Hugo Ballot Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell

Hugo Ballot Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell

by Rich Horton

Here is a review of the fifth of six nominees for the Best Novel Hugo that I have read. John Wiswell has been publishing short fiction for the past 15 years, a few dozen stories already, with considerable success: multiple nominations for both the Hugo and the Nebula, with one Nebula Award resulting, Best Short Story for "Open House on Haunted Hill", which I also reprinted in my Best of the Year volume. Someone You Can Build a Nest In is his first novel. In addition to its Hugo nomination, it is on the Nebula final ballot.

The story is told from the point of view of Shesheshen, who is a shapeshifting monster, or wyrm, and who has threatened the population of the Isthmus for some time. As the novel opens, Shesheshen is awakened early from her yearly hibernation by a familiar menace -- monster hunters. These are Catharsis Wulfyre and his two hired monster experts. Catharsis is the eldest son of the Baroness Wulfyre, who seems to be the closest thing to a ruler the Isthmus has -- situated as it is between two mutually hostile polities. Catharsis wishes to kill the monster before his mother returns to the nearby town of Underlook. But Shesheshen is able to kill him instead.

We learn a bit about Shesheshen-- her shapeshifting ability is supplemented by using organs and harder pieces mostly taken from prey -- such as Catharsis's jaw. (I was reminded of the symbiotic creatures in another Hugo finalist, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay.) She is the one survivor of a clutch of eggs laid by her mother inside the body of the late Baron Wulfyre (the husband of the current Baroness.) (Shesheshen ate her siblings, which seems to by the way wyrms operate.) This gives some understandable motivation to the Wulfyres' obsession with killing wyrms. Shesheshen, shapeshifting into the form of a woman, reconnoiters in Underlook, only to be discovered and chased away. She falls off a cliff, but is rescued by a young human woman, Homily. And almost instantly (too instantly, in my view) they fall in love, though of course Homily doesn't know that Shesheshen, who takes the name Siobhan, is a wyrm.

The plot proceeds nicely enough -- Homily turns out to be one of Catharsis Wulfyre's sisters. Her mother, the Baroness, soon shows up, along with her other sisters, Epigram and Ode. (I did like the Wulfyre names.) Epigram, a few years young than Homily, is a nasty piece of work, and Ode, though still a young child, seems to be even worse. The entire family was abusive to Homily but Homily still is in their thrall to an extent, and now she joins in the monster hunt, with "Siobhan" helping out. I won't detail how this works out -- it's interesting enough, and there is one quite nice twist, and of course in the end the good guys win. (I don't think that counts as a spoiler.)

But -- and perhaps you could see a but coming -- the novel really did not work for me. There is some pretty promising material here -- some fun ideas. (Though the mechanics of the shapeshifting plus usage of found materials don't bear much thinking about.) But I kept coming up against things that made me just go "No! I don't believe that at all!" Not the fantastical ideas -- those were either fun enough or get a pass because, hey, it's fantasy. But things like Shesheshen -- who claims to hate talking -- having a spectacular and quite idiomatic understanding of the local language. The entire characterization of Homily didn't ring true. Homily's abuse is real, but her family is an overdetermined example of abusers used for convenient "good guy/bad guy" labelling -- and children are seen as responsible for abuse as adults. The worldbuilding is flimsy -- the geography and local politics unconvincing. The prose is mostly OK, but there are a few misses, and some jarringly contemporary language. The human characters are very scantily characterized. The novel's structure is off -- the worst aspect being an unbearably tedious closing part -- what should have been perhaps two pages of a sort of coda goes on and on (and the important stuff that is said to happen during this is not even shown, just mentioned.) Much is made of Homily being "stocky" but ... it doesn't really land, or seem to matter. And I was really annoyed that the central "hard issue" -- Shesheshen's need for a host for her eggs (as the title promises) is completely ducked. 

I think a lot of the issues I raise are essentially "first novel" issues, and totally understandable. Most aren't fatal -- just annoying. There's definite promise here -- and Wiswell has done some nice work at shorter lengths -- it's just that this is a Hugo and Nebula nominee, and I really don't see it. 

