The Re-Read: Anne McCaffrey, Dragonflight and Dragonquest (Wait What Now? Edition)
Sunday's Child Is Bonny and Blithe
I pretty much read all of Anne McCaffrey’s writing when I was a teenager. I liked The Ship Who Sang and Decision at Doona. I read her more obscure books like The Crystal Singer and Dinosaur Planet, though those weren’t very good as I remember them.
But the Dragonriders of Pern books were the ones that merited repeated re-reading and I go back to them every once in a while.
It’s plain that some aspects of the Pern setting were only partly developed when she started off and got more elaborated over time. Eventually we find out that Pern was settled by a technologically advanced galactic federation but that the colony ship sent to Pern got cut off from its people after they discovered that there was an unexpected complication to life on the planet. Namely, an erratic ‘wandering planet’ in the same star system came close to Pern periodically. Its surface was infested with an organism that the colonists called “Thread” that was capable of traversing space between the wandering planet (aka “the Red Star”) and Pern; when it arrived in Pern’s atmosphere, it would fall to the ground and begin devouring organic materials it encountered. Indigenous life on Pern mostly had defenses against Thread, but the colonists did not. Having scrapped their ship, they now found that most of their crops and livestock ended up dying and they themselves had to hide for years on end during a close pass by the Red Star.
All of that background only became clear later in the series. When the series opens, life on Pern has settled into an agrarian society and the people of Pern have completely forgotten their origins. They survive and thrive on the planet because most of the population lives in caves or other Thread-safe shelters and retreats (“Holds”) there whenever Thread is falling and (more crucially) their settlements are protected by large dragons breathing fire that are symbiotically connected to human partners who ride and direct them. The dragonriders live in “Weyrs” that include some men and women who are not dragon symbiotes but serve various secondary roles in the weyr (preparing food, taking care of administrative matters, etc.) most of whom seem to be unsuccessful candidates for dragon symbiosis (known as “impression”) who elect to stay on in the weyr.
McCaffrey developed a strong contrast between “Hold culture” and “Weyr culture”, even in the first book. The holds are hierarchical and semi-feudal, ruled by an aristocracy. Their size is capped and only rarely is a new small hold started because of the difficulty of building Thread-safe shelters of sufficient size. The weyrs tend to be more democratic and more culturally open, but they’re also physically and socially isolated from the rest of Pern’s communities. There’s also some global-scale guilds that specialize in various artisanal crafts or knowledge (livestock, farming, technology, music and history, weaving) that recruit new members who are then trained and eventually posted to various holds and weyrs to offer their services.
When I re-read the first three books recently as well as a side series that’s focused on the Harpers’ Guild (I find the later books in the series to be too preoccupied with a grand resolution to the problem of Thread with a bit too much fan-service as well), a couple of things really jumped out at me more than they did when I was a teenager.
The first is that like a lot of other fantasy and SF series that were enticing to imagine yourself within (e.g., nobody really wants to be dropped in the middle of Game of Thrones) it’s largely because there’s a meritocratic elite who have attractive lives and privileges that you could hope to be part of—just like you’d hope to be a Jedi, hope to be a Starfleet officer, hope to be a superhero. It’s the old “fans are slans” idea (that SF fans were drawn to settings that offered them a chance to feel like they’d come out on top in that world instead of just being geeks who were constantly beaten up). McCaffrey developed the idea over time that dragons pick their partners intuitively, that they recognize a kindred spirit who also possesses some deep emotional and intellectual merit.
There’s some things that really hit middle-aged me when I re-read. Two warnings here as I go on. First, if you’re part of Pern fandom, I’m pretty sure that everything I’m about to say has been discussed to death within that fandom. This is just me, with no special knowledge of what a dedicated community of readers have made of the books. Second, what I’m going to focus on touches on coercion and issues around sexual consent in these books.
Before I get to that, there are other issues I noticed that just had not mattered to me as a teenager. Like, how does Thread launch itself out of the gravity well of the Red Star in the direction of Pern? McCaffrey eventually depicts Thread as being both on the ground and high in the thin atmosphere of the Red Star, but I suspect that if she were writing it today, she might have a mechanism that gets Thread into interplanetary space that’s a bit more worked out. (Io’s volcanos, for example, are known to eject material outside of Io’s minimal atmosphere.) But also, since Thread seems to be a life form of some kind, what’s it subsisting on when it’s on the Red Star? We eventually get the elaboration that the entire solar system is infested with dormant Thread in its Oort Cloud, but in any event, for something that dominates the entire series, the explanations for it come pretty close to “deal with it”.
