Dragons Made Me Do It: Season 2, Episode #2: Make It Make Sense, part 2

Tequila Mockingbird: And welcome to Season 2 of Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about media related in some way to Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but still the only one by us.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and when I took biology in high school, we had to do a capstone science research project, and I did mine on seat apportionment in the United States House of Representatives and learned how to do some basic statistics.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I remember nothing about biology in high school, except that my best friend and lab partner wrote “The Lipids of Doom” in the back of his notebook, and every time lipids came up we would raise the notebook and scream, “The Lipids of Doom!” Which I’m sure everyone else in this honors biology class really enjoyed and benefited from.

Lleu: Today, we are, once again, joined by two friends of the podcast for a continuation of our discussion of the science — or lack thereof — in Pern.

Roxie: Hello! I’m Roxie. In high school I composed a song parody about nucleic acids, and then I stopped taking biology classes, because biology is yucky. My Pern credentials are that I am a previous guest on part one of this episode and the originator of the Rukbat Messy Room Theory, publication pending.

Nazh: I’m Nazh, and around the time that I was in high school biology was also when I was writing, purely on my own initiative, a full-length small research report on different species of dragons resident in different biomes. Uh, no one asked me to do this; I just did it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we are going to be continuing in our scientific explorations, this time focusing more on what is happening on Pern itself, rather than in the space around it. And for that, I think we wanted to talk first about Pern and Thread and how Thread might have had an impact on the flora and fauna of the planet.

Nazh: As somebody who only read the first handful of Pern books as a kid, I was thrilled to find out from you guys that we get a whole bunch of other unhinged bits of Pern evolutionary history, especially from the prequel books. You have now told me that at some point in Pern’s past, there were grazers, question mark? Something that maybe means mammalian? I personally would rather there not be mammals, considering there don’t seem to be any mammals now, but at the very least, there were grazers — probably meaning large animals…

Nazh: I briefly read “The P.E.R.N. Survey” in preparation for this, and I didn’t learn any new information other than what you guys told me in the episode.

Roxie: It’s okay — neither did the surveyors. They learned nothing and they passed it on to the colonists.

Nazh: So we know that we have a lot of lizard-adjacent things in the fire lizards and the tunnel snakes, and the watch-whers —?

Tequila Mockingbird: Also, I do want to make sure you know that there’s no grass on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: “[...] short, greenish spiky vegetation looked somewhat like grass. It had no silicates,” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — “was visibly triangular in form, and was more blue than green.”

Lleu: Well, no wonder that all of the livestock thrives on Pern, then — they don’t even have to worry about grinding their teeth down constantly.

Tequila Mockingbird: Does this mean that all of the runner beasts have giant horrible teeth and fangs?

Nazh: That is a great question; I don’t actually know what happens with horses if you don’t feed them enough roughage. That does sound like an actual problem you would have.

Tequila Mockingbird: So maybe they’re just hand-filing down all of the teeth?

Nazh: It is not that their teeth keep growing; that’s only rodents that do that —

Nazh: Correct. It still might do something weird, because they do just have really big teeth, on the assumption they’re gonna get ground down, but it might be fine. That’s also the first thing to go out in a lot of animals when they get old, if they’re being taken care of otherwise. So maybe horses just get to live a really long time, and it’s great.

Roxie: We do also have an uninterrupted history of animal husbandry on Pern —

Roxie: — so these have always been domesticated animals. It’s quite possible that they’re giving them something to chew on.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is canonical that they are genetically adapting them to be better suited for Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that’s part of the justification we get behind all of the very stupid renaming from horse to runner beast, etc., because they’re not the same as an Earth horse — by the time we get to even the Second Pass, they have been genetically modified, and the fact that they are unable to genetically modify some animals to be successful on Pern is why we don’t, for example, have bees.

Nazh: That one is wild to me, I will say. Chickens are one of the hardiest of our livestock that just routinely go wild. But, you know, whatever.

Roxie: So, pre-the introduction of humans and human-brought species and human-engineered species, with the survey, we’re coming to Pern. Thread has come at least once, and already there’s no large animals.

Nazh: Well, I will say, the “grazer” bones were stated to be from about 50,000 years ago. Now, you guys already discussed — this doesn’t necessarily mean that that is when the last grazers lived. It just means that that’s when they found the fossils from.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it does say that they have ground-down dental machinery, so something’s grinding their teeth down.

Nazh: Hey, maybe it’s not silicates; maybe there’s just some other tough plant stuff.

Lleu: Okay. There’s two other native animals that we know of, one of which we know is large — wherries, who, prior to the arrival of humans, seem to be the apex predator. We know they eat fire lizard hatchlings, at least — they probably can’t catch adult fire lizards, but we don’t know for sure. And they presumably survived the advent of Thread by having wings. Although — I also still don’t know where I got this sense, but — I did somewhere get the sense as a child that wherries have some distant relation to fire lizards, and have some amount of whatever telepathic, etc., abilities that fire lizards have.

Nazh: Interesting. I did not get that impression from the Harper Hall books, which was my greatest exposure to wherries.

Lleu: Yeah. I think I must have gotten it from something in The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern, but I honestly don’t remember, and it’s possible I just made it up completely.

Nazh: I’ll be much happier if wherries are related to fire lizards, because the fact that we don’t get any description of any other bird-like species means that I only have one lineage to deal with here. There are multiple lizard-y things, and if there’s only one bird that’s annoying, so I would rather make the bird also related to the lizard-y things.

Lleu: The other species we know exists but we don’t know anything about is something called “wher-sports,” and we know that they hunt them in the Southern Continent, but we don’t know how big they are. I assume that they’re native; I assume that they’re probably related to wherries in some way. I’m imagining that they’re more like chicken-sized, whereas wherries seem to be, like, big.

Lleu: Big enough that worries can be a threat to a human, if they are so inclined.

Nazh: Small emu size? Big enough that a wherry was very difficult to pull out of a swamp.

Tequila Mockingbird: I will throw this curveball at you: it’s possible that wher-sports are chickens —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that escaped the first Threadfall and have gone feral, and because they don’t know what they are, they’re just like, maybe this is sort of related to a wherry? It has feathers, but it looks kind of different — maybe it’s a bad wherry?

Lleu: I’m into that. Alright, we’re all in on, wher-sports are chickens.

Tequila Mockingbird: We also do get attestation of a bunch of different types of snakes, so more reptiles —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and we know that there are native pollinators and bugs of a variety. We get trundle-bugs, but we know that there are also some other type of bug that are pollinating all of these plants.