Review: Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost, by Chaz Brenchley

Review: Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost, by Chaz Brenchley

by Rich Horton

Chaz Brenchley is a delightful writer, an Englishman long resident in the US, born in the same year I was born. He's been publishing SF and Fantasy since the early '90s. I reprinted two of his stories in my Best of the Year books. Of late he's been publishing a series of "girls' school" stories, set at a boarding school in a crater on Mars -- the Crater School. The books are marketed as YA, and I haven't read them yet but I will get to them.

His new novella, Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost, now available from the outstanding UK small press NewCon, seems to be set in the same world, as Rowany de Vere is a graduate of the Crater School. This version of Mars is a bit steampunkish -- it's a colony of the British Empire, complete with canals, airships, mysteriously maintained gravity and atmosphere (in all senses of the word), and also a setting for the Great Game -- the Victorian Era conflict between Russia and the UK. (This also seems to be the same Mars as in his story "The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red, Red Coal", one of those I reprinted.)

Rowany, a newish recruit to the Colonial Service, has been tasked with escorting a Russian defector, Leonov, to safety. This is her first solo mission, and so it's not surprising when her charge complains that he's been met by a mere girl, instead of someone like the legendary Colonial Service man Mr. Colpert. But Rowany is who he's got, and she tells him that for now he's her Uncle Vasily, and they are going to meet her father. And they're off.

It's soon clear that (as was certainly expected) some Russian agents are on their trail. So Rowany takes them off to the fair being held on the canal (it's "Second Christmas") which means skating. And dodging through crowds, and finding a boy named Tommie to give them a bit of help -- then a long parlous skate, and an escape into the bad side of Marsport, where some feral children are happy to harass the Russians who are still following them -- then onto the train, only to find themselves followed by an airship ... and ...

But why tell more? It's a romp, a delight, with plenty of derring-do and narrow escapes and Rowany surprising herself with her cleverness, and a pretty conclusion complete with expected twist. This is lots of fun -- and Brenchley is ever great fun to read.

Review: Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg

Review: Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg

by Rich Horton

SFWA Grandmaster Robert Silverberg had a career of a rather interesting shape. He broke into the field as a teenager in 1954, with his first two stories appearing that year, one in the UK magazine Nebula, and one in the US magazine Future. His first novel, a juvenile called Revolt on Alpha C, appeared in 1955, and over the next decade he published a couple of dozen SF novels and many dozen stories. (He also published widely in other genres: crime, Westerns, erotica, but SF was always his prime focus.) By the early '60s, however, the magazine market had greatly shrunk, and Silverberg mostly left the field, concentrating for a few years on popular science. SF novels kept appearing at a slower rate, but some of these were expansion of earlier stories, or YA. Famously he was lured back to SF by editor Frederik Pohl, who urged him to do more ambitious work, and beginning in 1963 some increasingly impressive short fiction started appearing, with a return to novels in 1967. Over the next five years (though a couple more novels appeared in 1975 and 1976) he published another couple of dozen novels, and the best of these are outstanding work. He publicly "retired" again by about 1975, only to be lured back to the field by a very high advance for his novel Lord Valentine's Castle, which came out in 1980, and over the next couple of decades another couple of dozen novels appeared, about eight in the Majipoor series but many unconnected. He produced some more short fiction through the first decade of the new millennium before, to all intents and purposes, finally retiring from fiction writing.

I've been making a somewhat desultory effort to read through all his early SF novels, and all his mid period novels. (I've read a good sampling of his later work, put I'm not sure I have the energy to attack all of Majipoor.) The middle period novels really do include some remarkable work -- I'd mention Thorns, Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, A Time of Changes, and The Stochastic Man as particular favorites. There are still I few from this period I hadn't get gotten to, and one of these is Up the Line. This was serialized in two parts in Amazing Stories, July and September 1969, and more or less simultaneously appeared as a paperback original from Ballantine Books.

