage scene —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and I think you could have zoomed in and made us feel her exhaustion, and made us worried and like, “Stop! Moreta, no!” Where instead, it just feels like, uh-er…

Lleu: It feels like McCaffrey was like, “Ooh, it needs more punch. So we’ll add more ‘oh, yeah, she was trying to do all the right things, and it still didn’t work.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: When, instead, I would rather have been told that the task was impossible.

Tequila Mockingbird: That the task was impossible and she did it anyway, and then she faltered at the last moment, and it would have been impossible for anyone not to have faltered, and that’s what makes it so noble, that she took it on anyway, because it had to be done.

Tequila Mockingbird: Rather than, “Oh, she could have been fine, but don’t fly tired, guys!”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s just unfair that she doesn’t do this all the time. Moreta is so interesting and complicated, and fun and messy, and I think Moreta’s flaws feel a little more like flaws, and a little less like, “Oh, no, I’m Lessa, and I’m so angry, and I want to murder everybody in a way that’s kind of cool of me, but also evil.” It just feels a little more real.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think we both pointed out, or you pointed out, at the beginning, Moreta’s a grown-up. She’s in her late thirties, and it’s nice to have this protagonist who’s an adult.

Lleu: Right! Lessa’s literally 21 at the oldest at the beginning of Dragonflight, and F’lar is, like, early 30s but doesn’t really feel like it. And it’s just so nice to have a well-adjusted 30-something as the main character.

Lleu: She would. All of the queen riders that we meet in the main series are either, the four kinds of women, taciturn, stupid, lazy, or…

Lleu: Right, or slutty, or they’re Lessa, who is unique, or they’re Brekke, who is a housekeeper. Whereas Moreta shows us a functional 30-something-year-old woman.

Tequila Mockingbird: She also has a job beyond just being a queen dragonrider. She was planning to be a basically veterinarian before, and now she’s a very talented dragon vet.

Lleu: And she gets to be in many ways the mirror image of all of the bronze that we meet in the main series, who are these handsome, charming, amiable, friendly dog-men with their giant psychic lizard-cats. And Moreta is an amiable, friendly, attractive, dog-woman with her giant psychic lizard-cat.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s well-adjusted, and that’s so rare. Very few sci-fi/fantasy protagonists get to be well adjusted adults.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even beyond Pern. And it’s so lovely. But even beyond Moreta, ’cause the other thing is, there are so many interesting and compelling and satisfying female characters in this book, and previously it felt like, you get one. You get one fully developed, narratively realized female character, and everyone else is a caricature, or an archetype, or inexplicably mean. And here, that just isn’t the case.

Tequila Mockingbird: We get Leri, who’s this really fun, interesting, compelling older woman who does have a lot of wisdom and is also dealing with aging ungracefully and chronic pain, and we get a glimpse at her grief, at her loss, because her weyrmate has died, and that’s why Moreta is now the main Weyrwoman of Fort, or one of the reasons. And we also get Desdra, who is a Journeywoman Healer who is dealing with the medical angle and supporting Masterhealer Capiam.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we get glimpses at Nerilka, Oklina, the other queen riders that Moreta engages with professionally, and you really do see the community of queen riders in this in a really fun way. This feels like a world that is genuinely populated by interesting women.

Tequila Mockingbird: We get a little bit of that in the Harper Hall books, but some of it is that Menolly is a child, so she’s looking at all these adult women as maternal figures or, like, taking care of me.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where, with Moreta, they’re professional equals and friends.

Lleu: Other books in the series have technically passed the Bechdel-Wallace test. This is the first one where, in addition to the conversation not being about men, it also has been not about housekeeping. Which is a nice change!

Tequila Mockingbird: And to the core of the Bechdel-Wallace test, which is, is there potential lesbian subtext here —

Tequila Mockingbird: — this is the first one where I’m really like, “Yeah, give me a fic. I’d read that.”