Nazh: Do they explicitly discuss pollinators, then? Or just imply that they exist?

Tequila Mockingbird: And then we get no further updates. So there’s some form of insect life that may or may not be a pollinator. I am assuming something’s pollinating.

Nazh: So they may not have known if it really could be a pollinator, but the fact that the colonists start growing Earth plants on Pern — and presumably not hand-pollinating every bit of their wheat, or whatever the heck — we can probably just assume that, great, it worked out. That part they didn’t have to worry about.

Roxie: So the way that species are surviving Thread is by going underground, going underwater, being small and widespread enough that a couple Threadfalls doesn’t take out the entire population, or whatever fire lizards are doing. Do we think that they’re surviving by flying out of the way, or by teleporting, or by psychically knowing it’s coming?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah — we do see wild fire lizards chewing firestone and breathing fire at Thread, I believe, specifically in defense of their eggs and hatchlings.

Nazh: I kind of hate that, though, because that contradicts Menolly’s whole situation? I guess maybe there just isn’t firestone around.

Lleu: Well, also, those fire lizards are — possibly, at least — not the mentasynth-modified ones.

Lleu: Yeah, so the colonists arrived and Sean and Sorka and a couple other people Impressed fire lizards, and then they did mentasynth to the eggs that those fire lizards produced, so there’s a second, mentasynth fire lizard lineage that subsequently replaced the original, non-mentasynthed fire lizards.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is an alien process that — I think what we get is, it increases empathy and is done on various animals and also people to make them more capable of making telepathic connections.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It is the specialty of an alien species that humans have interacted with, called the Eridani.

Tequila Mockingbird: We do get information canonically, that mentasynth doesn’t work well on cats or felines, for some reason.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the wild felines that hate everybody and are homophobic —

Tequila Mockingbird: — on Pern have been mentasynthed. So it’s possible that it does work on cats, but it doesn’t make them like you; it makes them want to kill you.

Tequila Mockingbird: Whether they’re naturally homophobic or whether the mentasynth also makes them more homophobic I think is narratively unclear.

Roxie: When they can communicate with you, they learn more about you and realize that they hate you.

Nazh: Are you saying that the fire-breathing behavior is seen the mentasynthed fire lizards or the pre-mentasynth ones?

Lleu: We don’t know, but if I were going to hypothesize why there’s a difference, I would suggest that the fire-breathing behavior is something that the mentasynthed fire lizards, maybe by virtue of being more dependent on humans, don’t do.

Nazh: Alright, sure. For the record, I could also believe that modern fire lizards could do it, and it’s just that the queen that Menolly saw didn’t have access to firestone at that moment.

Lleu: Right, the other thing is, we know that firestone is not distributed everywhere across the planet’s surface, so…

Lleu: Right, the Nerat Peninsula is not a big firestone producer so these fire lizards don’t do that, is also a possibility, yeah.

Nazh: Great. So we generally seem to have a pretty good lineage of lizard-like things, and, if we follow my train of thought, I would like to extend that to bird-like things, which even fits reality, because all of our birds are dinosaurs and all that fun stuff. So, that, I think, pretty neatly explains all of the megafauna that we get to see. We have the Earth lineages; we have the Pern lizard megafauna lineage; we have a whole crap ton of bug-like things — sure, I’m not inclined to worry about it.

Nazh: Yes, the whole ocean ecosystem is amazing, and we do not get to see much of it. I would also like to do the quick disclaimer that all of this, including the fact that humans can just be on Pern and it’s fine, and that fire lizards look like lizards and all of that — we are starting from a gigantic evolutionary biology, either this is the hugest coincidence and Pern is the specialest place in the universe, or we are operating in science fiction land where the fact that we’re telling a story here means this is the one place in the universe where they just happen to have recognizable lizards.

Roxie: Right. Even if they’re stretching the linguistic descriptions a lot, like, “Oh, I kind of think it looks like a lizard” —

Roxie: Then we’re still — the fact that they can digest meat from native Pernese creatures —

Nazh: I’m fully just glossing past that whole side of evolutionary biology, being like, “Whatever, man. This is the sci-fi world where, where large life evolves, it’s roughly compatible with Earth life.”

Lleu: I was gonna say, there is one key difference, which is that the tunnel snakes — presumably, because it’s implied that they're related to fire lizards — and fire lizards, dragons, etc. are not actually reptiles. They do not have scales; they have hide.

Nazh: Sure. I put in the category of “It’s an alien snake-like thing, cool. It looked like a snake and we don’t have to worry about it.”

Nazh: But hide I think tends to imply hair — do we get any sort of bristles on dragons or fire lizards?

Lleu: Not that I can think of? They’re just described consistently as having “hide” —

Lleu: Wait, there is a good reason why wherries might need to evolve feathers, if that’s better for flying, and fire lizards wouldn’t.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is worth noting that fire lizards are not actually “flying” in the sense that any earth creature is flying. They are just telekinetically lifting themselves at all times.

Nazh: Yeah, I forget about this fact constantly, and then I am reminded of it.

Tequila Mockingbird: Their wings are not actually sufficient to support powered flight.

Lleu: Their wings are doing something, but the wings are doing something supported by telekinesis.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it’s possible the wings are for steering and things, but the lift is provided by telekinesis —

Lleu: — too, but I think the lift that they’re getting from their wings is being augmented by the telekinesis.

Roxie: I think they use the wings for the gestural component of the spells they’re casting to be kept aloft.

Lleu: When I wrote my Pern/Young Wizards crossover, I was briefly considering having fire lizards also be wizards, but the whole collective consciousness thing made that a little complicated, so I did not do that.

Roxie: Yeah. Thread as an ecological pressure is really weird, because it comes every 200 years.

Nazh: Yes, so it is a very strong evolutionary pressure, and evolutionary pressure is stronger, basically, the larger proportion of the population it’s acting on dies or is unable to reproduce. That’s why you can get, like, antibiotic-resistant bacteria with only one cycle of application of an antibiotic. But, as Roxie says, if you only apply that once every few hundred years, then those organisms have a few hundred years to evolve in different directions. So, it’s a weird one. That is a strong enough pressure that truly, if you kill everything except the handful who managed to make it, then guess what? All of them have whatever trait it was that let them survive the first time.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it does last 50 years, which is a number of generations.

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially for fire lizards who seem to reproduce once a year, or something like that.