Up the Line is a time travel novel. Judson Elliot III is a young man in a the middle of the 21st century, bored with his pre-ordained role as a law clerk (his father is a judge), so he runs away to New Orleans, where he somewhat fortuitously runs into a somewhat older black man named Sam, who suggests he apply for a job with the Time Service once he runs out of money. It seems time travel has been around for a couple of decades, and people in the Time Service work essentially as tour guides, taking groups of ten or so people "up the line" to historical times (it's impossible to go to the future of wherever your own life has taken you.) 

Jud actually has a decent education in Byzantine history, and in addition some of his ancestors were from Greece and Turkey back in those times, so he decides to concentrate on that period. We get a good look at the rules the Time Service operates under -- avoidance of paradoxes, trying never to meet another of your "selves" when you go back in time, etc. We also realize pretty quickly that the Time Service treats these rules a bit loosely, though with care -- and there is a certain amount of smuggling of relics from the past, as well as some other theoretically forbidden activity. Still, there is the risk of the other branch of the Time bureaucracy, the Time Patrol, discovering your shenanigans, which can lead to suspension, to a trip back in time to fix whatever problems you caused, or even in extreme cases to erasure from history.

We see a number of trips in time -- first back just over a century to witness Huey Long's assassination, then a number of different trips to Byzantium/Constantinople. These trips go back all the way to Constantine's time, and forward through Justinian's era, Belisarius, the Iconoclasts, and finally the last couple of centuries as Islam and the Crusaders variously despoil the Byzantines. There is a fair bit of depiction of the real history behind all this, and there is also a lot of depiction of sex -- at first with members of the tour groups, but eventually, inevitably, with the "locals", including the Empress Theodosia. (For this novel, Silverberg accepts Procopius' slanders of Theodosia as the truth, though it's my understanding that historians now regard those stories as sheer political smears.) There is a scary episode with one of the tourists setting up a criminal enterprise of his own, made worse by his interest in barely pubescent girls, and, of course, Jud is eventually tempted to try a sort of distant incest with his many greats grandmother -- only to fall desperately in love.

In the end, I think this is pretty minor Silverberg. It's professionally done -- a slick and engaging read. The manipulation of time paradoxes is well handled, and the history seems pretty solid. Some aspects are a bit queasy making to contemporary eyes -- the characterization of Sam, Jud's black friend, while positive, does make some political points that maybe seem a bit off coming from a white writer. And the sex is -- well, let's just say the male gaze gets some play, and the sexual morés are perhaps unconvincing -- thought partly intended, I think, as a satire on a future hedonistic culture. On the whole its a decent read, but it's not one of the books on which Silverberg's reputation is based. 

Hugo Ballot Review: The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Hugo Ballot Review: The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett

by Rich Horton

This is the fourth of the 2025 Hugo finalists for Best Novel that I have read. Robert Jackson Bennett is a writer I have heard of before, but have never read. His first novel came out in 2009, and he has received a good deal of attention for his work -- two novels, Mr. Shivers and American Elsewhere, won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, and two of his series (Divine Cities and The Founders) have been finalists for the Hugo for Best Series. The Tainted Cup is the first book in a new series, Shadow of the Leviathan. (The second book in the series, A Drop of Corruption, has already appeared this year.) It is a fantasy detective novel, and I'll confess that I was happy to hear that -- it sounds like fun. (And I recently read another fantasy detective novel, Lisa Tuttle's The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief.)

The narrator is one Dinios Kol, who has recently been appointed Assistant Investigator to the Iudex Investigator for Daretana, a remote canton of the Kahnum Empire. This investigator is Anagosa Dolabra, a decidely eccentric woman of middle years. Din, meanwhile, is a youngish man, though a bit old to still be an apprentice -- his appointment as Ana's assistant is conditional, dependent upon successful completion of his apprenticeship. 

The current investigation is of a spectacular murder -- the first exciting assignment Din has had. (The first four months of his time with Ana involved tedious dealings with financial fraud cases.) Ana has a disability -- she is unable to tolerate excessive sensory stimulation, and she spends most of her time in her rooms, often blindfolded. So it is up to Din to handle the physical investigation -- but he does have one ability that will help -- he is an "engraver", and has perfect memory of everything he sees and hears, so can report precise details to Ana. This ability is due to an "apothetikal" modification -- a sort of fantastical plant based biotechnology. There are many such modifications, mostly used by the Iyalets, the four main branches of Empire service: Din's branch, the Iudex, are the criminal investigators; the Apothetikals are the masters of biotech; the Engineers maintain the Empire's infrastructure, and the Legion is the military. Apothetikal modifications include tremendous strength, enhanced vision, great powers of calculation, and many more. 

