Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

My Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.50 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.06 / 5.00

I read this book as part of a Read Along. You can find my posts here:  Week 1   Week 2  

The planet of Pern is subject to a strange phenomenon that returns every two hundred years or so. During the roughly fifty years of a Pass, Thread falls from the sky in waves like a series of rainstorms. During each Threadfall, the strange, alien organisms drift down from the sky, seemingly inert until they touch something, anything, organic, which they will destroy with mindless savagery. Only two things can hold the Thread in check: stone and the fire from dragons. Pern’s society has adapted to survive this threat by creating and supporting the Weyrs, where dragon riders and their linked partners can train to fight the Thread when it comes. However, it has been more than four hundred years since the last Pass and many now believe that Thread will never come again. This belief makes it increasingly difficult for the last surviving Weyr to continue its role of leading the rest of the population in preparing for the next Pass. The other five Weyrs have been deserted since the last Pass, which only adds fuel to the speculation that dragons, and their riders, are no longer needed and should not be supported by the rest of society. F’Lar is convinced that the next Pass is approaching, but he has to fight his own leaders to persuade them that Thread is not simply a child’s tale.

Lessa is the sole surviving member of the noble family that used to rule Ruatha Hold. When her family was slaughtered she hid with the watch-wher, a dragon-like creature that watches over the Hold and warns of approaching threats. Disguised as a kitchen drudge, she has survived in the Hold, plotting revenge against Fax, the man who killed her family. When F’Lar comes to Ruatha in search of candidates to offer the latest clutch of dragon eggs, he realizes that Lessa is a good prospect for the single golden egg in the clutch that will hatch to produce the next Queen. With her as Weyrwoman, he has a chance of changing the Weyr’s policies and keeping the world safe when the Thread returns.

This book was originally published in 1968, although two segments had appeared in Analog magazine in the year before. It is one of the first of Ms McCaffrey’s books that I read more than twenty years ago and I am glad to say that it stands the test of time. I was concerned that it might appear dated after all these years, but it has stayed remarkably fresh and relevant, offering up a marvelously detailed and fully conceived world that falls somewhere between Fantasy and Science Fiction. It is the first in a series that now totals some twenty-four volumes, and the exploration of the Science Fiction aspects is more pronounced in some of these titles than others.

At first glance the setting is thoroughly Fantasy, with a medieval feel to its feudal society. However, the Introduction places us firmly in a Science Fiction universe, making it clear that Pern is actually a human colony on a planet orbiting the star Rukbat. This places Pern’s society in a rather different context, as we can see that the threat of Thread has pushed a people capable of interstellar flight into a pre-industrial period of their development and effectively stalled their ability to progress beyond this phase. The repeated effects of Threadfall are so catastrophic that is no wonder that these people are barely able to survive the long Passes, when harvesting food becomes almost impossible and cowering in stone structures is their best choice. It is a testament to the determination of previous generations that there are still people on the planet at all.

Other than this piece of information the other Science Fiction elements are rather limited. Perhaps the most important is the Thread itself, which appears to be derived from the Red Star, one of Pern’s neighboring planets. The nature of Thread is never really addressed, although the destruction that is causes is demonstrated rather graphically and we learn a lot about how to destroy it. This again fits with the idea that it is such a devastating menace that the people have never had the chance to develop the resources needed to understand what it actually is. This makes a very nice change from the standard trope of a thinking enemy that has some reason, even if it is a totally evil one, to take action against our protagonists. The Thread is alive, but in a non-thinking way, which somehow makes it so much more terrifying. There is no negotiation to be attempted or surrender to be given: they must simply endure until the Red Star moves on and the Pass finishes.

Finally, we have the dragons, although they do not really fulfill the classic Science Fiction element that we would expect. Rather it is their ability to travel between that takes us away from Fantasy to a certain extent. Whereas nothing else in this world appears to be inherently magical or unexpectedly talented, this ability is truly unique. By thinking about a place in great detail, a dragon can move into a type of non-space that they call between and then pop back out into the normal world at a different location. This ability to translocate at will is crucial to their ability to avoid and fight Thread and is a nice contrast to their fire breathing, which actually relies upon them chewing stone containing phosphine. This mundane explanation for the expected ability to belch out fire makes the whole between concept seem so much more exotic.

The lack of a major enemy, in favor of the impersonal Thread, is certainly refreshing, although we do get a few human bad guys to detest. However, most of the conflict comes from the prevailing belief that there will never be another Pass and that the Weyr is now a redundant relic of an earlier age. We get to feel all smug and satisfied as the naysayers learn the truth the hard way, but few of them are truly evil people, which adds to the satisfyingly normal feel of the society that we observe. Just as with World War Z by Max Brooks, it is interesting to see how societies cope with disaster and to follow individuals as they come to terms with their world being turned upside down.