Lleu: Absolutely. On which note, this is also the first book that I feel comfortable saying, yeah, there’s actually queer stuff going on in here, and it’s not in a weird homophobic way —

Lleu: So, among other things, we have, I believe, two passages that are narrated from the perspective of K’lon, who is a blue rider in a long-term relationship with another man. At another Weyr, too, so it’s a long-distance relationship; they’re commuting back and forth to see each other. And, interestingly, when K’lon is first brought to our attention, it is through a conversation between Moreta and Sh’gall, who is at this point the Weyrleader at Fort Weyr. And Moreta doesn’t really like Sh’gall; Sh’gall is, I think, a bit younger than her, and is also just difficult, but good on the battlefield, effectively, while they’re fighting Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: And she thinks a couple of times about, “Ugh, I don’t really like him, but he’s a good leader while Thread is still falling,” because we’re very close to the Interval, is another thing that’s brought up a lot. We’re only eight years away or so from Thread stopping for 50 years. So she on multiple occasions is like, “Ugh, as soon as Thread’s not actively falling, I’m gonna choose a different Weyrleader and not have to deal with this guy all the time.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think part of what might make him so unpleasant is that he knows that.

Lleu: Mm. It might be a factor. So, as Moreta and Sh’gall are talking about the illness, and this first news of the illness, Sh’gall’s like,

Lleu: “‘Find Berchar.’” — the Weyr Healer — “‘I want to know exactly what K’lon was ill of. K’lon didn’t know, and Berchar wasn’t in his quarters.’

Lleu: “Sh’gall had never developed any compassion or understanding of the green and blue riders, and their associations.”

Lleu: So, notwithstanding the euphemism here, it’s clear to me here, and also from some other passages in the book that we’re supposed to regard Sh’gall’s homophobia negatively.

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s supposed to be a little parochial, like, “Ah, you don’t get it. You’re not Weyrbred. Get with the times, Sh’gall.”

Lleu: Yeah. Which is a really nice change from previous books where it’s just kind of been all over the place. The other thing about this moment, specifically, is that the reason Berchar isn’t in his own quarters is because Berchar is with his weyrmate, a green rider named S’gor. So this is the first — explicit, anyway — queer relationship between a dragonrider and a non-dragonrider that we have seen.

Tequila Mockingbird: And sadly we don’t get to see much of them before Berchar dies of the plague, but he does also get to be competent. He’s the one of the Healers, and he’s very good at his job, and he does successfully figure out an effective treatment — it just isn’t enough to save him.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause he is the one to figure out aconite for the heart palpitations.

Lleu: Our only green rider that we’ve seen in a context that drew attention to the fact that he was gay previously is T’reb, the hysterical one who stabs F’nor in the shoulder. So it was really nice here to see that S’gor is, in fact, (a) kind of just a guy but (b) also is competent. He’s obeying Berchar’s instructions about keeping quarantine, makes sure that no one comes near him, relays information to and from Berchar as best he can, accounting for the fact that Berchar is extremely sick and feverish, and so is doing a good job both at managing plague and also at being a supportive partner for someone who’s extremely sick and then ultimately dies. And we also get A’dan, who similarly is portrayed when his partner, the blue rider, or his dragon, is injured by Thread, and A’dan feels nauseated at the sight of this but bears up and helps Moreta save the dragon’s wing and repair it. And it’s this really positive, lovely scene. And then we see them later with his dragon, like helping to hunt for his weyrmate’s dragon, and it’s just a really overall positive portrayal.

Lleu: The flip side of this is that there are a bunch of weird moments of emphasis on, like, “Ugh, blue riders. They’re so useless.”

Lleu: Brown riders — yeah, like, “You know how brown riders are.” And it’s like —

Lleu: — we’ve never at any point in the series to date seen blue riders or brown riders do anything to deserve the critiques that are leveled at them in this book.

Tequila Mockingbird: The brown rider is just a critique. We do see C’ver being a jerk. But all of our Telgar Weyr is being jerks.

Tequila Mockingbird: But the blue rider, it’s not just that the characters are cranky; it’s that the narrative keeps reinforcing this? Multiple one-appearance-only blue rider characters are kind of just there to be jerks. They show up, they’re rude to Moreta, and then they leave. And it’s like, why? What’s going on here?