What Din finds in this investigation is that a certain Commander Blas of the Engineers had been visiting a house owned by the Hazas, a powerful "Gentry" family; and that suddenly a plant "bloomed" inside his body, killing him horribly. This plant is "dapplegrass", which grows so quickly that when it was first invented it destroyed an entire canton before it was contained. Ana and Din soon learn that in the neighboring canton of Talagray ten more engineers have been killed, also by dapplegrass, and some of them were working on the seawall that protects the Empire from being overrun by the incredibly huge leviathans in the oceans. It's very clear that these murders must be solved quickly, especially since the breach in the seawall caused by the dapplegrass blooming within it leaves Talagray vulnerable to a leviathan -- and the wet season, when the leviathans approach the shore, is upon them. 

Ana and Din head to Talagray, and start investigating, even as more murders are discovered. There is clearly some sort of conspiracy at hand, and there are plenty of suspects, including the Haza family, a cabal of Engineers, discontented exiles from the canton that had been overrun by the dappleglas, and even potentially members of the team assembled to help with the investigation. Din continues to perform the active work of crime scene examinations and interrogations, while Ana analyzes what is found, makes brilliant deductions, and strategizes next steps. It is a true race against time, and we get to know Din and Ana better and better, as Din makes some remarkable discoveries about his own abilities, and we get hints of a past for Ana. Of course they do solve the crime(s) -- and the solutions are pretty satisfactory (though there is some coincidence, and perhaps Ana's deductions are somewhat implausibly brilliant.) 

The real fun of the book is the mismatched pair at its center. Ana is a pure delight -- cranky and demanding but funny and honest; while we really come to like Din, a poor boy making good despite personal difficulties. Other characters -- especially the fiercely honest military veteran Tazi Miljin, and Din's love interest Kepheus Strovi (they don't get together until the end but I could see from when they first met where that was going) are interesting as well. The magical* inventions are neat too -- Din's special abilities, the various apothetikal modifications, the nature of the leviathans, the scary "twitch" -- really well done. 

Where does it rank on my Hugo ballot so far? Roughly third out of four -- pretty much on a level with T. Kingfisher's A Sorceress Comes to Call but behind Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay; with the difference coming down mainly to science fictional interest and ambition. All four of the novels so far have been at least very enjoyable reads. 

*(I can easily imagine this book recast as science fiction -- what is presented as magic here could have been given a scientific justification, admittedly not a terribly convincing one.)

Review: In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden

Review: In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden

by Rich Horton

Rumer Godden was one of the great mid-century British women writers who tended to get ignored a bit because, well, women's fiction (and the tendency to denigrate it as purely middlebrow.) Other examples: Barbara Pym, Margery Sharp, Elizabeth Jane Howard. She was, to be sure, quite successful commercially -- nine books became movies, and her books sold quite well. Novels like Black Narcissus and The River (and their associated movies) remain well respected. Below is the potted bio I wrote the last time I covered Godden:

Margaret Rumer Godden was born in England in 1907, but was largely raised in India (her father was a shipping executive.) She spent some time at school in England, but mostly lived in India until after the Second World War. She ran a ballet school in Calcutta (now Kolkata) for twenty years. She converted to Catholicism in 1968 after many years of study. Ballet, India, and Catholicism are all recurring subjects of her books. She wrote some 60 books -- novels, children's books, memoirs. Her elder sister, Winsome Ruth Key Godden, was also a novelist (writing as "Jon Godden"), and the two collaborated on some memoirs late in life. She married twice, the first time unhappily, the second time much more successfully (though she has been quoted as saying she never really loved any man but Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice!) She had two daughters. She was named an Officer of the British Empire in 1993, and died, a month short of her 91st birthday, in 1998.