Our protagonists are a little earnest, especially F’Lar, but this is also a function of their life experiences and so it fits perfectly with the world that they inhabit. However, they also demonstrate my one problem with this title. F’Lar and Lessa have a difficult relationship and they are both very closed off, private people, so they have some trouble admitting their feelings for one another. Even so, I did get very annoyed with the number of times that he grabs hold of her and shakes her. Whenever she appears to be being awkward, argumentative or uncooperative he resorts to physical violence in order to ‘shake some sense into her’. I found this very objectionable and, although I doubt that it would appear in a book written today, it made it rather difficult for me to like F’Lar as much as I should. Somehow I struggle with a hero who keeps assaulting his partner.

It is interesting to note that this misogynistic approach to communication is at odds with the sexual relationships shown within the Weyr. The riders are psychically linked to their dragons, and so when the dragons mate their riders do as well. As the dragons are somewhat liberal in their mating choices, this means that some of the female riders mate with many men and do not have monogamous relationships. Also a female dragon that is not a Queen can bond with a male rider, and so we can assume that homosexual relationships are perfectly acceptable as well. This liberal attitude to sex is one area where the riders are shown to be very different from those who live outside the Weyrs, where more conservative family relationships are the expected norms.

However, putting this interesting dichotomy in attitudes to violence and sex to one side, there are many things to enjoy in this title. As I have already mentioned, the setting is still unique enough to be interesting, but there are two other aspects that are even more of a ‘selling point’ in my opinion.

Firstly, there is the character of MasterHarper Robinton, who is a firm favorite with the fans of the series. He is so vividly drawn that I have to believe that he is modeled upon someone that Ms McCaffrey knew very well. He is hilarious and provides some wonderful moments of light relief, whilst providing a sensible, levelheaded counterpoint to F’Lar’s sometimes over-emotional assessments of situations. He is also the leader of the Harpers, the teachers and scholars of Pern’s society, which is itself an interesting concept. Given that Thread can destroy anything organic, and because nobody survives from one Pass to the next, all the information about Threadfall is communicated via ballads and songs. This choice of dependence upon the Oral Tradition was excellent because it is a perfect fit for the needs of the society, but also allows information to be transmitted without complete understanding so that it has to be deciphered in the present. The songs and poems that constitute the teachings about the Thread are interesting and add an extra dimension to the world.

However, the most enjoyable aspect of this whole series are the dragons themselves. They are suitably alien in their thought processes, so that they are most definitely not human, which provides ample opportunity for comedy and disparaging differences of opinion. Lessa is unusual because she can hear all dragons and not just the one she is bonded to, so we often get a dragon’s commentary on what their rider is saying, which can be very funny. In general, the dragons have excellent characters and are loveable in their own right: they seem to be heavily based upon cats, so you can imagine their love of food, luxury and attention. However, I really wish that we did not get reminded of their color so frequently. This writer’s tick gets annoying about one third of the way into the book and actually becomes laughable after that, but is a small price to pay for the dragons themselves.  

Whilst I would suggest that this title in the series is rather light on aspects that are truly Science Fiction, I can promise that the later novels take the reader both forward and backward in time within Pern’s history revealing some wonderfully interesting ideas. As it stands, I would recommend Dragonflight as a great introduction to one of my favorite authors, especially if you are a little uneasy about plunging straight into something with heavy Science Fiction tropes or an exotic Fantasy setting. This series deals with real human people who are struggling to survive a very unusual threat. Whilst it is not Fantasy-lite, it relies upon elements that are not too outlandish or difficult to visualize and so you can concentrate on the story and enjoy the banter between the characters. 

  

I read this title as part of:

 

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

My Rating: 3.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.10 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.95 / 5.00

Earthsea is a land of many islands and it was on one of these, Gont, that the boy Duny was born to the village bronze-smith in Ten Alders. The youngest of seven brothers, he led a wild life until one day he overheard his aunt using strange words to call a goat down from a roof. Next day he shouted the same words at a whole herd of goats and then was terrified when the animals surrounded him and would not leave him alone. This was the first example of him using magic and it showed how powerful he would become.

The second time he used powerful magic was when the Kargs came to kill the villagers and plunder their homes. Conjuring a dense fog around the village he deceived the enemy and led them to their doom. This attracted the attention of the great wizard Ogion, who took the boy to be his apprentice and gave him his true name, Ged. But names carry great power and so the boy chose the name Sparrowhawk, and so he was known at the School on Roke and later when he went forth into the world as a fully-trained wizard. However, a student display of his hubris had released a shadow upon the world and Sparrowhawk soon found that he could not avoid it as it pursued him wherever he went.