Lleu: Yeah, I don’t know what’s up with that. It is weird. Although, in this book, not directed at green riders, which is a nice change. But in spite of that, this is the first book that I tagged as “lgbtq” on Storygraph. Unfortunately, I know ’cause I’ve read the others that there’s only one other book that I will tag as “lgbtq” on Storygraph, but it was nice that there are two, and nice that one of them is this one, which is good.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even if she is not choosing to engage in depth with the queerness in the other books, having this textual confirmation does make me feel more comfortable saying, “Yes, canonically there are queer relationships in all of these books,” because it has been built inherently into the world-building now.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I think there’s a lot of, like, okay, but is it queer, or is it, “Oh, my gosh, it’s sooo gay.” But it isn’t act— There’s that blurriness in the way that I think people online discuss things and the fanfic community specifically engages with text. So it is nice to be able to be like, “Yeah, it is.” Is that always done well? No. But it is there.

Tequila Mockingbird: Wow, you did an okay job. Damning with faint praise, perhaps.

Lleu: So this book was wild to read after having lived a pandemic that’s still going on.

Lleu: And one thing that I think is really striking is that she accurately judges, in many ways, how people will respond to a pandemic. People freak out. People don’t understand quarantine or quarantine rules. People don’t understand vaccination, although she does not anticipate the anti-vaccination movement that —

Tequila Mockingbird: And people freak out in both directions. You have some people who are just panicking and breaking quarantine because they’re like, “But I have to go home! I have to tend to my oxen!” But we also have people who are overreacting — we have a Lord Holder who’s shutting everything down, and he won’t even let vaccinated Healers come in, because he’s like, “No one can come in and out. It’s too dangerous.”

Tequila Mockingbird: This book hit me harder than it did when I read it when I was 14, or whatever.

Tequila Mockingbird: How much of that is having lived through a pandemic, and how much is just having a little more Emotional depth than I did when I was a high school student, I can’t really say.

Lleu: The other thing that I was thinking about as I was reading it… Obviously it’s a flu; we’re told explicitly, this is a “viral influence,” i.e., the flu.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I also love the idea that maybe what was written down was viral flu, and they’re extrapolating to —

Tequila Mockingbird: — “influence,” because influenza doesn’t seem logical — how would they get there?

Lleu: Although we’re told that the Harper Hall has an etymological dictionary. So.

Tequila Mockingbird: The Harper Hall does have an etymological dictionary. So, actually — and I do want to point out, this is my little nitpick, did they not have a single archivist anywhere on this planet who cataloged the records? Because every time they’re like, “Oh, no! We literally have to go all the way back to the oldest record and read them in chronological order all the way forward to know if a thing happened at any point in history.” And I’m like, “Guys, I can think of four methods off the top of my head to conveniently categorize this. So you don’t have to do this.” And I am not in any way trained in this. I’m just a nerd who likes to be organized.

Lleu: Yeah. It definitely seems like a big gap, that maybe someone should have gone through and indexed a little bit. Probably she had in mind, for example, the 1919 —

Lleu: — flu pandemic. But I also think — this book was published in 1983, and I think if I had been reading it at a time as a gay man, it would have been difficult not also to be thinking about AIDS.

Lleu: In particular because the first person that we meet who’s sick with the flu is a gay man, K’lon, but also because of the way that the onset of it is described — people go from fine to dead in the course of a couple of hours. And obviously, the sort of incubation period and the patterns of propagation are completely different, but, especially since this is the first book where there are a significant number of queer characters, it really jumped out to me.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we do also get — it’s not the reason for the illness, because that is explicitly coming from contact with this cat — but we do get the fact that they were at a big party. Part of the tragedy of this is that there was a Gather at Ruatha and at Ista, and so all of these people were congregating and dancing and interacting with each other while this illness was spreading.

Lleu: Especially because one of the other things that we’re told about blue and green riders is that there’s very little dancing at the Weyr, as a rule, except that, after a dragon dies, blue and green riders will sometimes do wild dances that make Moreta uncomfortable. Which, first of all is funny, but second of all is like, oh, they’ve reinvented going to a rave to celebrate that you’re still alive at a time when everyone around you is dying.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s possible that McCaffrey believes that is an inherent component of queer existence passed on genetically.