Nazh: So I think that gives us a good amount of ability to say that Thread is an active evolutionary pressure, which I personally love. My favorite thing in fictional ecologies is how an ecology adapts to an insane specfic catastrophe premise. I would love to see the world of Pern three million years after Thread has been happening constantly — but, sadly, we don’t get that world; we get dragons instead, so they stop that beautiful world from happening, for me, personally. But we can dream.

Lleu: Maybe the fire lizards would have evolved into dragons eventually anyway.

Roxie: Because Thread is not an evolutionary pressure in the ocean; it’s a boon.

Roxie: ’Cause you have basically a free food source that falls in massive abundance every 200 years.

Nazh: I would compare it to the whale fall effect on the ocean floor, just a massive shot of nutrients into a specific spot of the ocean at some interval.

Roxie: Not to mention that one solution, at least, for the inconsistent continent sizes, is to just say, “Well, sure, that’s the size of the continent, but it’s not the size of the planet, ’cause the planet is 98% water.”

Nazh: I would really love it if that was the answer. Roxie and I have been discussing for a long time how much we’d prefer for the actual story of Pern to just be happening underwater this entire time. And I’m all for that — all ocean, humans are just scratching this tiny little surface. It’s great.

Roxie: Yeah, there’s some sentient alien utopia down there, but it wasn’t relevant to Lessa’s journey, so they never made contact. I know what you’re dying to ask, which is, if there is this entire civilization flourishing under the oceans of Pern, complete with free public transit system, why haven’t the dolphins told us about it? And the answer is they promised not to.

Lleu: I don’t if dolphins in general I would describe as “very ethical,” but we know they keep their promises.

Nazh: I would also like to note, just for everybody’s enjoyment, hopefully, that in our beautiful underwater society we decided that the Thread getting dumped onto the surface is the occasion for massive parties — just go up and have a rave with your amazing Thread treat.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, I do have a question, though. If, as you say, Thread is a great boon for these oceanic creatures — this sudden influx of food, it’s fantastic. You get used to that for 50 years. Wouldn’t you then have a giant population crash when Threadfall ends, every 200 years?

Nazh: I’d say it depends a lot on how they were adapting to it. Also, I think for all that we’re talking about how it’s great, the fact that there’s more food in certain patches of the ocean at a semi-predictable frequency — the ocean’s real big. I don’t necessarily think that that actually makes a huge difference.

Nazh: So, I think it’s more a boon to the individual fish that happened to get lucky that day.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s basically like fish food is being sprinkled across the whole ocean?

Roxie: My intuition on just the mathematical patterns of population is that, if you have a sufficient boom, that will create a huge burst of fish population lower on the food chain where they’re eating Thread, and then that’ll create predator booms, and then the Thread will go away, the prey populations will take a massive hit, and then the predator populations could potentially consume the entire prey population before taking the hit themselves. So there’s a chance that you lose biodiversity that way, but I think we’ve already concluded that it just isn’t really that impactful.

Nazh: — for me to think that one strip of the top five feet of the water is enough to make a significant difference.

Lleu: I do also kind of wonder how much biodiversity there actually is on Pern? Mainly because we get so few references to actual native Pernese animals.

Nazh: I personally love the idea that, yes, the continents of Pern are pretty dang bare, because they got stripped by this massive apocalypse that happened not all that long ago, on an evolutionary timescale, but the oceans have not been touched at all, except in a positive way, so I’d love to think that there are massive coral reefs down there, that everything is great, that there is, if anything, more biodiversity, because we’re saying the ocean is gigantic.

Nazh: I would love to just think that the ocean is doing all great, while the land mass on Pern is just going to hell for millennia.

Lleu: They don’t say Nerat, obviously, because it’s in the survey, but I believe that’s one of the things when they’re like, “The coral reefs are good, unlike the jungles!”.

Nazh: If I can make a brief aside, when these two were talking about that specific quote in “The P.E.R.N. Survey” episode and being like, “Why was Anne McCaffrey hating on rainforests?” I can at least provide a little bit of context — it’s that rainforests tend to have stripped out their soil nutrients, and they really are mostly eating each other, and any fresh influxes of nutrients from elsewhere, such as from animals migrating away to take advantage of temperate nutrient booms and then carrying that back with them in the form of their own biomass. So it is kind of true that rainforests are cycling nutrients in a more active way than all ecosystems are cycling nutrients. It is weird to make that a big negative thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: We had a listener of the podcast, tumblr user rary, did reach out and let us know that the soils in the Amazon, specifically, are really low on nutrients —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and it's basically surviving on sediment runoff and that perhaps Anne McCaffrey heard that the Amazon actually had really low-nutrient soil and was extrapolating from that to all rainforests.

Lleu: Yeah, although it’s also interesting that Indigenous peoples in the Amazon developed ways of making soil extremely good, presumably to compensate for the general low soil quality, so it does seem like, in the space future, you might know that — but I guess Anne McCaffrey maybe didn’t know about it, so…

Tequila Mockingbird: Also just in general, European and European-inspired agricultural practices generally are so fucking terrible for soil quality —

Tequila Mockingbird: — see: the Dust Bowl. It’s about strip-mining the soil and slurping all the nitrogen out of it —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and then looking around and giving a shocked Pikachu face and going, “What happened to my topsoil?”

Roxie: Well, and on a similar note of colonialism, I think you can draw a direct line from colonial explorers to “Jungle scary. Jungle bad. Jungle kill me.”

Lleu: They’ve been living on the northern continent for 2,500 years, so I guess they probably can’t have completely obliterated the soil quality — otherwise, they’d be dead — but I do wonder what agricultural practices on burn actually are like.

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially if you’re pumping a bunch of agenothree into the soil after every Threadfall.

Nazh: I don’t know enough chemistry to say whether that would be accessible nitrogen, or bad nitrogen, or completely biologically inert nitrogen.

Tequila Mockingbird: It might lead to nutrient blooms and fuck up all your lake ecology, too, with algae blooms.

Nazh: Yeah. Now, I would believe that — like you talked about — maybe the Healercraft survived longer with more modern stuff than some of the less critically important for life areas of study. I would believe that the Farmer Crafthall kept pretty good —

Nazh: — general “how to not murder your planet” theory longer, because that’s critically important.

Tequila Mockingbird: We talked about this in our human demographics episode. We were, for that episode, and in general, assuming that the farming practices on Pern are more efficient and more sustainable than actual medieval Europe, because, as you say, there’s no reason that the Farmercraft would have just forgotten crop rotation.