There’s also the huge problem, at least for me, that the dragons can teleport across apparently unlimited distances and can travel through time. There’s some exploration of the implications of both (the second ability is discovered for the first time by dragonriders during the series) but let us just say that the overall impact of hundreds or thousands of teleporting time-traveller telepathic alien dragons seems far more limited than it probably ought to be.
Anyway, on to my main point. The books frequently assert that weyr culture is sexually liberated and relatively egalitarian in gender terms, though that’s not particularly the case by the standards of 2021, especially in Dragonflight, which was first published in 1968. Women do all the domestic work in the weyr; women are only allowed to impress gold dragons, who are the female dragons allowed to reproduce; women who impress gold dragons have some degree of political authority within the Weyr but mostly over domestic matters and everyday administration, etc.
That changes in the course of the books. For example, a woman is for the first time allowed to impress a green dragon (green dragons are female but not allowed to reproduce on the grounds that they produce small dragons who can’t be ridden or used to fight Thread—in the course of the series we find out that dragons were bred up from small “fire lizards” indigenous to the planet, so this restriction is part of that long-term breeding project). The woman who is the major protagonist of the first book, Lessa, asserts new kinds of autonomy that change weyr culture from that point onward, and one of the side series also features a woman who is allowed for the first time into what had been an all-male profession.
So the 1968-era gender material certainly jumped out at me on a recent re-read. In its time, especially within science fiction, it was progressive, but still, you’ve got F’Lar (the major male protagonist) shaking and slapping Lessa with some frequency and just generally the weyr comes off as a very patriarchal place where male dragonriders have sexual access to women who are brought to the weyr largely for that purpose. It’s what the Holders are actually afraid of when the dragonriders go on “Search” for young women to impress a new queen who is about to hatch—that their daughters will be taken away to become mistresses for male dragonriders.
The more I thought about sexuality on Pern, the more I wondered whether McCaffrey fully saw the implications of her world-building. As a teenager, most of the implications of the sexual mores of dragonriders whooshed right over my head—I mean, there were some sex scenes that caught my eye then (especially in the third book in the series, The White Dragon) but I didn’t really grasp the full implications.
In the books, dragons are fully intelligent. They communicate with their riders via telepathy (and there are hints that they can speak telepathically to other humans if they choose to, but they mostly don’t). They are able to communicate instantaneously to other dragons as well but the perspective in the books is not universally omniscient—we never ‘hear’ an instance of dragon-to-dragon speech, just what dragons report to riders about what they’ve heard from other dragons. So we don’t know if dragons actually speak to one another in the same fashion as they do to humans, or if their communications with one another are fundamentally different. We don’t really know if dragons have emotionally meaningful relationships with one another, in fact. They don’t seem to have friendships or rivalries except around mating.
Dragon mating is a big deal in the books and it’s what really got my attention on this re-read. The gold females, also known as queens, periodically “rise” when they’re fertile and the biggest male dragons, bronze dragons, chase competitively after the queen to mate with her. It’s the one time McCaffrey gives us some sense of what dragons are thinking other than when they are speaking directly to humans. On one hand, she makes it clear that the frenzy of mating overrides most of their normal thought processes—female riders have to exercise control over their queens to make sure that they don’t eat too much as they get ready to rise. On the other hand, we are privy to the thought processes of a queen in one mating where it’s clear that she is actively sorting through her potential mates and deciding which she prefers and which she cannot abide. We also see that even though dragons normally have zero aggression towards one another, if two gold dragons are in heat at the same time in the same place, they’ll fight to the death and overwhelm the emotions of their riders in the process.
The human side of it is what gave me the most pause on re-reading. When a queen rises, the woman rider and all of the male riders associated with the bronzes who are chasing her retire to a private room. This is what I didn’t really understand as a teenaged reader, but basically, it’s a sexually charged experience for all of them. All of the humans are heavily influenced by their dragon’s lust—the men are basically hovering around the woman waiting for one bronze to catch the queen. When the successful bronze mates with the queen, their two riders have sex right at the same moment as well, and it’s strongly implied that happens while the other men are still in the room. In the first book, it turns out it’s Lessa’s first sexual experience and her partner F’lar expresses some regrets about that afterwards, as he might—and for the rest of the book she rebuffs his attempts to continue their sexual relationship until the very end, when suddenly she responds to him “as if dragon-roused”. Though in all the training and preparation he’s been putting her through before that first mating, he never mentions that this is coming—in fact, the dragonriders don’t ever seem to talk about the sexual dimension of dragon symbiosis with the young men and women they recruit to join the weyr, which causes problems on several occasions throughout the series.