That potted bio just above notes her conversion to Catholicism in 1968. The novel at hand, In This House of Brede, was published in 1969. It is set at Brede, a Benedictine monastery for nuns (that is -- not a convent.) Godden herself spent three years living just outside a monastery -- partly to research for this book, but also, I assume, as part of her studying Catholicism. I should note that I myself was raised Catholic, and I often find myself admiring Catholic fiction, particularly perhaps fiction by converts -- Gene Wolfe and Graham Greene are two other examples.

The novel opens with Philippa Talbot, an highly respected member of the British Civil Service, suddenly resigning her position. Many of her fellows at the organization are shocked -- she was greatly admired and clearly going places. But she herself has been planning this for some time, and her boss, Sir Richard, as well as her close friend, McTurk, have been told for years that she intends to become a nun. She had had an affair with the married Sir Richard, and had broken it off (though they remained friends.) We learn that she had previously been married, but her husband died in the War, and her very young son had also died, in circumstances she won't discuss. 

The rest of the book covers about 15 years of her life at Brede -- a couple of years as a novice, followed by time as a junior sister, but -- perhaps inevitably though not without personal struggle -- eventually rising to a position of authority. There is a lot going one besides Philippa's story -- the death of one Abbess and the difficulties the new one has; a serious financial difficulty caused by the old Abbess; issues for several of the incoming novices, which in some cases mean they have to leave, and in other cases are resolved only after torturous personal discovery; the installation of a beautiful new altar; literary works by a few nuns; an effort to help establish a new Benedictine monastery in Japan; intricate examination of the personalities of the various nuns, and their conflicts with each other, the petty jealousies and so on -- plus a slight hint of Lesbianism, and also a side plot about abortion (for someone outside Brede.) We also, eventually, learn the details of Philippa's history.

It's a beautiful novel, really. The characters are exceptionally well captured, the writing is lovely. It's a long book, well over 600 pages in my edition, a 2005 Loyola Classics reprint, though it's probably only some 160,000 words -- long, but not as long as 600+ pages would general indicate. (The book was originally published by Viking -- Loyola Press is a Catholic publishing venture, as the name indicates.) At any rate, for all its length, and despite its constricted setting, it is never boring. It succeeds completely as a description of monastic life, and as a convincing argument for its value. We really do understand that these women are living fulfilled lives, and are variously happy or sad according to their natures and the vicissitudes of their lives. A few events seem somewhat convenient, particularly the resolution to Brede's financial crisis, but so be it. A book much worth reading. 

Hugo Ballot Review: Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Hugo Ballot Review: Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

by Rich Horton

My next review of a Hugo nominated novel is Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky (real name Czajkowski -- publishers asked to change it because the composer's name is so familiar) has been publishing SF and Fantasy prolifically since 2008. He has been nominated for the Hugo six times -- twice each in the categories Novel, Novella, and Series. He won for Best Series in 2022 but declined the award after the hugely questionable nomination ballot counting issues were revealed. This year he has two novel nominees (the other is for Service Model) and another series nomination, for The Tyrant Philosophers. I have read some short fiction (including "Dress Rehearsal", which I included in by Best of the Year collection for 2017) and one novel: Children of Time, which I found quite impressive.

Alien Clay is also pretty impressive. Tchaikovsky is fascinated by unusual biology -- that certainly was central to Children of Time, and it's central here. The narrator, Arton Daghdev, is a scientist -- a biologist with great interest in ecology, but he has been exiled to a work camp on the exoplanet Kiln. It seems Earth is now dominated by an authoritative government called the Mandate, which among other things tightly regulates science -- only science that supports the Mandate's view of the universe is allowed. Daghdev was as outspoken as he could get away with, until he crossed a line and got sent to Kiln. He was also a real revolutionary, but hadn't been caught at that.

On Kiln he is assigned to Dig analysis, and is also contacted by the head of the camp, Commandant Teloran, who is reasonably well-educated, thought still a tool of the Mandate, and who wants Daghdev to participate in the effort to find the missing "Builders" -- the species that supposedly left a series of structures behind that seem the result of intelligence, especially since there are symbols written on the structures that seem an alphabet of sorts. Daghdev is well aware that any appearance of collaboration with the Commandant will result in ill treatment from his fellow prisoners, so he doesn't directly help him, but he is fascinated by the scientific question.

