Dragonsdawn and Dragonquest: First impressions of Pern

[ljwrites]

I read the Pern series only in part and badly out of order. A long time ago, and we're talking around two decades, I found Dragonsdawn and Dragonquest in a bookstore and read them one after the other. I found them a) to have some good ideas, b) boring in the execution, and b) skeevy as hell in places.

Content note: Rape, reproductive coercion.

I read Dragonsdawn first because it was supposed to be the first in time. The idea of genetically engineering native creatures to fight an environmental threat was interesting, as were the details of the resulting creatures' abilities and physiology. However, I found the characters deadly dull and the evil-for-no-reason woman a boring adversary.

Also, looking back, the "heroic" woman character repeatedly raped her husband who didn't show much of an interest in having sex with her. I think she even called her initiations "dawn attacks," where she would have sex with him while he was too groggy to fend her off. Like, how is this okay again? Because your body belongs to your spouse once you're married? Because a man is always up for any sex with a woman, at all times? Even though I knew a lot less about sexuality back then than I do now, I remember thinking even then that he might be gay--and now the possibility of asexuality also comes to mind, or maybe he just wasn't sexually attracted to her for whatever reason, or had hangups about sex. Rape is a solution to exactly zero of these possibilities.

I'm also not in love with the way another of the female characters got pregnant on purpose without telling her boyfriend. She's the one getting pregnant so maybe the reproductive coercion isn't as bad as the other way around, but being a parent is still a big step for anyone and it feels very wrong that she saw it fit to take that step without talking it over with her partner. Maybe it was the gold queen's influence that gave her an extra-strong need to breed, but I'm not sure dragon influence stops you from communicating with your significant other about major life decisions?

Of course, this is Pern we're talking about so all this is perfectly all right and lovey-dovey. The rape victim/husband is so sad over his wife's subsequent heroic death that he publicly chastises himself for being unreceptive to her due to workaholism and takes her name as his own. I wasn't nearly as moved by this as the author probably intended, though, because his actions also seemed consistent with a guy who wasn't ready to face his reasons for being unreceptive in the first place, who was all too willing to validate his own violation due to a sense of obligation and possibly shame at his perceived inadequecy as a man, and who was far more willing--even relieved--to worship the idea of a dead hero wife than to deal with a living one who had inconvenient needs and complications (read: rape). And the boyfriend duped into being a father is, if memory serves, happy over his girlfriend's pregnancy so it's all good.

I swear the Pern books would be masterpieces of damaged and abusive hero-figures if only the author were self-aware enough to realize how immoral her beloved characters really are.

Part of the reason for the dullness was probably that Dragonsdawn was not meant to serve as an introduction but rather as a parade of Greatest Hits where a prior fan could ooh and ahh at the familiar references and see how the Pern they knew came to be, especially the dragons. Still, that is no excuse at all for the novel not to stand on its own. For one thing, not everyone can get all the "necessary" books; the two books I got were the only ones available to me, and I didn't have the internet to tell me the proper series order. For another, call me old-fashioned but I think every book should stand on its own and be enriched by their connections to others, rather than needing them to make sense. Ideally any work in a franchise should serve as a decent entry point, being entertaining on its own and leaving readers to hanker after more.

Dragonsdawn didn't leave me with much in the way of hankering, but remember, pre-internet days, I was bored, and I'd already bought the other book. Hoping things got more interesting in the future, I cracked open Dragonquest.

I don't even recall what the titular quest was, actually. Mostly I remember that there was another pointlessly evil slutty feeeemale without much in the way of a psychological profile and more rape apologia. I was also desperately confused over who all these characters were supposed to be, because once again the book was relying on readers having come from the prior and first volume in the series, Dragonflight. I would not turn to that book for another twenty years, because even post-internet I was left cold enough on the series that I never bothered to search out other volumes.

Fast forward to the present, where chordatesrock got a bout of nostalgia about the series and asked if I wanted to read the series, in proper order this time. I decided to see if that made things better, and hoo boy. If I thought the abusive relationship dynamic in Dragonsdawn was bad, Dragonflight would deliver much, much worse.

Comments

[dhampyresa]

Two words about Anne McCaffrey and sexuality: Tent pegs.

[ljwrites]

Ooh yeah, that infamous bit. Has it ever been verified that she said it, though? Fanlore casts some doubt on the issue.

[chordatesrock]

Ooh! "Still, that is no excuse at all for the novel not to stand on its own. For one thing, not everyone can get all the "necessary" books; the two books I got were the only ones available to me, and I didn't have the internet to tell me the proper series order. For another, call me old-fashioned but I think every book should stand on its own and be enriched by their connections to others, rather than needing them to make sense. Ideally any work in a franchise should serve as a decent entry point, being entertaining on its own and leaving readers to hanker after more."

This could probably stand as part of its own essay. I have reservations about agreeing with this idea because... well, long and byzantine plots seem like they wouldn't work in this case. There are definitely series where any or almost any installment can be a decent entry point but it strikes me that I can only think of one example where the series also has a long narrative arc spanning all the books, and in that one case, there comes a point (around the fortieth book, or thereabouts) where entrypoints and plot-movement become mutually exclusive. I don't know how you think this should work for series with overall plot progression; how, for instance, would you have rewritten Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to be more accessible to people who hadn't read the first five books?

I mean, Pern isn't that kind of series, anyway, so that's perhaps a bit off topic. (But the Ninth Pass books specifically do contain two sequences that function as that sort of series: the Dragonflight > Dragonquest > The White Dragon > All the Weyrs of Pern > The Skies of Pern sequence, and the Dragonsong > Dragonsinger sequence that makes up two thirds of the Harper Hall trilogy. And there's definitely a sort of relation of this sort between Dragonsdawn and some of the stories from Chronicles of Pern: First Fall.)

I don't know, this is kind of off-topic, but it stuck out at me.

[ljwrites]

Yeah, I probably overstated my case though I did say it was an ideal. Obviously books in an overarching, longer story can't have the same effect when read singly as when read as a whole. Still, I think they should at least make sense even if they'd have a much greater impact if read with the others. And that tantalizing glimpse should make readers want to seek out the others in the series. For me Dragonquest failed on both fronts, and Dragonsdawn on the second.