Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #9: Dragonsdawn (1988), part 1

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

LLleu: And today we’re talking about Dragonsdawn, the prequel novel about the settlers who first colonized Pern. Note that in addition to our standing disclaimers about sexual violence and homophobia, in this episode we will be discussing racism, cultural genocide, eugenics, and more at some length.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, Dragonsdawn begins about 2,500 years before the main events of the series, with the Earth colonists — or, better to say, human colonists, because some of them are not actually from Earth; they’re from other space colonies, Centauri, etc. — arriving on Pern and attempting to form a settlement. We learn a little bit about the backgrounds, that there’s been some kind of interstellar war and that many of them are veterans of that war, and we see that their goal is setting up a low-tech, very libertarian, return-to-the-land colony on Pern. We know that they are already divided into “charterers” and “contractors,” so there’s already the beginnings of what will end up being the feudal system of Pern. And we meet a number of our focal characters, mostly Sallah Telgar, who is one of the pilots; and Sorka Hanrahan, who is a young child; and Sean Connell, another young child that she befriends, first on the ship and then later on the planet. The first section of the book, called “Landing”...

LLleu: …narrates the first two-ish years of the colony, where we see them setting up their facilities, establishing some kind of educational system, conducting field research, and, in particular, Sorka and Sean discover creatures that are called variously “dragonets,” “fire-dragonets,” and “fire lizards,” which can fly and teleport between places, and also communicate empathically with humans that they psychically bond with when they hatch, and are about the size of cats, and which, of course, are the basis of the later fire lizards and also, ultimately, of dragons.

Tequila Mockingbird: The first section also introduces us to our flies in the ointment. We meet Avril Bitra, who is not actually planning a happy farming life on Pern now that she has failed to seduce Paul Benden successfully and become…queen? Question mark? Of this new colony. Her motives are a little confusing. She is actually planning to steal a bunch of gemstones and flee back into human-controlled space. We then get a time jump to part two, “Thread,” about eight years later, where we get the first Threadfall, and we really see the trauma that this inflicts, both individually on the people, because a lot of them are killed. They have no context; they have no warning. Suddenly, horrible alien organisms are falling from the sky and destroying all organic matter they come in contact with, and there’s really nothing they can do. A couple of people who are out among that first Threadfall by jumping in water, but other than that, it’s pretty much, if you were under metal or stone you were fine, and if not, you’re dead. So there’s individual trauma, but there’s also the upheaval to the colony, because they really didn’t have a centralized governmental structure. The plan had been this very, in a lot of ways, American fantasy of, “We’re going to completely be individual and isolated, and we’re all gonna have our own little stakeholds and farm without any necessity of relying on each other.” And this means that when there’s a crisis like this they don’t have a great way to respond without just putting Benden and Emily Boll — Paul Benden and Emily Boll — back in charge, when they had really supposed to be just in charge for the voyage over.

Tequila Mockingbird: So we see the crisis, and then we see them attempt to respond, and this attempt includes trying to blow up Thread or shoot down Thread, burn it in the sky from what they call “sleds,” which are clearly kind of able to fly, in limited sense, but that is very intensive on their technological resources, because the plan had been to step back from technology when they got to Pern, so they don’t have an unlimited set of battery packs. They don’t have unlimited repair parts for these sleds. And they hit upon ultimately the idea of bioengineering the fire lizards, now, into dragons, using genetic manipulation techniques that are not actually of Earth or human origin, but from the Eridani, who are a intelligent and more technologically advanced alien species that humans had come into contact with before arriving on Pern. So they set that up, but it’s obviously gonna take a while for the experiments to work and for the dragon eggs to hatch and for the dragons to grow up, so it’s not really a short-term solution, and in the short term things are going badly.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also see a resolution of Avril Bitra’s evil plot, which does involve her attempting to flee to the Yokohama, one of the ships still in orbit. Sallah follows her, and they both end up dying in space. We also see the colonists attempt to figure out what’s going on with Thread and being generally unsuccessful. They attempt to send a number of probes, and those probes are destroyed in the atmosphere. They attempt to experiment, but they can’t really keep it alive very long. And they’re still unsure about whether this is a deliberate attack from an alien community that is in this system, or whether it’s a coincidence, or whether Thread is the first stage of a life form that is then gonna evolve into something that looks more humanoid. Like, they’re very uncertain about what’s going on. And the second section, “Thread,” ends with them realizing that, also, the volcanoes in the area where they first settled are starting to become more active, and that they are going to need to resettle the entire community on the Northern Continent, both because there’s less earthquake activity and less volcanic activity there and because it has better natural cave systems that can protect people from Thread, where the Southern Continent is very open, and they just don’t have enough metal to dedicate to building safe housing for what they eventually hope their population will become.

Tequila Mockingbird: Part three is called “Crossing” and really focuses in on attempting to get everybody from the South Continent to the North Continent, and also with the coming-of-age of the dragons, who are now old enough to be ridden and to go between for the first time. The very first time is tragic, because Marco and Duluth, panic in the middle of the evacuation of Landing, go between, and don’t come back out, but eventually the dragon riders are able to figure out chewing firestone, breathing fire, and flying between, and the book ends with them triumphantly, fighting Thread for the first time on the North Continent, in what will eventually become Fort Hold.