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s the kind of information that wouldn’t get lost because you’re actively putting it into practice —

Tequila Mockingbird: And so just lived experience with farming will make sure that those farming practices are passed along, and we know that at least some practices are very ritualistically passed along, because they’ve been told to watch out for grubs. And they remember that —

Roxie: So they don’t need to know why they’re doing it. They just need to know that we sing the little song about it, and therefore we do it.

Nazh: Sure. We didn’t really talk about plants, but that’s mostly because I don’t think we get very much information about plants.

Lleu: Yeah, we know there’s a couple things that bear fruit; we know there’s at least one citrus thing — we don’t know if that’s a native Pernese tree or whether that’s imported.

Tequila Mockingbird: Citrus trees are so slutty; I would fully believe that an Earth citrus got freaky with some local Pern flora and survived.

Tequila Mockingbird: We know that there are, generally, temperate forests, rainforests, and plains —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that have some kind of not grass, question mark, that grazing animals can survive on. And we know that they can grow probably adapted Earth edible grains that can be the basis of things like bread, porridge, oatmeal, etc.

Lleu: Yeah. We don’t know how many different grains they’re growing. And we know that there are “tubers” — some kind of root vegetables.

Tequila Mockingbird: One of which is, I think, firmly identified as carrots, and one of which is just called a “tuber,” but which I assume, because of the general Irish vibes, is a potato —

Nazh: Well, we’re once again fully operating in the space of: it’s wild to say that flowers and trees both evolved on Pern, but whatever, sure. Something that looks close enough to a flower and close enough to a tree has evolved on Pern.

Nazh: Also greens. That one’s easier, at least. That’s just some leaves you can eat. Yeah. Well, honestly, the leaf — the leaf is an incredibly specialized structure. Whatever; we’re not worrying about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I will note that we do get the information in Dragonsdawn that the botanists are working their asses off.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, it is possible that a lot of these things are Earth transplants that have been bioengineered. I think the only things that were very clear are native Pernese things are klah bark and fellis.

Tequila Mockingbird:: And all the other stuff, like “featherfern” and “sweatroot,” it’s entirely possible that those are Earth plants that just got weird names over 2,500 years.

Nazh: So that’s kind of as much effort as I’m inclined to put into plants. They’re mostly a hand-waving convenience.

Nazh: Excuse you, I’m here for birds. And also plants, to be fair — plants are actually my secondary, but… So if that’s kind of it for the native Pern ecosystem, then that talk about the grubs leads us into the fascinating world of what the heck the settlers did to Pern.

Nazh: As Tequila was saying, they did some big bunch of stuff with plants; we don’t know. Maybe it’s only stuff that’s good for people, maybe it’s almost everything on the planet. Who can say?

Roxie: Because there would have been motivation for that, even just, like, wild plants that they weren’t going to cultivate —

Tequila Mockingbird: So, Kentucky? I mean, it is actually more teal than regular grass; I will say that. It’s not blue, but it is bluer.

Nazh: Also, if you would like a not-a-grass-but-looks-like-a-grass-and-has-a-triangular-cross-section, we could just conclude that all of them are sedges.

Nazh: So they mess around with the plants a whole bunch. Great, cool; that was their first priority when they got there, that and adapting their domestic animals so that they’d survive. This is before they knew they needed to mess around with fire lizards, or Thread, or grubs, or anything like that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Uh-huh. That accords with what we see in Dragonsdawn.

Roxie: Okay. We can, I think, be pretty generous about how much they got done there, because it would have been their top priority, and they would have been at full technology and full capacity, and they would have packed to do exactly this.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it seems clear that they very much planned to do that and had a schedule — “This is when we take the horses for this, and then we do the sheep” — it was all part of the plan, and it was very much proceeding according to plan.

Tequila Mockingbird: By the time the first Threadfall hits, we know that they’ve gotten to recreational animals.

Tequila Mockingbird: So they’ve clearly gotten through all of their agricultural needs, because they’re doing horses for fun horse breeding.

Lleu: And Ted Tubberman has access to a bunch of lions and tigers and cheetahs, right?

Lleu: — these were not brought along because they’re like, “We need lions.”

Nazh: You know, I haven’t asked that question yet. Why are the lions here?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because — don’t worry about it! — Ted Tubberman’s daughter dies in the first Threadfall. He is deeply psychologically wounded by that, because he’s a pussy —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and they shun him. And while he is shunned in his weirdo little cabin, terrifying the shit out of his wife and family, he’s like, “I know!” It’s supervillain energy. He’s like, “Aha! I’ll make the cats; that’ll make them sorry!”

Lleu: And then I kind of assumed that he was doing the cats because he was bored. I don’t know if it was a revenge thing.

Nazh: Okay, wait, but this still does not tell me where he got some lions to do this on.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, so they had a full bank of Earth frozen embryos —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because they were gonna see what they thought the ecology needed.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Well, it’s possible that they thought in the Northern Continent they wanted savannah —

Tequila Mockingbird: — or they thought that the grasslands could use it if they were trying to introduce —

Tequila Mockingbird: — wild boar or something. I don’t know. So he stole those embryos —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and, like, tried to use mentasynth on them, which, as we know, doesn’t work, and so the psychic cats he created hated him instead of being his special buddies and murdered him and escaped.

Lleu: Yeah, right — you get your psychic animal friends, and the psychic animal enemies.

Nazh: This does imply the existence of a psychic animal enemies to friends to lovers.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’d read it. To be fair, I am implying a little — it’s textually unclear whether the result of the mentasynth not working is, the cats are the same level of intelligent as an earth cat and that’s why they kill him and escape? Or whether it does work and make them more intelligent and telepathic and also they hate him and kill him and then escape.

Lleu: Yeah. I think we get pretty strong evidence in later books that the cats are actually intelligent.

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re hunting in ways that wildcats generally don’t.

Tequila Mocckingbird: Although it’s possible that’s because of the evolutionary pressure that Pern has put them under, that their behavior has shifted.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, so, when the colonists go from the South Continent to the North Continent —

Tequila Mockingbird: So there’s a bunch of just cattle, presumably also sheep and pigs —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that are just feral on the Southern Continent, because —

Tequila Mockingbird: — either they were ranched animals whose owners died in the first Threadfall and so were never caught —

Tequila Mockingbird: — or in the evacuation they were trying to get them, and some of them were too far away, or panicked, or whatever, and had to be abandoned because they ran out of time.

Roxie: I would kind of expect those to die out during one or more Passes of Thread, though.