Soon he realizes that Kilnish life is very differently organized than Earth life, and almost every creature they find is a composite species, with several different individuals cooperating to survive. This sort of thing is very much not approved by Mandate science -- but it's also clearly the key to unlocking the secrets of the planet and the "builders". Daghdev gets in trouble eventually for two reasons -- one, he openly mocks the absurd attempts of the leading scientist on Kiln to manipulate the data they show Teloran in order to fit the Commandant's prejudices, and, two, he joins a resistance movement among the other workers at the camp, who aim to oust the Commandant and steal a spaceship to return to Earth. And thus Daghdev, with several of his allies, is demoted to "Excursions" -- a very dangerous group, as these are the people who make field visits to Kilnish sites, with purposely substandard equipment. Kiln is a very scary environment -- but ... this is also a way to actually study Kiln up close. 

I've left a lot out for spoiler avoidance. But it's a very enjoyable novel. It's a bit of a slow burn -- the first half or so is spent on rather overdone descriptions of how terrible the Mandate is, and how bad things are on Kiln, etc. etc. I think this could have been somewhat cut -- but also it's fair to say that Tchaikovsky has developed an appealing voice, or prose style -- rather sarcastic, full of quite clever images, and fun to read. His prose doesn't sing -- but it does maintain an effective "patter", if you will. So I was never bored -- and once Daghdev joins "Excursions" the book picks up dramatically -- his final expedition is tremendously exciting, and the promised revelations about Kiln and the "builders" and all are science-fictionally fascinating (though I did figure out the general shape of things pretty quickly -- which isn't really a bad thing, some books of this nature are puzzles in a way, and are satisfying to solve.)

Quite a good SF novel, and real SF too -- as of now (but I have three novels to go) it is second on my Hugo Ballot. 

Review: Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

Review: Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

by Rich Horton

Our book club discussed Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight this week, which prompted a long overdue reread on my part. I had first read it way back in my Golden Age, or technically shortly later -- when I was 14 or so instead Peter Graham's 12. I believe I read the 1968 Hugo winner "Weyr Search" first, in Isaac Asimov's second Hugo Winners anthology, or perhaps in Nebula Award Stories Three, and I read the sequel, "Dragonrider", in Nebula Award Stories Four. I am honestly not sure at this remove that I read Dragonflight back then -- it comprises "Weyr Search", "Dragonrider", and an additional novella length story that fits in between "Weyr Seach" and "Dragonrider". (This story seems to have originally been called "Crack Dust, Black Dust" but was never published separately.) Back then I think I may have assumed that there was no new material in Dragonflight. I did go on to read the first sequel, Dragonquest (1971), but never continued to any further Pern stories. By the time The White Dragon came out in 1978 I was in college, and I suspect I simply didn't have the time to read it. (I do remember that it was one of the earlier SF novels to get prominent front of store placement in the Waldenbooks where I still worked part time -- and indeed The White Dragon did become a New York Times bestseller.)

Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011) began publishing SF in 1953 with a story in Hugo Gernsback's odd late return to SF edition with Science Fiction Plus, but didn't sell any more stories until "The Lady in the Tower" (1959) and "The Ship Who Sang" (1961). She published a couple more "Ship" stories in 1966, but while those drew some attention it was "Weyr Search" that made her name. It appeared in Analog for October of 1967, and "Dragonrider" quickly followed, a two part serial, in December 1967 and January 1968. The novel Dragonflight came out in 1968. "Weyr Search" won the Hugo for Best Novella (in a tie with Philip Jose Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage"*) and "Dragonrider" won the Nebula for Best Novella. McCaffrey was the first woman to win a Hugo for fiction, and was tied with Kate Wilhelm as the first woman to win a Nebula, as Wilhelm's "The Planners" won for Best Short Story the same year that "Dragonrider" won. Dragonflight was McCaffrey's first novel, and two more novels followed in 1969 (The Ship Who Sang (fixed up from the stories) and Decision at Doona) so her career was well established, and she proceeded to publish dozens more novels in a variety of series -- not just Pern, but the Ship seres, Doona, Crystal Singer, and more. Much of her later work was in collaboration with various writers, including her son Todd. She was named an SFWA Grand Master in 2005.