LLleu: So we’re planning to do this in two parts. First, we’re going to try and talk about Dragonsdawn in and of itself, as a self-contained novel, in part because it is chronologically the first book in the series, and at least one person who has listened to some parts of this podcast started the series with Dragonsdawn, ’cause they knew it was chronologically first. Which is wild!

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and I’ve also seen that on the Internet, as advice saying, “Oh, you can start chronologically with Dragonsdawn, or you can start in publishing order with Dragonflight,” and personally I am never in favor of reading in-universe chronologically rather than extradiegetically in publication order —

Tequila Mockingbird: — ’cause I think authors always, whether they mean to or not, build and develop their world as they write. There are always things that, even if they’re attempting to write with a, “Oh, maybe someone will come to this first and I should explain,” they’re never gonna get everything, but in this case I think it is particularly wild advice to intentionally give someone, because I think the picture you get of what this series is going to be is, in some ways very different if you read this book first.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although there are elements of continuity. The romantic consent is never gonna improve. That is the baseline here.

Tequila Mockingbird: But there are no dragons until the last couple of chapters, really.

LLleu: Which is wild considering that the book is called Dragonsdawn, and also because they are the most important thing in the whole rest of the series.

LLleu: It just feels like they maybe should have a little more space. But it really is only just the last couple chapters where the dragons become a major element of the narrative. Throughout the entire second section, even once they start actively developing them, the dragons don’t hatch until near the end of the second section.

Tequila Mockingbird: And they’re also just not super narratively important, honestly.

Tequila Mockingbird: The lens that we get on the dragonriders is really through Sean and Sorka, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying that either of them was the protagonist of this book.

Tequila Mockingbird: The point of view is jumping wildly. We get scenes from maybe a dozen different characters’ perspectives.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I would say we definitely get a lot from Paul Benden. We’re over his shoulder for a significant chunk of the book. We definitely get a lot from Sean and Sorka, and we definitely get a lot from Sallah Telgar.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would say that those are the four protagonists? If I had to choose.

LLleu: Yeah, but I kind of don’t think it makes sense to say this is a novel with a protagonist at all.

LLleu: I would say that it’s a novel about the community as a whole — which is interesting! And I think she actually is quite successful at doing that.

LLleu: It’s hard. So for all of this novel’s flaws, and it does have many, as we will discuss, I think it actually is very cleverly handled in the way it’s managing perspectives in order to give us this panoramic, synoptic view of the colony and the early years of the colony as a whole, rather than giving us the story of one person in the colony.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. I also think her pacing is really good with this one, in a way that it isn’t always, because of those three sections. We do have yet another time skip — she loves a time skip, although it’s eight years this time, and not two. But she really hits that, “Oh, my god! Threadfall!” beat as the first crisis of the book, and then I really enjoyed — and part of what drew me to this book as a kid was — how much it is a crisis response book, very similar in a lot of ways, I would say, to The Martian, by Andy Weir. You’re constantly just seeing, “Okay. How are we gonna problem-solve this one? How are we gonna problem-solve this one?” And it isn’t one thing, ’cause it’s like, “Oh, now, Thread’s falling again. How can we figure out when it’s gonna fall? How can we figure out where it’s gonna fall? How can we communicate with all of these people? How can we marshal our resources and keep track of our resources?” And a significant chunk of this book is dedicated to the logistics of quartermastering, essentially, a society in crisis, which is really cool! Justice for Joel Lillienkamp.

LLleu: Yeah. I think the second section is excellent in that way as a kind of self-contained crisis narrative. I think the first section is a little…

LLleu: A little slow and a little unfocused. There’s a lot of things, and it’s like, “I don’t really know what the point of this is,” or this could have been ten pages shorter.

LLleu: Things like that, and the last section, to me, is a little bit caught between two things. On the one hand, it wants to be the story of the Crossing to the Northern Continent and, on the other hand, it wants to be the story of the dragonriders’ coming-of-age, and, for me, at least, as a result, it doesn’t really succeed in doing either.

LLleu: ’Cause so much of the Crossing stuff is shown from Sean’s perspective, and Sean’s like, “I don’t want to deal with any of this.” And, meanwhile, when it is actually focused on the dragonriders, it takes a little too long to get to the point.

Tequila Mockingbird: Hm. Part of what feels unfocused about that first section — I don’t think the first section is effective unless you know that Thread is gonna show up, which is part of the reason I think it’s wild to read this book first —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because I think a lot of the tension that underlies the entire first section is the dramatic irony of the reader knowing that this is not how it’s gonna go. And they’re like, “Oh, these concentric circles that were in the report, they’re not here anymore. I’m not worried about that. That was probably just a fungus.” And you’re, as the reader, going like, “No! No! Don’t go outside in the horror movie!”

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s providing, I think, a lot of the urgency of the first section, which inherently doesn’t have much. It’s sort of rambling. We’re meeting all these people. But looping all the way back to Dragonquest, I think, in the same way, having that first section separate and delineated, introducing us to everyone, does pay off later in the book, because I could easily imagine a version of the story that starts with the Thread section, in medias res: there’s a colony planet, they’re in crisis, and then we try and learn about people in the middle of that, or with backstory, or with flashbacks.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think she’s choosing deliberately to slowly introduce us to everyone, help us get a sense of who are the political players here, who are the different stakeholders, how is the colony as a community and also very much as a series of disparate miniature communities shoved together by circumstance. And then, when crisis hits and we are suddenly moving very quickly, we already know everybody, and we already have a sense of the players.