Roxie: Whereas the cats, if they have some sort of psychic ability, maybe that’s how they’re dodging Thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, there’s also cave structures that could shield them from Thread.

Nazh: I’m okay with saying that we know that there were grazers on Pern and they were killed by Thread, but we don’t know how long that took. It might have been many millennia of slow effects. Also, maybe the native Pernese grazers were sluggish. Maybe they were big, slow lizards; we don’t know.

Lleu: We also know that fire lizards, especially Impressed ones but possibly also wild ones, do have a more general protective instinct.

Lleu: We know that the fire lizards were trying to herd livestock inside before the first Threadfall.

Lleu: So it’s possible that livestock survived because fire lizards were —

Lleu: That was one thing I was gonna say. The other thing I was gonna say is, we do know from “Beyond Between” that there’s at least one psychic horse on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not canon, and I refuse to interpret it as canon. The other thing that I was going to say —

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, you shouldn’t, and you should feel bad about that. We also know that because Tubberman seeded the grubs on Southern, Thread is not able to kill all of the plant life —

Tequila Mockingbird: — so it’s possible that what killed the native Pernese grazers was not Thread falling specifically — because it never falls on everywhere; it falls on specific areas —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but that Thread was killing enough of the plants that it couldn’t support a large grazing population, and that would no longer be a problem on the Southern Continent.

Nazh: I had thought about that a while ago and then completely forgot it during that segment, so thank you for bringing that back. That’s absolutely a way easier way to make something go extinct than killing the actual members of that species.

Roxie: This does actually bring up for me, though, a question that, when you discussed it on an earlier episode, really got to me, and so I did make a note, and I need us to go back to it. Why did they need to wait for centuries to go get a sample of grubs from Southern?

Lleu: I wish I could tell you, because I hate that they feel they need to wait centuries to do this.

Roxie: I could be wrong, but I just don’t think you would have a viable population to actually propagate on its own in Southern if that population couldn’t lose a small sample and still survive. Nazh, you have a proposal to fix this for me.

Nazh: Yes, my proposal is dumb, but also I can’t think of any solutions that are less dumb. So: I’m not even joking about making the grubs 200-year cicadas.

Nazh: Specifically because, you’ve discussed that this is a problem before, we know that the dragons, to some extent, modify their reproductive cycles to ramp up when Thread is coming. We don’t know if that’s a sensory thing, or if that’s a time-based thing, or what, and it doesn’t make a ton of sense, but whatever. So, I’m just saying, look, they have the technology. However they do it. So, perhaps, the grubs specifically have a population boom when it is Thread time, so it’s not so much that they had to wait for a certain amount of time to pass as they had to wait for a certain amount of Falls to pass.[2] And maybe it’s only one — maybe you get 50 years of good reproduction, and then there’s plenty, but it was a tiny population during the first Fall, and then by the end of the second Fall, they’d forgotten. It’s not good, to be clear, but it’s the best I can come up with.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, even by the end of the First Interval they seem to have given up on the Southern Continent. That is one of Lleu’s biggest frustrations with Dragonseye —

Tequila Mockingbird: — they’re like, “We just can’t find Landing anymore!”

Lleu: No, no, no, it’s not, it’s not that they can’t find Landing, it’s that they can’t find the Admin building at Landing. Sorry, you had 200 fucking years, and you can’t dig up… one archaeological site that wasn’t even ever that big, because there were no more than 6,000 people living there?

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, so, clearly, Jancis specifically was fated to find the Admin building — it’s like the sword in the stone.

Tequila Mockingbird: Until she was born on Pern, it couldn’t be found. She is the rightwise finder.

Lleu: “Whosoever draws this door obstruction from this building is rightwise born finder of all Admin buildings.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And she does get promoted to Mastersmith specifically for doing that in about an hour.

Tequila Mockingbird: They put that in the notes. They found the building, and they couldn’t open the door, and they were like, “Whosoever…” and then it waited for another 2,200 years.

Nazh: I’m so glad we solved it, guys. So my pitch is, they couldn’t do it during that first Fall, mostly because things were too chaotic for a very long time.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that seems very legit. I think you only really have to explain why they can’t do it in an Interval.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because during a Fall, I’m willing to give you a big pass on, you only have eighteen goddamn dragons! This is real bad!

Nazh: Yeah. And then all of the grubs go dormant, or lay eggs and die, for the entire Interval. And then we get to the second Fall, and seemingly, by that time, you’re saying already everybody had kind of given up on a Southern Continent?

Roxie: Well, and also, if they’re going dormant, or laying eggs with an extremely long incubation period, it’s possible that they did go back, and they looked, and they said, “There ain’t no grubs here.”

Roxie: Maybe there’s a tiny population that messed up their time cycle, but “That’s so small; we can’t take any of that away.”

Lleu: I would love for this not to be the case, because it would be a good explanation.

Lleu: So, problem one is that in Dragonseye, they — when they do their little expedition to the Southern Continent, because everyone’s bored out of their minds, what they are notionally doing is quote-unquote “checking the progress of the Tubberman grubs,” and they do survey their progress and be like, “Yup, they’re spreading out! That’s good.” And that’s a month before the Pass starts. So that’s one problem.

Tequila Mockingbird: So well within the ramp-up. So I would believe that they’ve now started to propagate again.

Nazh: Although it doesn’t explain why they couldn’t take them back with them at that point, if there were a good amount.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, they were busy getting attacked by homophobic lions, Nazh. They were very distracted.

Lleu: So, problem two is in Dragonquest, when they first discover the grubs slash rediscover the grubs, where F’lar takes a sample of grubs to the Masterherder, and the Masterherder and then later the Masterfarmer look at these grubs and are like, “Gross. I hate this.” And the Masterfarmer specifically is like, “Bring me acid so I can destroy these immediately. We have explicit instructions in our Craft records to ‘watch for’ the grubs, and we have spent hundreds of years fighting back infestations of them in Ista and Igen.” This, to me, strongly suggests that the grubs have a normal annual or shorter reproductive cycle and are active consistently.

Tequila Mockingbird: Counterpoint: maybe the acid doesn’t bother them; they love the acid. And the farmers just think that the acid works, because they don’t grow, because they have this long cycle. So they’re like, “Wow, it’s working great! They’re not spreading!” And then Fall happens, and they get kind of busy doing groundwork, and the grubs take over, and they’re like, “Shit, we weren’t actively aciding the grubs, and no wonder they spread! Quick, kill them, kill them, kill them!”