Lleu: It’s possible that she does believe that; she had many strange and upsetting beliefs about queer people. If this were something that she had genuinely believed, it would be pretty benign.

Lleu: Yeah. I’m especially thinking about the fact that she and Samuel R. Delany, who is gay and at this point in time had just published Neveryóna, the second Return to Nevèrÿon book, and was writing Flight from Nevèrÿon, the third book, which includes the first extended treatment of AIDS that was published by a mainstream publisher in the US.

Lleu: So it was on his mind, and they were close enough that he dedicated Neveryóna, the second book, to her.

Lleu: So I feel like, however much it may have directly influenced the book, it seems to me like there must have been at least some indirect influence at work.

Lleu: If my sound is different now, it’s because I had to move to another room. The last big thing that we wanted to talk about is the way the book is thinking about bloodlines, and also the management of sexuality, and also Alessan, the Lord Holder of Ruatha, with whom Moreta is romantically and sexually involved.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, his younger sister strikes up a very casual, recreational sexual relationship with a bronze dragonrider, and it’s interesting to me to wonder, okay, is this a, “Everyone else is dead and if this makes you happy, go for it, sis” kind of a situation, or would that actually be socially acceptable? Because we’re given a pretty strong impression that it wouldn’t normally be cool. Is Alessan just that chill?

Lleu: Or is it different because B’lerion is a dragonrider, and that somehow makes it, if not okay, then at least less bad.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. Interesting, ’cause I feel like previously, we’re given this impression that that doesn’t make it better. This idea of like, “Oh, the Weyr is sexually degenerate, or sexually predatory or dangerous. Nice hold girls shouldn’t be seduced by that.”

Lleu: Yeah. There’s an implication, I feel like, in the Ninth Pass books, that it’s bad when it’s like too much or too in your face or certainly it would be bad to be in a committed relationship with a dragonrider if you were a young Hold girl.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I come back yet again to this question that we talked about briefly in The White Dragon: what is the point of patriarchy and attempting to control women’s sexual experiences if you’re not going all the way with that? There isn’t usually a “but it’s okay if you have recreational sex with this category of person.” It’s a “you can never do this.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So that’s sort of an interesting crack in the world-building to maybe explore. I do think it’s entirely possible that Alessan is just grieving from the loss of his entire family and a significant portion of his entire Hold and thinking, “What does it matter? I don’t need to worry about arranging a marriage for her, because she’s literally the last daughter of Ruatha left. She can marry whoever she wants.” All of Tolocamp’s daughters are dead. There’s not a lot of competition in terms of aristocratic young women who can marry for political advantage left.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it ends up being irrelevant because Oklina does end up impressing the queen dragon egg that Orlith lays. And so the implication is that perhaps she can have a committed relationship with this dragon rider, or even just a casual one, ongoingly.

Lleu: So it’s resolved, except that it’s also not, which is one of the things that I think is interesting.

Lleu: When it becomes apparent that dragons are particularly interested in Oklina because they think she would be a good queen rider, Alessan’s response to this is, “I’ll let her be Searched as long as it’s understood that any of her children come back to Ruatha.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But I do think that makes sense, because she wouldn’t be raising those children anyway. It’s made clear that queen dragonriders don’t have the time or mental or emotional energy to raise their kids. We meet one of Moreta’s biological children, who she is meeting for the second or third time.

Tequila Mockingbird: Who has been fostered out, and so I think if Oklina’s children are gonna be fostered out anyway, it sort of makes sense for him to say, “Yeah, foster them back to Ruatha.”

Lleu: But to me it doesn’t seem like foster them back to Ruatha; it means send them back to Ruatha. They will categorically not be dragonriders. They will be Holders.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, but again, to me that doesn’t seem like a very significant difference.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because they make sense to me that he would be like, “I want to raise another generation of Ruathans, of this family.”

Lleu: I just think it’s an interesting juxtaposition with all of the other ways that this book is interested in breeding and lineage.