I am not sure why I had never read this book before, as I have been aware of it for a long time, although my husband’s lack of enthusiasm may have made me avoid it. I have seen a lot of high praise for this title, and the trilogy that it begins, and felt that I should finally experience this award-winning title myself. Unfortunately, I was rather underwhelmed by the experience and I am at a loss to explain why this book is so highly praised.

The story of Ged / Sparrowhawk is full of imagination and is certainly interesting enough as a quick read, but I never really felt emotionally involved with it, and that is my major criticism. When I read a book, no matter of genre, I want to be drawn into its world and feel connected to the characters that I am following. In any type of fantasy, I expect the world to be lush with detail and diversity, challenging my imagination and presenting alternative types of life.

In Earthsea, Ms Le Guin has created a full-realized world, with a myriad of creatures and cultures for us to explore. There are languages, stories, folklore, mythology and history, as well as a variety of magics and magical abilities, and so I can understand why people mention it in the same breath as Middle Earth. However, and it amazes me to say this, Tolkien usually related his stories in such a way as to draw the reader into his world and make them feel as if they are being carried along by them. I say that this amazes me because I know that many readers find Tolkien overly wordy and too interested in descriptions, and yet he still draws me in to his works and I travel his characters’ journeys with them. I cannot say the same for A Wizard of Earthsea, which I can only compare to that densest of Tolkien’s works, The Silmarillion. I wanted to know what happened from an intellectual point of view, but felt very little inclusion in the world or empathy for the hero, Ged.

The world of Earthsea is so detailed and intricate that I felt overwhelmed by it. As Ged moves out into the world we see glimpses and flashes of the cultures he encounters, but we never get the chance to explore any of them with any depth and this was very dissatisfying, much like a single day tour of New York City. No sooner had we been introduced to something novel than we were whisked off to see another oddity. If ever there was a book where I desperately wanted much more time to immerse myself in the little details of a strange, new world, it is this one. Rather than cramming so much story into this little book, I would chosen to see perhaps only one third of the plot, with the rest of the space filled with descriptions, atmosphere-building dialogue and character work.

The characters are only lightly drawn and are mostly used for a single beat and then tossed aside with little rhyme or reason. Perhaps if I had been given a chance to understand Ogion, for example, I might have accepted his decision to simply send Ged off to the School with little argument. This was one of the most difficult decisions for me to accept, especially after Ged had shown that he was rash and had attracted the attention of a shadow creature. Maybe Ogion had valid reasons for abandoning his role of teacher for the boy, but it made little sense to me and thus tested my suspension of disbelief.

Ged himself follows the trope of the wild child who finally scares himself ‘straight’ by doing something incredibly dangerous. This was a believable, if predictable, character arc, but was about the only development that he showed during the entire story. Again, there was too little detail and I would have liked to see many more interactions between him and those around him. I truly wanted to believe that his friend Vetch actually liked Ged for some reason, but he was merely a means to an end, providing Ged with the necessary skills to finally track down the shadow.

In short, I felt as if I was reading the outline of a much more interesting book which would display a fully-realized cast of characters and lush world-building. I have seen lots of reviews describing this as a great work of fantasy, and I can see the imagination that was involved in creating it. However, I just wish that I had been given the chance to see that world rather than being told about it.

I read this as part of a whole heap of challenges:

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

My Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.50 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.10 / 5.00

Dana is a black woman living in California in 1976. She is a writer and is married to her husband, Kevin, who is white. On her twenty-sixth birthday she suddenly becomes dizzy and collapses, only to awake in Maryland before the Civil War. She sees a white child drowning in a river as his mother screams on the riverbank. Without thinking, Dana dives in and saves the boy, dragging him to the shore and then using artificial respiration to restart his breathing. His mother is terrified by the black woman using ‘magic’ on her child and beats Dana until the boy’s father steps up and points a loaded rifle at Dana’s head. At this point, Dana feels faint again and is returned to 1976.

It soon becomes clear that the child was Rufus, the son of a plantation owner and one of Dana’s ancestors because he had a child with a freed slave called Alice. Shortly after this first incident, Dana is pulled back again to save Rufus from a life-threatening situation but stays for several hours rather than only a few minutes. It appears that time passes differently in the two timelines and so Dana begins to spend extended periods of time in an era where her skin color is the only thing that defines her as a person.

This book and author have been on my TBR pile since they were recommended during Kristen’s Women in SF&F 2012 event over at Fantasy Cafe. I was aware that the author was a person of color, which made me even more determined to include this title in my reading this year and I am glad that I made the effort. This was an interesting read, although I can only imagine how shocking it was to the American reading public when it was originally published.