Roxie: Something has to activate the dragons and the grubs on this 200-year reproductive interval.

Roxie: They might just have an internal timer. This is true for cicadas. My favorite fun fact about cicadas is that different cicada broods tend to have prime number cycles, so that their boom is less likely to line up with a predator cycle with a smaller period. So if you have birds on a three-year sort of boom cycle, they are less likely to line up twice in a row with 13-year cicadas, because 13 is not a multiple of 3. Anyway, I propose, alternatively, that instead of an internal clock they have a way to pick up that Thread is coming, and this is my “Thread has a psychic signature” theory —

Roxie: — that Thread emits some sort of signature on a psychic level, it travels very far, it’s very loud. Oh, gosh, if I want to get really weird, I’m gonna say that Thread, like a slime mold, behaves in a unicellular way at some points, and then at other points — for example, say when it’s arranging itself in space in perfect 14-hour bands — it behaves more like a joint organism, creating these sort of patterns. This would be something that the dragons would pick up on to start producing a lot of dragons pre-Pass. Maybe the grubs aren’t as good at it, and they’re picking up all the dragon signals as, “Oh, Thread is coming; we have to be producing all the time.” So on Northern Continent, where there are Weyrs and dragons and psychic humans, they are much more productive and more active all the time. It’s a reach — it’s a desperate reach; I’m not proud of it — but we need something.

Nazh: I don’t hate that. I’m committed to psychic Thread, I will say, so I’m happy with anything that lets me bang this drum.

Lleu: I think psychic Thread is actually a very defensible position, because we do see at multiple points in the series, among other things, horses and humans responding instinctively to the incoming presence of Threadfall. However, I don’t think we need psychic Thread specifically for this, because we know that the proximity of the Red Star and the approach of the Red Star — not just Threadfall, but the years leading up to a Pass — are marked by increased geological activity.

Lleu: I think it is not unreasonable to think that the grubs could be responding to the changes in Pern’s climate and tectonic activity related to the Red Star coming.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. So we know that the Southern Continent is much more tectonically active, so maybe that in some way impairs the grubs, or slows them down?

Nazh: But that would make it the opposite of what they would want to respond to the Red Star?

Tequila Mockingbird: And he did get murdered by a cat only a few years into this project, so he was still working on it.

Roxie: Hm. So they go back to check the progress of the grubs, specifically, and they know at that point that the grubs are an anti-Thread measure?

Lleu: My assumption is that he started with the sandworms and modified them, but we also know that the grubs are related to Thread in some way, because that’s one of the revelations that we get —

Roxie: These specific scouts saw that there was enough grubs that they could take a sample, but the grubs are disgusting, and they didn’t want to touch them, so they made a mental note to send someone else to do it later. But then they were attacked by homophobic lions, they got distracted, they forgot. That’s all I have.

Lleu: Yeah, so when P’tero and M’leng were attacked by the lions, that interrupted everyone else’s survey, and everyone just forgot that they had meant to ask someone else to get the disgusting grubs.

Roxie: Yeah. Look, real forgetters understand that even walking into another room is sufficient disruption to forget everything that you were planning to do for an entire day. So if I were attacked by a lion…

Lleu: Yeah, no — it just requires the entire population of all of the Weyrs to have forgotten simultaneously, which is not impossible…

Lleu: Oh, okay, then it’s only, like, a population of 3,000 people. They could totally forget.

Roxie: No, but the thing is, they’re all psychic, and they’re all having orgies all the time, so they’re very close, and they’re very upset by what has happened to their good friends.

Tequila Mockingbird: Also, Zulaya and K’vin are having a whole psychosexual revelation about their interest in D/S play immediately after that, and that’s very distracting.

Lleu: And, to be fair, the dragons all go between by themselves to help P’tero and M’leng, and everyone’s like, “They don’t do that. What is happening?”

Lleu: So there’s a lot going on. It’s very reasonable that 3,000 people could all forget this information at the same time.

Nazh: Okay, can we return to the psychic signature one briefly? I feel like that could work.

Nazh: If the grubs are psychic, and they pick up on psychic Thread signature to wake up from their egg hibernation, whatever, start reproducing a little ways in advance of when Thread actually starts falling, then the cycle of events is that Tad Tubberman creates them; there are a few around his house; then everything is chaos for the entire First Pass; and then they go back right after the end of the First Pass sometime, maybe, and all the grubs are seemingly gone. But we know that they go back and look shortly before the beginning of the Second Pass, correct?

Nazh: Great. At that time, the grubs have just started to wake up. So they see a few grubs, widely spread, so they’re like, “Oh, good, they’re spreading,” but there’s not very many of them anywhere. There’s only just a few that have woken up, and then also the survey gets disrupted, and they need to go deal with the Pass. So they’re like, “Okay, well, it is working, but we really didn’t feel good about how many of them there were. They seemed to have managed to spread out, but not make very many of them. We don’t want to risk it.”

Lleu: I feel like the problem with that is that they do find them. We get a pretty precise report on how far they’ve spread —

Lleu: — in terms of stakes from Dragonsdawn. I forget what the actual range is.

Nazh: So you’re saying they were able to just dig up a random hatch of ground and find some grubs?

Tequila Mockingbird: Or the dragons are just scraping, like [machine noise] across entire swaths of the Southern Continent.

Nazh: I don’t know; that’s the best I got. Oh, and then the conclusion to that is, when they make it to the Northern Continent, they are a very imprecise measure of Thread psychic signatures, so they mistake all of the dragons and humans for a psychic signature, that means they should be reproducing. So that's why the Farmercraft people up north think that they’re common.

Lleu: If the grubs are psychic, there are psychic animals on the Southern Continent, and it’s the felines — so that’s how and why the grubs are spreading a little bit still at all times.

Roxie: And that’s how they found the grubs, ’cause they saw a feline from the sky and they were like, “Chase that thing away and dig right here!”

Nazh: Hey, we know that there were felines at the place where they started their survey.

Roxie: Speaking of that, let’s talk about the reason we’re all here, which is: dragons. Psychic dragons and psychic humans. Tell me more about them, Nazh.

Nazh: Ever since hearing Tequila and Lleu discussing whether this was fantasy or sci-fi in their very first episode — I am very much on the side that it is sci-fi, because it’s so utterly in those genre conventions.