LLleu: Yeah. I absolutely agree that structurally it makes sense to do it that way. I just feel like the first section probably could have been a little tighter still.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. And in that first section I think she does a really excellent job of giving us just enough backstory without giving us too much. We learn that there has been a war called the Nathi War, and I think we learn that they are specifically fighting aliens called the Nathis.

Tequila Mockingbird: Paul Benden was an admiral, and many of the other pilots, especially, were fighter pilots in that war. That there was a siege on First Centauri and that Emily Bull was the governor of that planet during that siege and the figurehead of the survival and the endurance of that siege. And it really sets this tone of post-war trauma and escapism, and the fact that part of the reason that they have this frankly very stupid plan to come to this colony and escape all government and all violence and all logic and technology is that they have gone through something really horrific. But she doesn’t get bogged down in the weeds about it.

LLleu: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think for better or for worse she actually is mostly good at managing information that is provided to readers. And sometimes that means an infodump, like the prologues —

LLleu: — and sometimes that means giving us just enough information that we go, “Okay, yeah, I don’t need to know more about that. I understand there was a war. They’re all veterans. They’ve all been marked by this war in different ways that continue to manifest over the course of the book. Don’t need to know details about the siege; I just need to know it was bad and that Emily Poll was important to helping people survive.” It does a really good job of setting the tone without oversetting the tone, and also of providing us with enough information that we can follow the narrative and follow the characters without going overboard and making something that would be boring.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it also pays off later, because we do see how, when crisis strikes again and suddenly they’re under attack, those maladaptive coping mechanisms come right back.

Tequila Mockingbird: Also, in a story that doesn’t really have one protagonist, it gives her an easy, straightforward, emotional arc without having to do a lot of specific backstory work.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which I think is an efficiency in a story that’s trying to work in the way that this one does.

LLleu: Yeah, absolutely, and it does create interesting dynamics later on, that in some ways later books in the series actually do raise questions about, although never answering those questions. When the colonists are like, “Is this an attack? Is someone attacking us? Is this the Nathi attacking us?”

LLleu: And they conclude, “No, it’s not attacking us. It seems to be just a natural phenomenon.” But there’s still that lingering question, in a way that, this is something you would probably think about, but the extent to which they are preoccupied with this, and the ways that that preoccupation informs their response, clearly comes out of this —

LLleu: — prior experience of war that we are aware of without needing to belabor, in a way, that is, yeah, I think really effective.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although it is interesting to me that she very deliberately withholds information from them. ’Cause none of their probes work, and it feels weirdly coincidental; things keep going wrong when they’re trying to figure out more about the Red Star, or Thread, or what’s going on here. And I’m not sure if she did that because she wanted to preserve the suspense for later books.

Tequila Mockingbird: She didn’t want to give away the answer? Because I feel like it would have been perfectly logical for these people to have discovered an answer and then for that answer to have been lost over the 2,500 years of Pernese history, in a way that a lot of other things were lost.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it seems like she doesn’t wanna give that answer to the reader just as much as she doesn’t want to give it to the characters.

LLleu: Yeah. This is sort of the problem with the rest of the series after Moreta, basically, is that she gets really invested in the overarching plot, and the overarching plot requires them to do a bunch of archaeology and whatnot in the Ninth Pass in order to get answers and to be able to change things.

LLleu: And that means that some of the information can’t have been available in the past.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. She’s stuck now with the, “Well. Why didn’t they just do it in any of the previous 2,000 years?” And the answer has to be “Because of really good reasons, I promise.”

LLleu: Yeah. ’Cause because it wouldn’t be interesting if they’d known it in the past —

LLleu: — and we just had the answers in the future. It’s more interesting if the people in the future, who we’re already invested in, familiar with, if they get to figure things out for the first time themselves. But it does lead her into a bunch of situations, including in like All the Weyrs of Pern, as we’ll discuss in the future, where you’ve created a problem that feels fake even from an in-world perspective, because it doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t already have this information or that someone wouldn’t have already acquired this information —

LLleu: — but you needed that not to have happened because of the way that you are conceptualizing the main plot from this point on.

LLleu: It’s one of the frustrating things, also, is, the book ends with the volcano erupting at Landing and everything being buried, and it’s like, okay, in the future we learn in All the Weyrs of Pern that it takes them like 3 years to excavate all of Landing. Why didn’t they just come back and do that later? Then the answer is: because they didn’t.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, I do think it sets up the chaos. The Crossing section really does convey how they were not prepared to move their entire society to a different place on very limited notice.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you see some fun things about, “Oh, let’s just put that in the Catherine Caves, seal it up, we’ll come back for it later,” and you know that they didn’t. And things like that that are fun little Easter eggs. And I also think, as much as the war and that context does provide a little bit of a logical reason why they did this, a lot of the stupid decisions that these characters make, and the ways in which their society ends up bad, really do, to me, feel a lot more justified when you learn that they’re the kind of losers who deliberately move to a new planet and the first song that they want to sing when they get there is “Home on the Range.”

LLleu: Yeah, they explicitly conceive of themselves as quote-unquote “pioneers” colonizing the American West. We’re told proudly that many of the many of the colonists are descended from Alaskan settlers. Their Alaskan genetic inheritance. And it’s like…

Tequila Mockingbird: What does that mean to you? What is that doing in this novel? Interesting.