This is one of the few books that I have read that really made me feel the massive differences between American and British history and societal norms. Yes, I grew up knowing about racism in the UK, and I was certainly aware that some people had a real issue with the influx of non-white people in the 1950s. However, the issue of slavery was not as prominent because the vast majority of the African slaves in the British Empire were not actually located in the UK, but in the colonies in the West Indies, for example. When these peoples became free they remained where they were and so did not have to integrate with their previous owners back in Britain. Also, slavery within the UK was made illegal much earlier than in the US and was extended to the whole of the Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. All of this makes the British experience very different from that of the US, especially in the Confederate states where much of the action in this novel is based. Similarly, the UK did not suffer from the same racial tensions, segregation and discrimination that led to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century in the US.

Although this novel uses time travel to allow us to experience slavery from a very personal perspective, there is never any attempt to explain why the link between Dana and her ancestor, Rufus, exists. Both parties are unable to explain why she travels through time and why she can carry objects with her, including her husband at one point. However, they quickly conclude that mortal danger is the trigger that opens the ‘portal’ with Rufus’ imminent death calling her to his aid and her fear sending her back to her own time. The time dilation that we see in the past was an interesting choice, allowing the author to follow Rufus’ whole life story over a relatively short period of Dana’s perception. This makes it far easier to accept her fears about what would happen if she were to ‘travel’ to his time whilst she were driving or crossing a road. It was also a massive relief to know that, at the end, she could get on with her life without fear of ever returning to slavery in Maryland.

However, as a modern reader, I did not feel the impact of the discrimination that was present in both time streams. Perhaps I am cynical, but I was not overly surprised by the attitudes of Dana’s guardians when she married a white man, as I assumed that an interracial marriage would have been very shocking in 1976. Equally, I was appalled by the treatment of slaves that we witness in antebellum Maryland, but not surprised. I have read and seen enough representations of slavery to know how terribly many of them suffered. In many ways, I was actually surprised that Dana was not punished more for her impudence and unacceptable behavior, as it would have been viewed by the whites of that period.

Dana herself is an appealing character. As Grace says at Books Without Any Pictures, she is remarkably easy to identify with. She is appalled by the level of hygiene and medicine that she encounters, and yet she finds a place for herself in this shockingly different world. Although we get the impression that she is rather soft, emotionally, and petite, she shows great strength of character and presence of mind. I particularly liked her relationship with her husband, who has his own sojourn in the past. They seem like a regular, everyday couple, with the usual issues and problems. They struggle to cope with her ‘travels’ and he finds it almost impossible to cope with the way that she is treated in the past. I also thought that his disorientation was well drawn when he finally returns to the modern day after many years in the nineteenth century. I appreciated that his instinctive response was anger and frustration, and that at no point did I ever feel as if we were shown an easier alternative if a grittier one would be more realistic.

I was impressed by the variety of attitudes that we saw amongst the slaves. Although there was a vague sense of disappointment about those who adopted an attitude closer to ‘Uncle Tom’ than Dana would like to see, she always found out why they had been broken and made to become subservient. We see physical punishment used as a casual way to keep them in place, but other, subtler, methods are also shown. The cook, who seems to be a confident and outspoken woman, has been cowed by having most of her children sold away from the plantation and we see families broken up on a regular basis at the whim of the owner. We see slaves quietly determined to better themselves, but the ever-present fear of punishment keeps even the strongest from acting rashly.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this novel was the insight it gave us into the thinking of Rufus. At first he seems like a lovely little boy, with his best friend, Alice, and you think that they might become leaders in the movement to allow interracial marriages. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how these two can by Dana’s ancestors, as Rufus becomes a typical slave owner, with a sense of entitlement that is truly repellent. By the end of the book I was fervently hoping that Dana would actively chose not to save him from the next danger or actually kill him herself. His attitude to women is appalling, although could be partially explained by the twisted relationships he has with his hysterical mother and remotely critical father. Indeed the treatment of women to breed new slaves and to satisfy the needs of their owners is even more disgusting when you have to listen to a young man explain why a woman should just let him have sex with her rather than forcing him to rape her. Such thinking is no doubt an accurate depiction of how many men thought at the time, and still do in some cases, but it is not something that I enjoy reading.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to explore the slave experience, especially from a female point of view. It is only minimally a science fiction title, and the time travel is merely a device, but that does not reduce the impact of a modern, free woman being forced to accept the role of a slave. It was a grim, but very rewarding read.

I read this as part of a whole heap of challenges: