Anne McCaffrey

Dragonsdawn

In the beginning, before Thread, before the Dragons, before the Holds and the Weyrs and the elite Dragonriders of Pern, was just the great ships gliding through space with nearly six thousand colonists prepared to tackle the mighty task of beginning a new world on a strange planet. It was a jewel of a planet, with rivers and seas and mountains, and breathable air and growing things. Then came the terror. The strange, unidentifiable circles in the grass suddenly revealed a meaning, and every living thing was at risk. Many died - a horrible and consuming death. All resources, every man, woman and child had to fight the terrible nightmare of Thread. But a new creature was about to save the planet. From the delicate fire lizards a new life was born - a new symbiosis between man and beast.

yeah, i guess i'm on an old sff book kick...

this was generally about as good as i remembered! mccaffrey tried her best to inject some representation into this book, but it was really nothing more than exotic names hovering about. even the ostensibly irish protagonist pair was markedly american in attitude (although this is perhaps excusable on account of the "pernese" mindset). 

that and relatively limp characterization aside, the ideas of this book are as fun as they were in middle school! the existential terror of thread is well-written, as is the high fantasy of dragons flying about flaming thread from the skies. these pair well with the pioneering wild west setting to create a swashbuckling sense of adventure. having seen a little more science since i last read this book, i did struggle a little with the very evident absence of any real scientific understanding, although i've probably just been spoiled by ken and ted. 

Jeremy Wang

yeah, i guess i'm on an old sff book kick...

this was generally about as good as i remembered! mccaffrey tried her best to inject some representation into this book, but it was really nothing more than exotic names hovering about. even the ostensibly irish protagonist pair was markedly american in attitude (although this is perhaps excusable on account of the "pernese" mindset). 

that and relatively limp characterization aside, the ideas of this book are as fun as they were in middle school! the existential terror of thread is well-written, as is the high fantasy of dragons flying about flaming thread from the skies. these pair well with the pioneering wild west setting to create a swashbuckling sense of adventure. having seen a little more science since i last read this book, i did struggle a little with the very evident absence of any real scientific understanding, although i've probably just been spoiled by ken and ted. 

Deadly spores threaten the human colony of Pern unless the colonists, with help from geneticist Kitti Ping, can develop fire-breathing dragons to combat the menace

Daryl Houston

This one's interesting because it starts out as an origin story for Pern as straight-up science fiction, but it shifts toward the fantasy elements of the other books in the series and shows how a technologically super advanced society was forced to regress to the more manorial sort of society that emerges.

Great prose this isn't. The characters tend to be caricatures. These books have tended to be much more about "this happened and then that happened" than about relationships or characters or good writing. So they're neat as stories but not really all that satisfying as literature.

Dragonsdawn

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