LLleu: Yeah. So there’s one aspect of the book, and so kind of of the series, if we think about the ways that science fiction is associated with escape, is the classic Ursula K. Le Guin question about escape: “from what is one escaping, and to what?”[1] And, on the one hand, the answer is that the colonists are escaping from war, but, on the other hand, the answer is, the colonists are escaping from a anti-modernist caricature of industrial society. They’re fleeing from the “technocrats” and the “syndicates” who control most other life in human space, and they are fleeing towards libertarian feudalism.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s also a very clear fantasy of guilt-free colonization, in a way that a lot of science fiction is. This very white idea of, “Well, what if we came to a new world and there wasn’t anybody already living there that we were trying to murder and divest of their home and land, and we just got to take charge, and we could have manifest destiny all over again, but without having to feel bad, because, actually, we would be good?” It’s, I think, a preoccupation of white American science fiction, for fairly obvious reasons, and it is interesting to step back and look at this and see Thread as maybe a little bit of a inadvertent judgment on that, of, actually, no, you don’t get to play colonizer and get off scot-free. There are always going to be consequences. There are always going to be complications. Nothing is that easy or that simple.

LLleu: Although also, if we think about this as fundamentally a westward expansion narrative, the flip side of that is that Thread is in effect representing Indigenous people.

LLleu: It’s this inhuman, cannibalistic, alien force that is mindless and just wants to kill everyone and everything and is preventing the colonists from exercising their Charter rights to land and livelihood. Huh! Anne.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think you see that a lot in sci-fi Westerns. Once you become aware, as a writer, that it is not actually a good thing to have your bad guy be the Indigenous people, there’s a lot of very, in some ways, lazy science fiction reskinning, where you just cross out “Native Americans” and write in “vampires” in the case of Priest or “Reavers” in the case of Firefly —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and you are still fundamentally telling the story of a Western, which is a story of “civilization” surrounded by wilderness and fighting back against wilderness, and the idea that civilization is constantly under attack from evil forces of savagery and violence and chaos, which is, as you point out, actually, an un-racist concept, even when you’ve abstracted it into science fiction.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And it’s this very specific flavor that I call “well-intentioned white lady racism,” where she clearly thinks that she’s doing something great here, with her diverse cast of characters, and…it’s bad. It’s just really bad, because her attempt to write all of these characters of color is so clumsy, and so tokenizing, and so obnoxious, and her description of that, like, everything about it is regrettable.

Tequila Mockingbird: The things that jump out specifically are the language that is used to describe Avril Bitra —

LLleu: Yeah. The thing about Avril Bitra is that most of the people in this space future have generically kind-of English names. There’s Emily Boll, Paul Benden. Not actual English names, but English-sounding names. Avril Bitra: not exactly an English sounding name. And then, on top of that, the reason that she knows about the large gemstone mines that are accessible on Pern is that her several-times-great-grandmother was on the original survey team and marked these areas down and smuggled some gems off-planet. And now Bitra is like, “Ah, yes, I’m gonna claim my grandmother’s legacy,” and her grandmother has a very obviously I think Arabic name.

LLleu: Yes. So we’ve got the evil, sexy Arab woman who uses her sensuality to manipulate men and is, of course, frustrated that she wasn’t able to manipulate the heroic Paul Benden. She’s just Kylara 2.0.

LLleu: Actually, she really is just Kylara 2.0 in every way, up to and including having a plan that makes very little sense, because it does seem like, initially, her plan was to become queen of Pern in some way that is not clear.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, she was sleeping with Paul Benden on the spaceship.

Tequila Mockingbird: She seems to think that then they’re gonna get married, and she’s gonna be in some way able to exert political or social power on the colony because she’s married to Paul Benden, despite the fact that the plan is always that he then stops being in charge once they land on the planet. But I don’t think she believes that he’s actually gonna do that. And then he dumps her, and there’s a lot of racist nonsense about, like, “Oh, he was captivated by her sensuality, but he didn’t actually want her as a partner, because…question mark.”

LLleu: Yeah. Well, and then, of course, when he afterwards looks at her, he’s like, “How could I ever have been attracted to this woman?” She disgusts him, which…mmm…

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. There’s also a pretty strong implication that his second wife is East Asian, and that what he approves of about her is that she is appropriate and modest and restrained. And it’s like, that’s actually also very racist!

Tequila Mockingbird: So, Avril is described in just this really weird, voyeuristic, “she’s evil and sexy and evil because she’s sexy and sexy because she’s evil” way. And her kind of rivalry with Sallah, which does end up getting both of them killed, in a certain sense, is both narratively a little weird and unsatisfying, and also just…why? Why is this necessary?

LLleu: There’s so much Orientalism going on throughout this. Let’s talk about Sallah Telgar, and let’s talk about Sallah Telgar’s love interest.

LLleu: So, Sallah Telgar is obsessed with a mining engineer named Tarvi Andiyar.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I have his first description, which is already very racist. It starts with:

Tequila Mockingbird: “No one understood him when he talked to himself like that; he was speaking in his first language, an obscure Indic dialect.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “When asked about his eccentricity, he would respond with one of his heart-melting smiles.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘For other ears to hear this beautiful liquid language, so it will be spoken even here on Pern, so that there will be one person alive who still speaks it fluently, even after all these centuries.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: So is the implication that he is the last living speaker of his native language?

Tequila Mockingbird: We also then get a deeply racist description of why he’s skinny.

Tequila Mockingbird: “My family has had generations of gurus and mahatmas, all intent on fasting for the purification of their souls and bowels, until it has become a genetic imperative for all Andiyars to be of the thinness of a lathe.”

LLleu: And here’s the thing. We subsequently find out that the quote-unquote “obscure Indic dialect” that Tarvi speaks is Pashto. He’s Pashtun! None of his ancestors would be Hindu.[2] The fact that he’s Pashtun in a book published in 1988, during the height of the Soviet-Afghan War, is so from 1988 that it’s funny, but also just awful.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, Sallah is obsessed with Tarvi, who is very uninterested in all women. Multiple people are flirting with him, and it is noted that there’s this expectation that you are going to have biological children in this colony, because they need people. They’re trying to spread out and manifest destiny, etc., etc.

LLleu: It is, in fact, kind of implied that there is a legal obligation to have biological children, but it’s not ever quite explicit. There’s just some phrasing that made me go, “Uh. Is that what you meant?”

Tequila Mockingbird: And the narrative does specifically say that they know that there are some queer people in this expedition, and that they’re fine with that, but that those people have also consented to have biological children, presumably via sex, because they don’t seem to have any kind of artificial reproductive technology with them.

LLleu: Well, they do, because they have the stuff they’re using for animals.

Tequila Mockingbird: But they don’t seem to have it for humans. Because Sallah is explicitly thinking, like, “Well, even if he’s gay, he has to have kids. So why not with me?” And her thinking on this topic goes so far that she eventually decides to drug him and sexually assault him, and she becomes pregnant as a result of this sexual assault, and they get married. This is fine, normal, and great.

Tequila Mockingbird: His quotations when her sexual advances become very obvious are:

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Perhaps this is the time,’ he mused as if alone. ‘There will never be a better. And it must be done.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘So, Sallah,’ he said in his rich low and sensual voice, ‘it is you.’

Tequila Mockingbird: “She knew she should interpret that cryptic remark, but then he began to kiss her.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, we get that, and then we get the time jump, and we learned that they’ve been married. They have three or four children, and he still seems completely uninterested in romance or sex. She starts initiating sexual encounters in the early morning when he’s still asleep, and that is the way that they are able to conceive all of their subsequent children, and she refers to them as, quote, “dawn attacks,” end quote.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then she goes after Avril Bitra and ends up basically trapped on the Yokohama, and there’s no way to get her back down. It’s a little unclear whether she’s going to die anyway, because she is bleeding from a horrible injury — the door basically cuts her foot partially off, and she’s been just bleeding out, uncontrolled, for.I think almost an hour or so at that point, because Avril is not giving her any medical care.

Tequila Mockingbird: So even after Avril has taken off in the Mariposa to her death, Sallah is stuck in the spaceship with either no way to get down or not a good likelihood that she would live long enough for them to get up there and get her back. But I think the shuttles are dubiously operational at that point; they don’t have a lot of fuel —

Tequila Mockingbird: — so, for whatever reason, it’s clear Sallah decides that she’s not coming back down; she’s gonna die on the ship. And when Tarvi is informed of this, he suddenly is absolutely devastated, and screaming, and confesses, actually he’s been in love with her all along. And I will also read a scene from there:

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘Sal-lah!’ The two syllables were said in a tone that brought her heart to her mouth and tears to her eyes. Why had he never spoken her name that way before? Did it mean the longawaited avowal of his love? The anguish in his voice evoked a spirit tortured and distressed.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s then revealed that he does love her romantically, and he just never told her? Because he was too obsessed with rocks?

LLleu: Yeah. He’s really into rocks, and I love that for him, actually. It’s great.

Tequila Mockingbird: Honestly, without this specific scene, my preferred interpretation would probably be, this guy is just asexual, possibly aromantic, and really loves geology, and that’s so fine. But then we get this elaborate scene where he’s confessing his love, and it’s very honestly racist in terms of the language that McCaffrey is putting into his voice here. We get like:

Tequila Mockingbird: “jewel in the night,[3], my golden girl, my emerald-eyed ranee, why did I never tell you before how much you mean to me? I was too proud. I was too vain.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “But you taught me to love, taught me by your sacrifice, when I was too engrossed in my other love—my worklove—to see the inestimable gift of your affection.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s bad and racist separately, but also the fact that it’s racist makes it more bad. It’s just a hot mess in a sandwich. And then she dies, and he decides that he has to change his name to her last name, Telgar, so that her name will never be forgotten, and, indeed, we know in later books that it is not: Telgar Hold, Telgar Weyr are all named after her and presumably founded by their descendants…?

LLleu: And here’s the thing. Avril Bitra and Tarvi Andyar are only scratching the surface.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, yeah. It continues and gets worse, ’cause we also get Kenjo — what is it, Fusaiyuki?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Kenjo Fusaiyuki, who is a war pilot and a war hero and another pretty prominent character all through, and then he is killed by Avril as part of her escape. And I do sort of question, if Sallah had actually, say, called for help or told anyone and not just followed Avril by herself, would they have been able to find Kenjo in time to save his life? Hm…

LLleu: Kenjo in particular raises some questions that we’ll talk about a little later on about legacies, but, in particular, I’m thinking about the ways that Kenjo is stereotypically Japanese. He’s doing, like, a kamikaze pilot war cry as he’s flying the sleds into battle.

LLleu: Yeah. And also there’s something about the way that he’s suspicious. He’s not allied with Avril, but —

LLleu: — he is stealing fuel for purposes unknown, and so they do consider the possibility he might be, and even when they are like, “No, he can’t be. He hates her.” There’s still that, like, “Okay, then why is he hoarding fuel?” question mark. And we know, because we see from his perspective, that it’s just because he really likes flying, but there’s still this…

Tequila Mockingbird: Otherness and the way that he is suspected, and also this sort of stereotype of, “Oh, he’s secretive and doesn’t communicate.” It’s just not a great representation, but also he’s a really interesting character — I like him as a character, and I wish that he got to do a little more in the narrative.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I wish that his relationship with his wife wasn’t also kind of racist.

Tequila Mockingbird: “His wife, patient and calm, had ventured no opinion on his avocation, aiding him in its construction.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “She had given him four children, three of them sons, was a good mother, and even managed to help him cultivate the fruit trees that he raised as a credit crop.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Another woman explicitly calls out that he didn’t marry her ’cause she wasn’t traditional enough —

LLleu: When he dies, they contact his stakehold, and his wife is like, “Ah, yes,” and someone else is like, “She’s very traditional.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s just this very clear choice that McCaffrey makes to try and make her world more diverse, but she’s writing from such a point of stereotype, and it’s not just with the named and engaged with characters. We do also learn that part of the requirement of the charter for this colony was that they had to take with them “ethnic nomads,” quote-unquote, who had been displaced from Earth and give them somewhere to live. So we’re told that some of those people are Tuareg, and we’re told some of them are Irish Travellers. Any other groups that are specifically named?

LLleu: I think we’re only explicitly told about the Tuareg and the Travellers, but it’s sort of implied that there are other groups as well.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Then we actually meet Sean Connell, and he’s a significant character and is part of that Irish Traveller community, and we don’t really meet anyone else. But then we’re told that in this first Threadfall. Like, oops! All of the ethnic nomads have been wiped out, because they were out from under shelter, living out, except Sean Connell’s family, who happened to be in a cave, and two Tuareg babies who were saved because they had seen the Thread and put them in a, I think, a refrigerator or something —

Tequila Mockingbird: — to save them and could be adopted. So we get this very tidy, like, “Oh, all of these nomadic peoples have died, except for these children, who can now be raised in a white community, and of course the Irish Travellers are fine, and, da-da-da, we’ve tidily moved on from that.” And it’s just… Yikes.

LLleu: Yeah. The Irish Travellers are fine, except, don’t worry, we’re still gonna be kind of racist about them. So Sean’s family are Travellers; Sorka’s family are also Irish, but settled. And we’re explicitly told that, of course, in the space future we’ve all left behind our prejudices. But also we’re explicitly told that Sorka’s family are like, “I don’t know about you being friends with that Traveller kid…”

Tequila Mockingbird: And in the same way that we’re told that — the quote is:

Tequila Mockingbird: “Only a few strong ethnic traditions had survived the Age of Religions, but the Chinese, Japanese, Maori, and Amazon-Kapayan were four that had retained some of their ancient ways.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But we get references to Irish culture, and they’re all so proud of being Irish, constantly. So it’s like, do you not think that that’s an ethnic tradition?

LLleu: Which is wild because of the ways Irishness runs through the whole series. It’s clearly something that McCaffrey was interested in and interested in exploring and in integrating into her world.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I can only assume that she doesn’t think of it as an ethnic tradition, because she assumes it is unmarked culturally, because it is the white cultural default?

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s just baffling and loops right back to, “Oh, well, nobody speaks Pashto anymore!” Uh… I just don’t think that that’s true.

LLleu: Also it’s clearly not entirely true, ’cause Sallah is able to ask some people about Pashto phrases and Pashto names, because Tarvi says things in Pashto while they’re having sex, and she’s trying to figure out, like, is it another woman? Is it a man? What’s going on here, and she never gets an answer, and so we never get an answer.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, I can only assume that he’s talking about different types of rocks.

LLleu: I was gonna say the same thing — presumably he’s naming different kinds of rock.

Tequila Mockingbird: So we have this deeply bonkers assertion that culture and religion is gone, and we’ve kind of settled all of that in the “Age of Religions.” That’s over; the space future is completely secular and completely acultural, completely homogeneously cultural. And then none of the actual world-building we see really seems to live up to that.

LLleu: Yeah. Side note, very funny to be like, “Ah, yes, no one believes in religion anymore,” and then have All the Weyrs of Pern end the way it does. But…

Tequila Mockingbird: So there is this, in some ways, both cultural genocide in the specific choices about what happens to the Tuareg, but also in the sense of writing this space future where culture is over whenever she decides it is, but also isn’t over whenever she decides she wants to engage with it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And one of the things that makes me the most frustrated about this book is, so, Kitti Ping Yung is a character who is the biologist who engineers the dragons. And she’s very elderly already at the beginning of this book, and she dies partway through, before she can see her work come to fruition. And she is Chinese, and it’s pointed out that, you know, “Oh, her house is still very Chinese.” We get:

Tequila Mockingbird: “In Kitti’s Pernese house, which was exquisitely furnished with heirlooms from her family, Paul knew better than to disrupt a hospitality ritual.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So they still have Chinese cultural…traditions? It’s kind of unclear.