Nazh: However, I do acknowledge the whole issue with psychicness. It was mostly just the ’80s. But I have a proposed solution for you, which is that if humans need to be psychic for this to work, and there are a lot of other psychic animals already on the planet — where by “a lot” I mean “fire lizards,” but whatever, don’t worry about it — and if we’re now saying that grubs are also psychic because Thread is psychic, my grand philosophy here is that Thread is psychic. Thread has been bombarding this planet for several thousand years. I think that there are a bunch of native Pern viruses that have just picked up the psychic gene and are jumping it willy-nilly into other species.

Nazh: As soon as humans show up on the planet, they start catching the Pern common cold and getting psychic. This is my grand hypothesis. I will be taking questions now.

Lleu: It could also be the kind of thing that — they got it from fire lizards, right? They had a solid five years of many people interacting with and telepathically bonding with fire lizards.

Nazh: Sure. Although someone needed to bond with the first ones, presumably?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah; that does happen less than a year — but he is Irish, so…

Lleu: But also that seems to be (a) characteristic of the fire lizards to begin with and (b) the earliest fire lizards haven’t had the mentasynth enhancements, so maybe also something about that process made the telepathy jump easier.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, to be fair, the Eridani have enhanced psychicness in various humans. We do get told in Dragonsdawn that:

Tequila Mockingbird: “Some of the stock, and indeed many of the human beings, had ancestors who had been so ‘enhanced,’” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — “and their descendants still showed signs of extreme empathy.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And then there’s also the note that dogs could not adapt to it. So cats and dogs cannot be mentasynthed.

Nazh: That’s so sad! We had to leave the dogs, the happiest to be our psychic animal companion of any animal out there?

Nazh: Because, if the dogs were available to be your giant psychic animal companion, why would you need the dragons?

Roxie: It does sound like it is a sci-fi alien technology enhancement; it’s just one that happened pre-series.

Roxie: And, again, possibly entirely a retcon, but we’ve already allowed her a number of those.

Nazh: So, Tequila, would far past advanced alien manipulation be an acceptable sci-fi reason for you for these people to be psychic?

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m totally chill with that, and it does accord with the idea that some families or lineages are noticeably more psychic than others —

Tequila Mockingbird: And even with the fact that we have Rusty, the one psychic horse on Pern. If that particular horse — because it says some of the stock had been enhanced —

Tequila Mockingbird: So, maybe there are a couple of psychic courses. I assume they are also from Ruatha.

Lleu: Well, no — he’s in Keroon, so it’s presumably related to Moreta’s family’s…

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s possible that every canonical woman who can hear all dragons is this kind of enhanced psychic lineage.

Tequila Mockingbird: And maybe because of those psychic signals, also tends to have horses and other stock that is more psychic in the area. Like calling to like.

Roxie: It is a truth of the series that if you are special, you are the specialest —

Tequila Mockingbird: So, my question is, does this suggest that Aramina’s family had psychic draybeasts?

Nazh: It sounds like we don’t need Thread horizontal transfer, which is what that virus jumping is called, in order to make humans more psychic. It could still be the reason that fire lizards are psychic, but it doesn’t need to be.

Nazh: That makes it maybe a little bit easier for the grubs to be, if we just say that some amount of psychicness is in nature on Pern. But honestly, it’s not necessary.

Roxie: Now, they are telekinetic, which seems comfortably lumped in with telepathy; however, it’s not the same thing at all.

Tequila Mockingbird: However, AIVAS canonically says that it is. He’s like, if you’re telepathic and you can teleport, weird that you aren’t telekinetic.

Lleu: It’s very simple if you think about it, because thoughts are a tangible, physical thing that you can move from one mind to another.

Roxie: Okay, so if this is the case, I am in fact going to insist on it being a physical ability that is in your blood, in your body, and that can be horizontally transferred, just because I think that’s cool, and —

Tequila Mockingbird: So, you're going for the midichlorian school of thought?

Nazh: We’ve taken care of humans, just in our unified theory that we’re building here —

Nazh: — do we want fire lizards, and to some extent other Pernese species, to have Thread-transferred telepathic abilities, or do we just want that to be a fire lizard weird thing?

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m all for the law of conservation of telepathy. I think as few independent sources of telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation as possible makes me happiest.

Roxie: Well, here’s the thing — I don’t like Thread as a bioweapon engineered to do exactly what it does. I am kind of happy with Thread as a discarded bioweapon, or as a waste product from some process —

Lleu: It’s entirely possible that there already was a space ecosystem in the Kuiper Belt, but I’m wondering if it’s possible that when the Red Star arrived in the Rukbat system, it brought a cometary tale of Thread with it.

Lleu: And Thread has interacted with the “Oort cloud” space ecosystem —

Lleu: So that Thread is not necessarily indigenous to the Red Star, but that Thread was brought by the Red Star.

Nazh: Yes. I mean, I've been assuming — based on their whole description of there being other Oort clouds out there, that very much implies to me that we're supposed to think that Thread is some general scourge out there in the universe.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s also the fact that the colonists and the space future folks assume that if it’s a bioweapon, it would be a Nathi bioweapon, because they’ve been fighting against the Nathi in this horrible war. But there’s actually nothing to say that it mightn’t be an Eridani bioweapon designed to be used against the Nathi —

Tequila Mockingbird: — that is psychic because the Eridani have figured out how to do that and then, as you say, was abandoned or discarded, or something went wrong. Because this is not an area of space where the war is supposed to happen, right? They’re way in the outcountry.

Nazh: The only thing I can think of there is that it sounds like the Eridani are — we don’t know if they’re allies, but they’re at least friendly enough that humans have their biotech.

Nazh: So, if this is a known problem in the universe and the Eridani haven’t told them — now, granted, there’s many reasons you wouldn’t tell people about your escaped old bioweapons —

Nazh: Also, to be fair, so far, all that the Pern survey were talking about were that they’ve found a handful of systems that are not anywhere that is colonized or inhabited by these intelligent species. So, it might just be that they’ve been like, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Listen, these Oort clouds are so rare…”

Roxie: — for a disproportionate emotional reaction to a legitimate personal tragedy, and who was therefore taking it out by creating this bioweapon and unleashing it in the universe.

Lleu: If there are at least three intelligent species in the galaxy, there might be more. It could be some random other species’s bioweapon.

Nazh: It’s just that we like the Eridani is the source, so that the human psychicness is the same source as the Thread psychicness.

Roxie: Which is also nice, because when humans encounter fire lizards, they are psychic in a compatible way. They are able to Impress and bond.