I have to admit that in later years one reason I never returned to Pern was an impression I had that it had become, essentially, pure traditional fantasy; and also that much of it was YA. The latter is somewhat ture, but not entirely, but I am told (by other book club members) that the main sequence of Pern novels is quite definitely science fiction, and does some interesting things with technological developments, and also with SFnal rationales for the abilities of the dragons. Pern has often been cited as an SF/Fantasy edge case, perhaps unfairly -- largely because for many people dragons = fantasy. The Pern books can also be called a sort of Romantasy precursor -- especially to books like those in Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean series, which feature dragons and dragonriders. That said, while there is definitely romance in the Pern books I've read, it is less prominent than in Romantasy (as far as I can tell) and there is certainly less explicit sex.

As for Dragonflight -- as noted, I had read it decades ago, but I really recalled fairly little. For this reading I read both the two original novellas in their magazine publication and the book version. I will say that the differences between the books and the novellas are quite minor (except for the added section in the novel.) There are a few changes at the sentence level, either thanks to the book editor, or to McCaffrey doing revisions. It did seem to me that even by the magazine version of "Dragonrider" her prose was improving -- she was still a fairly new writer, even in her early 40s, so it's not surprising that she was getting better. 

There are two primary viewpoint characters in the novel. Lessa is a scullery maid at Ruatha Hold, but secretly she is the only survivor of the ruling family of the Hold, the rest of whom had been massacred by Lord Fax a decade earlier. Lessa, just now reaching adulthood, is plotting to have Fax killed so she can reclaim her hold. Meanwhile F'Lar, a bronze dragonrider from the only remaining Weyr, Benden, is Searching for a new Weyrwoman -- a woman with the telepathic ability to bond with a Queen dragon; as the old Queen is about to die, and her bonded Weyrwoman is incompetent. F'Lar's Search has not been promising, but at last he comes to Ruatha, despite being told that there is no one left of "royal" blood. Well, you can see where that's going, and indeed, F'Lar does manage to recognize in Lessa the abilities he needs, while she is able to manipulate F'Lar to confront Lord Fax ... Along with this, we learn that the Holds and some of the dragonriders do not believe that the "threads" which the dragons and their riders burn away are a threat any more.

The subsequent story concerns Lessa's first couple of years at Benden Weyr, learning the historic lore of the dragonriders, and her and F'lar's ascension to leadership, even as the two of them still don't get along well. Then it is time for the threads -- and we see the desperate attempt of the limited number of remaining dragons and riders to fend them off. F'Lar and Lessa -- particularly Lessa -- come up with a rather clever method of fighting the threads despite their depleted numbers. I'll leave that secret to the readers to discover. 

There is the skeleton of a really interesting novel here, but I don't think McCaffrey pulled it off. The prose is erratic -- as I said, it improves, but McCaffrey really wasn't a good writer at this time. The central romantic relationship just doesn't come off -- there is no chemistry between the leads, and it all seems forced (literally so, at times.) Some of the conflicts are too easily resolved, some don't convince, and the pacing is off (to some extent because of the structure compelled by the novel being written in three parts.) I do think a complete rewrite, keeping the same basic story but fixing the issues I mention, could be pretty effective. And I believe the later novels in the long series got better.

I know these are books many people love -- and Dragonflight was a book I quite liked when I was much younger. But I think this is a book that hasn't held up -- even if later books work much better. 

*("Weyr Search" tieing for the Hugo prevented Harlan Ellison from a clean sweep of the short fiction Hugos that year -- "Riders of the Purple Wage" was from his anthology Dangerous Visions, as was the novelette winner (Fritz Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones"), while Ellison himself kept two other Dangerous Visions stories from winning -- his "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" beat out Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man" and Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah".)