Tequila Mockingbird: But then, when dragonriders find out that the gold dragons have been specifically bioengineered not to be able to chew firestone and breathe fire — only the bronze dragons, and, as we will later learn, the brown, blue, and green ones, because the 1st batch is only bronzes and golds, and the idea is that they will then lay eggs that will have all of the colors available, but they started with the biggest and strongest dragons, because they’re trying to fight Thread urgently.

LLleu: — in order to rapidly produce a dragon population capable of protecting the colony.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And so, when they have that realization, they decide or imply that, actually, that’s a deliberate decision that Kitti Ping Yung made, because she was sexist.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, this is when they find out that the gold dragons vomit when they try to chew firestone, it doesn’t work:

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘I was just thinking. Kit Ping was such a traditionalist…’ Sorka regarded her husband for a long moment, until he ducked his head, unable to maintain eye contact. ‘All right, Sean, you know every symbol in that program. Did Kit Ping introduce a gender discrimination?’

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘A what?’ Tarrie asked. The other queen riders gathered close, while the young men took discreet backward steps.

Tequila Mockingbird: “‘A gender inhibition…meaning that queens lay eggs, and the other colors fight!’ Sorka was disgusted.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And taking the decision that Anne McCaffrey made, to have queen dragons unable to fight Thread and they only lay eggs —

Tequila Mockingbird: — yeah, putting it in the mouth of a Chinese fictional character and abrogating responsibility for that piece of sexism is so infuriating to me.

LLleu: Yeah. It’s classic McCaffrey, and also classic writers in general, offloading the responsibility for their own decisions onto in-world explanations that make it worse.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also the specific, white women who want to be like, “Well, I’m very feminist, and I’m very aware, and actually, it’s these women of color, who are so backwards and don’t understand.” That’s a deeply poisonous attitude that is very prevalent.

LLleu: Yeah, and especially wild in the ’80s when Woman of Color Feminism was at its height. Like, Woman of Color Feminism capital every word except “of.” But. Hm! Anyway, on the subject of the ethnic nomads, this book also does something that we’ll see again in Renegades, which is, introduce a character from an itinerant population who is extremely dismissive of the settled cultures that he interacts with — namely, Sean — and by the end of the book he’s like, “Ah, yeah. Obviously, I want to settle down in a house with this woman, and we’ll live a — I mean, not a normal settled life, ’cause we’re dragonriders,” but the book, again, forces him inevitably to abandon the itinerant lifestyle and the community that he belonged to and join this settled community instead. It’s weird, because in some ways, as we’ll see in Renegades as well, some aspects of this book make it seem like Anne did, in fact, understand the structures that systemically marginalize itinerant communities in areas that are largely where the population is largely settled, but then also she still buys into some of them, and it’s very frustrating.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yep. So I would like to talk about Sean, and I would like to disclaim my own biases here, because Sean is my type. Love someone who’s very, very good at what they do and kind of an arrogant jerk about that fact. And if that describes you feel free to slide into my DMs. So I loved this book as a kid, partly because I was a little horse girl, and I love all the horses, but partly because I really liked Sean and Sorka’s relationship, and I think, even now, looking back and seeing a lot more the flaws, I do think it’s one of the better relationships in the series, in terms of, they are both capable of giving free consent when they enter into it. It’s not even fire lizard compulsion, because, while they both do have fire lizards, they both have male firee lizards. She’s got bronzes, and he’s got browns.

Tequila Mockingbird: They both just like each other, and they spend a lot of time together as kids, and they grow up, and they end up in a relationship. And it’s not perfect — there’s definitely a lot of, he goes around being brooding and not acknowledging his feelings, and she does all of the household management and emotional management and just decides that they’re gonna be getting married and doesn’t bother to tell him about that. And then when she gets pregnant, he’s like, “Well, of course we’re getting married.” But I think that, actually, their relationship is very sweet.

LLleu: Yeah. It’s definitely…nice, which is way more than can be said for basically any other relationship in the series.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, the bar is low, but I do think it is one of the healthiest romantic relationships we see in these books.

LLleu: Yeah, I would agree. The last thing, maybe, that I want to talk about in terms of Dragonsdawn in and of itself is, what was the point of the Sallah Telgar plot?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah… It doesn’t really seem to have much of one, honestly. It gives you something to do in the book. It sort of gives the book a plot, because it’s the only person-versus-person conflict within this larger society-versus-nature conflict, and so it resolves the Bitra plotline, but, yeah, you sort of feel like it’s possible, given that she wrote this immediately before, getting back to the main plot of the series in Renegades and All the Weyrs of Pern, that she needed the Ninth Pass Pernese to have access to a spacesuit.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so she had to have someone in this book die in space with an intact spacesuit.

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s honestly the biggest contribution that Sallah makes makes.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is kind of weird, because narratively, it’s treated as if, “Oh, she saved the colony, or she nobly sacrificed her life to prevent Bitra from destroying the colony,” but Avril Bitra just wanted to leave.