Lleu: In particular, as a juxtaposition with Alessan’s being a runner beast breeder. He’s a horse breeder and trainer; that’s what he does. That’s his primary interest, and he’s, historically previously, has been doing this for racing purposes, and then almost all of the runner beasts at the Hold die, and one of his primary concerns is, did the core bloodline die out? Are there no more Ruathan-bloodline runner beasts? And it turns out that a handful of them have been saved, including some young ones.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the pregnant mares, so that you have foals who haven’t been gelded yet, which is his concern.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s, okay, if all of the stallions die, this breeding effort is kind of gone, even if I have geldings and mares and such. And it’s interesting that that’s also Moreta’s first thought, and part of what she and Alessan bond over is that they’re both obsessed with runner beasts and love racing. But when she finds out that her home Hold, which, to be fair, it seems she hasn’t had much interaction with since she became a dragonrider, and that’s normal — you kind of become a different person; you lead a very different life.

Tequila Mockingbird: Her home Hold has been entirely wiped out by the plague, and she notices, she’s thinking, like, “Oh, it’s weird. I’m more sad, almost, about the loss of the horses. The fact that that entire line of runner beasts is gone, because that was our life’s work. That was my father’s passion and his efforts, and, and that’s all gone.” When that was maybe expected to outlive him. And then she comforts herself with thinking, “Well, the winter pasturage — there might be some of the horses remaining who have survived.”

Lleu: Interestingly, something else that she particularly emphasizes, and that comes up in a couple of other points is that it’s not just “This is like my father’s life’s work,” it’s “This is what connects us to our history.”

Lleu: We get the emphasis on “this bloodline goes back to the Crossing,” whether that’s the Second Crossing to the Northern Continent, or the First Crossing to Pern. That’s something that comes up repeatedly, both for human bloodlines and also for runner beast bloodlines. So there’s a sense that the loss of people and animals is also…

Lleu: Is literally the severing of this link, as well as representing a loss of information.

Lleu: Something else, thinking about the way this book deals with the management of sexuality, that I thought was interesting was early on in the book, when Moreta gets back to the Weyr, she’s reflecting on, like, “Okay, what do I have to do today? One of the things I have to do today is talk to one of the other women at the Weyr who has just gone into labor and doesn’t know who the father of her child is.” And this is a problem, because, since many relationships are casual, you actually do need to know who you’re biologically related to if you’re interacting with someone sexually at the Weyr. And so she’s like, “Surely it can’t be that difficult; she’s just got to write it down,” which I thought was very funny.

Lleu: But also it’s like, “Oh, this is the first time that this concern has been raised at all.” And it is something that you might think would be a concern, because the population of Weyrs is small. We’re told specifically in Dragonquest, there’s, like, 412 dragons at Benden Weyr, so 412 riders plus some number of support staff, but total population 1,500, maybe?

Tequila Mockingbird: I think this was in the Dragon Lover’s Guide, it suggests that it’s roughly a one-to-three dragonrider to support staff ratio.

Lleu: Okay, yeah, about 2,000 people, then, total at the Weyr, which is not a large community.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And that might honestly be one reason for the otherwise, to me, at least, very silly naming convention where you name your kids by smooshing together the names of their parents. Very Renesmée, for those of you who were also in those particular trenches with me as teenagers. It is to be fair, a cool little moment when she meets up with M’ray, her biological kid who stayed in Ista with his biological dad — although not raised by him — when Moreta moved to Fort Weyr. And it’s like, “Oh, yeah, D’say and Moreta — M’ray. Cool.” I guess if you have more than one kid with the same person, you’d have to get increasingly creative, but that doesn’t seem to happen very often. So it’s fine.

Lleu: I actually really enjoyed that scene, in part because, on the one hand, he is aware that they’re his parents and feels some kind of attachment to them, but also when he is like, “My dragon said that Moreta was here,” and shows up at his father’s weyr, he’s like, “Do I hug you? Do we shake hands? I don’t know what we’re supposed to do.” And then they have a little conversation, and at the end they hug, and Moreta’s like, “Ah, yes, he seemed a little more comfortable now,” but they just don’t have that kind of relationship which I think is really interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, they clearly haven’t seen each other at all since she left Ista, and probably not that often before that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And again, in terms of McCaffrey finally walking the walk in this book and actually showing us, in a sympathetic way, because this is part of what’s fun about this is the narrative doesn’t judge Moreta for that. There’s no, “this is the lost opportunity,” or “Oh, well…” it’s just like, “Yeah, this is fine. This is her biological kid. He’s not her child in any meaningful sense of the way, but she approves of him and is proud of him and is happy that he’s doing well.”

