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".)