As an older reader, I’m just kind of fascinated that here’s a speculative fiction that’s very mainstream in many respects that has a human-alien symbiosis at the heart of it that is built most strongly around sexual experiences. In the second book, Dragonquest, one male rider reassures a shy young woman who is afraid of the “wantonness” of dragon sex that it’s as positive an experience as the other aspects of being symbiotically connected to a dragon, but incidentally he also confirms that the dragons’ emotions are their own and separate from the humans—that the humans and dragons have sex at the same time, influencing each others’ desires, but also retain distinct consciousnesses. We even get one instance of an asexual dragon who nevertheless assures his rider that he remains emotionally connected to his rider when his rider has sex despite having no sexual desire of his own.
Once I started realizing how understated this whole premise is in the series, so many other aspects of it started demanding attention. The dragons generally form stable long-term relationships but there’s always a sense that maybe a different male might succeed in mating in the next mating and if so, their human riders will have sex, even if they’re otherwise not at all drawn to one another. On the other hand, neither male nor female dragonriders seem to be expected to be strictly monogamous in between dragon matings—stable long-term monogamous relationships between riders are portrayed as relatively unusual but not discouraged necessarily.
And then there’s the question of what other male and female dragons and their riders do. The smallest type of dragon is a green dragon, and they’re the non-breeding females. The medium sized dragons are blue and brown, and they’re male. In the second book in the series, there’s a brief but startling scene that makes it clear that green dragons also rise, and are pursued typically by blue and brown males. And until the third book in the series, all the dragonriders with green dragons are men, as are all the riders of the blue and brown males.
So that really got me thinking: what happens when dragons mate and all the riders involved are men? McCaffrey doesn’t even hint at an answer to that question—however much she might have wanted to change the way women were portrayed in speculative fiction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she also reads as extremely heteronormative. She was not going to write a scene where it was made clear that male dragonriders were either situationally or persistently queer, though I suspect she must have been asked about this at conventions in the years afterwards. This extremely important dimension of her world-building is right there in plain sight, full of implications. On more than a few occasions, it’s made clear that dragon mating has a huge psychological effect on any human—even the little fire lizards affect the people they’ve bonded with, and there’s several indications that dragon mating can even affect on-lookers who have no connections to dragons (the books say this is one reason why the dragonriders have to live apart from others, in fact). You pretty much have to imagine that male riders have sex with one another when their green and blue/brown dragons mate. You also have to wonder what’s going on when a gold dragon rises with the smaller male dragons in a weyr. It’s emphatically stated in the second book that smaller males aren’t disqualified by any rule from trying to mate with a queen, it’s just that they don’t have the strength and stamina to keep up with one in a mating flight. It doesn’t feel as if the smaller males and their riders just go take a cold shower when there’s a mating going on—though maybe most of them teleport out of the weyr for a while.
Like I said, I’m pretty sure Pern fandom has thought all of this through, but it does show that some re-readings surface some pretty meaningful implications in genre fictions that didn’t create concern at the time. I’m pretty sure that if today you advertised a new series as being YA-friendly and said, “It’s about a world where an intelligent alien species and human beings have formed empathetic and telepathic life partnerships and the humans get involved in sexual relationships that they don’t fully consent to of their own free will whenever the aliens have sex and these relationships are both hetero- and homosexual”, you’d have a series that would get banned from a whole bunch of libraries. But as far as I know (and I might be wrong), nobody ever raised a hue and cry about Pern back when the books first came out.
What got to me about the dragon books was the autocracy-- the stories and an infrequent threat so that ordinary memory and institutions weren't enough, and the population was illiterate. So it was necessary to have dragonriders in charge. I didn't like it that the society was rigged that way.
And don’t even get me started about Camo in the Menolly books and how he’s “fit for nothing” but chopping meat for his pretties and needs to be “shoved” in the direction of his next task. Really disturbing to me, even as a teenager.