Lleu: The one thing I will say, as a counterpoint, about names, is that unfortunately we do meet Hold people later on who also are named like this, and we’ve met Hold people before.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, but that could just be that the dragonriders started a trend.

Lleu: Among other things, I’m thinking about Jaxom, whose name is clearly “Gemma” and “Fax” squished together weirdly.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, I was just thinking of it as a corruption of “Jackson,” the Earth name, over time, in the same way “Keevan” comes from “Kevin.” That kind of thing. Interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: No, that makes sense. I mean, it’s not spelled — Gemma was with a G.

Lleu: — which also is funny because it’s Robinton and Sebell’s names squished together.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, that’s not about parentage. That’s just smooshing together the names of people you love romantically. Uh, did I say that? Uh, care about a lot.

Lleu: Spiritual parents, Anyway, we also get a bunch of interesting smaller worldbuilding things in this book. Glow worms apparently smell?

Lleu: But it’s mentioned in passing. We’re told that certain dragons are known as Search dragons; they have an innate talent for figuring out who will make good riders.

Tequila Mockingbird: So innate that their dragonrider doesn’t even know what’s going on.

Lleu: Yeah, and is bemused and a little dismayed to find this out, because from his perspective, his dragon has just been behaving really weirdly around Oklina, and he’s like, “I don’t know what’s going on! I can’t get him to stop.” And Moreta’s like, “No, it’s a good thing. He’s Searching her.” And M’barak’s like, “Oh!”

Lleu: “Okay!” There’s some stuff about watch-whers; we get the first, and I think maybe only in the main series, allusion to the fact that watch-whers have some kind of Thread-fighting function that Capiam doesn’t understand.

Tequila Mockingbird: We don’t read them. We also get the really fun sequences of Moreta riding dragons that aren’t Orlith. And having interesting connections to them in that psychic sense. She can’t talk to all dragons, shockingly, unlike so many other of McCaffrey’s female protagonists. But when a dragon chooses to talk to her and she’s kind of noticing how different Holth and Orlith and Rogeth sound to her, and Nabeth.

Lleu: And one thing that I think is particularly interesting on this point is that not only is she talking to these dragons, but she seems to be, at least with some of them, developing connections —

Tequila Mockingbird: And there’s also some very interesting stuff about, like, Holth and Orlith psychically merging to communicate with her while she is physically distant from Orlith but with Holth that maybe presages or is linked to the fact that she eventually is riding Holth when she dies and not Orlith.

Lleu: Yeah. Obviously her connection with Orlith is first and foremost; that’s the strongest, that’s the deepest, they are two halves of the same soul. But also it seems like she, over the course of the novel, develops a kind of active connection to Holth.

Lleu: That obviously will never outweigh Holth’s connection to Leri, either, but is more than just “sometimes Holth talks to her, and sometimes she talks back to Holth.”

Lleu: She’s aware of Holth in a similar way to the way she’s aware of Orlith, which I thought was really interesting. And also which she has to then address directly in Nerilka’s Story.

Tequila Mockingbird: No, we do not. I do think it’s really interesting and lovely to see sort of a maternal relationship between Moreta and Leri. Leading back to the “Let female characters have friends who are female; let them engage in these deep and meaningful interpersonal relationships,” and we haven’t really seen an elder of the Weyr before, because Benden Weyr’s situation was kind of weird, and I don’t think that Lessa is interested in being mentored by anyone. She would just stab them the first time that they disagreed with her or tried to give her advice.

Tequila Mockingbird: So actually I really enjoyed seeing that more normal or healthy Weyr pattern, where you do have these older people, and because you’re kind of not raising your own kids you might develop these families of choice relationships with other people at the Weyr.

Lleu: Mm. It’s just refreshing to see like, oh, this is what it would be like if Benden Weyr were normal.

Tequila Mockingbird: McCaffrey, why? Why can’t we have this all the time? And to your earlier point about the way that runner beast and human genealogies are so entwined in this book, I do think it is interesting to note that we meet, um, someone with an eidetic memory who recites the genealogies of both. And very specifically, like, “Wow is horse genealogy all he cares about?” And it’s like, “Oh, no. He also does Ruathan families.”

Lleu: Yeah. The fact that he has an eidetic memory means that he has a much deeper memory of genealogies than many people do, but this is, in fact, how information was orally transmitted for a long time, including falling into a kind of rhythm or chant as you’re reciting them. And there’s a way to read it as like, okay, this is a representation of an autistic character in a very dated 1983 way.

Tequila Mockingbird: I did notice that the way that other characters talk to him and engaged with him did remind me a lot of Camo, the character who has an intellectual disability that we meet in Dragonsinger.

Lleu: Yeah. And I do think that there is probably an element of that, or at least that she had that in mind. But it also to me, initially, just read as genuinely, this is someone who has this incredibly deep knowledge, and when he gets into his genealogy mode, you need to be like, “Hey, Runel. Come on. We gotta do other things” and kind of get him out of that rhythm.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And he does seem to be valued by his community for this skill.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s one of the things that Alessan definitely wonders at some point, like, if he’s dead then we don’t have that anymore. And again, it’s that both literal “Runel represents history,” but also is, in that he is this repository of historical information, but also the genealogy itself, and the fact that you are descended from someone extending back to the First Crossing, is in and of itself significant, such that the loss of any person in that genealogy is also a break in history, a loss of history, in a way that is really cool.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even though Moreta is actually, we are shocked to say, quite good. Probably don’t read it unless you are also committed, for some ungodly reason, to rereading all of the Dragonriders of Pern books.

Lleu: I would complicate that. I would say, if you read some of the books and have not read Moreta, you should read Moreta. It’s good. It’s worth reading. If you have not read any Pern books…

Lleu: It’s not worth reading other ones just to read Moreta, and I don’t think Moreta would work as well on its own.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. This is possibly the best of the Pern books, so…

Tequila Mockingbird: If that appeals, maybe. But also why not instead read something that is significantly better, which we are going to recommend now. I would like to recommend Ling Ma’s Severance, which is also a science fiction story about an apocalyptic pandemic, but this one is set a little more close science fiction, in New York. If you’re open for a pandemic novel. But if you’re not, you’re not open for Moreta either. So.

Lleu: My recommendation this time around is a book called Sanaaq, S A N A A Q, by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, who was an Inuit writer. Sanaaq is — the English translation subtitles it “An Inuit Novel.” It’s really not a novel. It’s just not really the right term for it. It’s a collection of 48 episodes or anecdotes that are linked by this central character, Sanaaq, and other characters in her community. It covers perhaps 30, 40 years of Sanaaq’s life, which are on a kind of sliding timescale with 70-ish years of the history of Canadian colonialism in the far North. It deals with, among other things, the arrival of an epidemic from the South — in this case, tuberculosis. It deals with rapid social changes and shifts in knowledge and the loss of traditional knowledge. And it’s just fun. It’s very stylistically interesting. The first half of it was written as a language learning exercise, when she was at a hospital in I think Montreal, and one of the nuns was like, “Oh, you should write us some things that we can actually use the Inuktitut that we’re learning.” And so she wrote the first 20-some chapters. And then later on an anthropologist came to the community and was looking for material and discovered that she’d written this and encouraged her to continue the story. And then, instead of writing his dissertation about “folklore,” quote-unquote, he wrote his dissertation about her book and produced a critical edition of it which is the basis of the English translation, which was done from a French translation. Anyway, it’s really interesting. It’s really engaging. The style has some really cool aesthetic effects and deals with some related themes to Moreta.

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.

[1] Tequila’s copy, a Corgi paperback from ca. 1996 (but likely representative of Corgi paperbacks going back to 1984), is signed off “Dragonhold, 1982–1983”; Lleu’s copy, a Ballantine hardcover from 1983, does not include the location signoff.