LLleu: Yeah. Of course, they don’t want her to take the captain’s gig, which is totally fair. It’s got fuel. It’s a useful vehicle for them to have access to. I’m 100% down with, like, don’t do that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you could make an argument that having it when they did need to make the Crossing to the Northern Continent might have, for example, spared Emily Boll from the shuttle crash —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that significantly injured her, or meant that they were able to get more equipment out safer, etc., etc. It’s definitely an antisocial act —

Tequila Mockingbird: — to take these resources and flee from a community in crisis.

Tequila Mockingbird: But Sallah doesn’t fix that problem, because Avril still has the Mariposa, and in fact flies it directly into the Red Star and dies with the ship, which is what they know is gonna happen and would have happened whether or not Sallah was up there, because the reason it happens is that Ongola pulls the control chip from the Mariposa. That’s the vengeance upon her.

LLleu: Yeah. And the thing that we’re told that Sallah did is that she’s like, “I’m gonna spend my last moments on ‘Pern business.’” And they’ve been having trouble with the probes. They keep sending probes, and they keep blowing up before they can get any useful data. So the people on the surface are like, “Ah, okay, this must be because there’s some kind of malfunction in the probe guidance system on the Yokohama. So if Sallah’s up there, she can manually check things over and make sure that the probes will not malfunction in this way.” But here’s the thing. The probes still blow up. They don’t get any more useful information from this. She accomplishes nothing. But instead, we’re told, “Ah, she gave her life for the colony, to protect us.” I mean, I guess?

Tequila Mockingbird: She tried to. It’s just, what did she actually accomplish?

LLleu: It’s frustrating narratively, because I want there to be some meaningful payoff from this death, which is, I must say, actually very affecting.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, yeah, it’s sad! Because you mostly like Sallah. You’ve gotten to know her. You’ve spent a lot of time in her point of view. I think she’s the first point of view that we get in the book, is her seeing the planet and putting it up on the screen and walking around the ship and meeting little Sorka. She’s kind of our introductory character.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s emotionally effective to lose her two-thirds of the way through the book. But I guess the other thing she does is she repairs the destruction that Avril did so that the ship works, and that does end up paying off plot-wise in All the Weyrs of Pern, that they can use the Yokohama when they get up there.

LLleu: It would be so much more satisfying and more, I think, effective, and I would not be going like, “Well, she didn’t do anything, though. Like, she didn’t save the colony. She wasn’t this great hero.”

LLleu: If at the very least one of the probes that she sent had actually, you know, brought back some useful information instead.

LLleu: I don’t need the whole narrative to be reworked. I still think that their response to Bitra is maybe a little bit overblown, but I get it. But I would have liked Sallah’s death to have some actual, meaningful payoff in the short term and in the long term beyond just…

LLleu: Right, ’cause also they could certainly have this happen, and she sends a probe, and it gets a bunch of data, and then —

LLleu: — Keroon is like, “Oh, it’s gonna take a long time to interpret this data,” and then we find out later that, “Oh, AIVAS has spent the last 2,500 years analyzing this data. And now we have something useful.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is just, yike. A little bit rough, honestly, like. Oof.

LLleu: Yeah. So this seems like an opportune moment for us to pause and give our first set of recommendations, and then we’ll move on to...

Tequila Mockingbird: Our next episode, which will be talking about Dragonsdawn more in the context of the series as a whole and what light it sheds on other books and other plot.

LLleu: Yeah. So my first suggestion is, if you are interested in a book actually by an Irish Traveller writer, you might want to check out Oein DeBhairduin’s Why the Moon Travels, which is a collection of short stories inspired by Traveller oral tradition. He has a couple other books. One is, I think, a collection of essays, and another one is a collection of ghost stories, specficially. So if you’re interested in looking at contemporary Traveller literature by a member of the actual community rather than the mess that is at work here — something to check out.

Tequila Mockingbird: And my recommendations are, first, if you would like a story about planetary colonization and racism and the ways in which a society in crisis can turn in on itself that is actually dealing with it as horror and engaging with it more clear-eyed. I would like to recommend Emma Newman’s Planetfall, which is about a future space colony in which something has gone horribly wrong upon landing, and our protagonist and narrator is one of the few people in the know, because they’ve decided to keep the rest of the community in the dark so as not to cause a panic. But this cannot stay forever. My other recommendation, and similarly thinking about the angle of society in a crisis, and in this case a post-war society dealing with both the trauma of war and with a renewed crisis, and the ways in which their response to that crisis and the government’s response to that crisis is deeply inadequate, is Godzilla Minus One, which is actually a movie that came out in 2023. It’s an amazing movie, and I think one of the best Godzilla movies recently, mostly because it’s a Japanese Godzilla movie, and they actually know what Godzilla is about, as opposed to Americans who are just like, “It’s fun to watch the monster crush things.” No, this is a movie about nuclear trauma and the trauma of war, which is what Godzilla should be about. There are also —

LLleu: The writer of the script for the original Godzilla movie, Kayama Shigeru, wrote several novels about Godzilla, which are available in a recent translation under the title Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, published by University of Minnesota Press. So if you’re interested in a more, perhaps, literary and even more actively environmentalist and anti-nuclear approach to Godzilla, worth taking a look.

[1] From “Escape Routes,” originally published in 1974 and republished in The Language of the Night.

[2] Or Sikh, for that matter. Perhaps technically not none, but it’s much less likely than that they would have been Muslim (or, if he’s stretching the timeline back to the Bactrian kingdom, maybe Buddhist).