Lleu: The other problem is that it’s possible that the Nathi War took thousands of years, but it seems a little bit like it doesn’t totally line up with what we see.

Lleu: It kind of seems like the Nathi War took, like, ten years, or ten years plus space travel time.

Tequila Mockingbird: But the Eridanis could have done it to kill somebody else 10,000 years ago.

Lleu: So all I’m saying is I don’t think it can be an Eridani bioweapon for the Nathi War, but it could have been an Eridani bioweapon from a war that they fought 10,000 years ago, and the Red Star has been slowly making its way towards the Rukbat system since that time.

Roxie: We can blame them for everything. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, because in order for Thread to have previously destroyed planets, as it is very much implied to have done — and I respect the authorial intent in that implication —

Roxie: — then it does need to have had 10,000 or so years to get into Oort clouds and get into inner systems and fall on planets and whatnot.

Tequila Mockingbird: I just very much believe in the law of conservation of psychicness. I want as few original sources of psychicness as possible.

Lleu: Here’s the final possibility, regardless of whether Thread is psychic. The Red Star has been making its way downtown, as it were, for 10,000 years —

Lleu: And it’s just been, you know, dragging thread along with it from whatever Kuiper Belt it originated in, and the other planets that were destroyed by Thread, it just had more Thread, so it didn’t need to circle that star for a while, it just had to pass through and drop a ton of Thread, once —

Lleu: — into that planet’s orbit, and then that ate up all the life. And because Pern is special, and because the Red Star’s been in transit for 10,000 years, there’s just less Thread now, except that it seeded the Kuiper Belt.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, ’cause its orbit has change, right? It got pulled into the gravity of the Rukbat system instead of just passing through.

Roxie: I have one final question about dragons, which is that I believe you attested to me that Kitti Ping Yung engineered the dragons to get bigger over time.

Tequila Mockingbird: Very. They start out larger than a horse, but not super larger than a horse, and in less than a thousand years, they've gotten to be about the size of an airplane.

Nazh: Listen, I listened to their episode discussing this, and the conclusion was mostly magic genetic engineering technology.

Lleu: To be fair, their originally planned maximum size is small airplane. Their final maximum size of 747 — that’s because of 400 years of inbreeding at Benden Weyr.

Roxie: Okay, I’ll allow it. There’s a gigantism gene there. It was activated.

Tequila Mockingbird: Alright. And just to clarify for our listeners, science side of podcast, what percentage of this episode would you say was wild speculation?

Roxie: This episode? We were pretty canon-compliant when listing all the species. Everything under the ocean was completely true but never mentioned in canon —

Roxie: — so it’s not canon-defiant, but it is also completely made up.

Roxie: Thread being psychic? Canon-compliant, and, honestly, I want to say kind of plausible, but definitely never explicitly supported.

Nazh: We have enough instances of “everything turns to look at the sky,” or “has a bad feeling,” that there’s something there. I think to a certain extent we can call that some amount of, “Oh, the dog reacted to the earthquake before everybody” — classic trope, but the fact that it’s being done implies that there’s something for them to pick up on.

Lleu: Yeah. I would also rate that as pretty plausible and definitely canon-compliant.

Tequila Mockingbird: All right. Thank you guys so much for coming on the show, and we do have another set of recommendations to close it out. For this episode, I would like to recommend The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson, translated by Agnes Broom. It is both a memoir of the author’s personal relationship with his dad and their eel-hunting pastimes in his youth and also a cientific investigation into eels, and it’s a delightful and engrossing read.

Lleu: I feel like identifying eels as most mysterious creature is a bold claim.

Tequila Mockingbird: We didn’t even know how they fucked for a very long time.

Tequila Mockingbird: Freud was trying to figure out eel genitals, and he gave up and invented modern psychology. This is true.

Roxie: Since the nonfiction barrier has been breached, I will recommend Philip Ball’s Patterns in Nature. This is a really cool book. It’s biology, it’s geology, mostly it’s the math that ties a lot of things together, but it’s a math book with a lot of pictures of pretty things. So if you’ve ever looked at a pattern formed in the sand on the beach or looked at a fern and been like, “how does it know to make every little one the same shape as the big ones?” this is a great book for you. It talks about how shapes occur mathematically and then how those patterns are repeated in a zillion different ways throughout the natural world.

Nazh: I’m going to continue the nonfiction trend and recommend The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner. It is the most beautiful nonfiction I’ve read — which, granted, I haven’t read that much nonfiction, but it won a Pulitzer, so someone clearly agreed with me. It is about evolutionary biology as a discipline writ large, in its focus, but it does that by looking at Darwin’s finches, their evolutionary history, and their general popularization through Darwin and specifically through the lives and research of Peter and Rosemary Grant, a couple of Princeton researchers, who have spent several decades visiting one of the Galapagos Islands routinely and observing evolution on very small timescales on a way that had not ever previously been done or even thought possible. I have recommended it to people before and been informed that it is perhaps less immediately approachable than I was hoping, but if that sounds intriguing to you, I encourage you — I think it’s very lovely.

Lleu: The first is in the nonfiction zone. We’ve been talking a lot about science in these last two episodes. If you think science fiction’s about science — wrong. You should read John Rieder’s Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, which is a good — I have some disagreements with it, but I think it’s a really good intro to thinking about genre as a social construct rather than as an inherent characteristic of literary texts. That’s recommendation number one. Recommendation number two, on the fiction side, since it’s Season 2, and I’m free to recommend whoever I want again, I have to recommend Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. I do think it is the greatest science fiction novel of all time, and also the most science fiction novel of all time, but in particular, its relevance here is its — hobbyish — interest in the middle of the novel in the ecology of one of its protagonists’s home planet, which does include dragons and coming into brief, semi-psychic contact with dragons, and also these dragons’ relationships to other forms of life on the planet, including its indigenous sentient species.

Roxie: So if you listen to all our other recs and were like, “I thought I was listening to a fun podcast about fiction books with dragons in them,” we still have one rec for you.

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] On further consideration, Lleu thinks the inconsistencies on this point probably refer to the densest part of Threadfall lasting fifteen minutes, with a full Fall possibly lasting longer over a given area, just with less density. But since Threadfall moves across the surface of Pern, the four to six hours that are given as the duration of a Fall (four at the beginning of a Pass and in Southern; six at peak) can’t be the length of time Thread is falling on a single area covered by the Fall.

[2] Misspoke here and subsequently; should be “Passes.”

[3] The actual quotation is: “such humans as had a high empathy rating and some innate telepathic ability.”