Characters
My first thought is actually: this is a bodice ripper novel with dragons. The main male character, a guy with the unfortunate name F'lar, is kind of an abusive dick; the narration seems to consider it not only okay but even charming that he cannot properly express his feelings for his love interest (see next paragraph) except by violently shaking her whenever she did not do what he wanted. What is more, even in his own thoughts he describes their first sex as borderline rape. The only thing missing is a cover image of a "scantily clad woman being grabbed by the hero", to quote a relevant Wikipedia page.
The main female character, Lessa, shows nearly all key traits of a Mary Sue, at least in my eyes. She is unusually beautiful, of very noble blood, a singularly gifted telepath, and of course she bonds with the most impressive dragon ever, an unusually large and fertile golden queen dragon. She had a tragic youth but does not appear at all traumatised. The men admire her and other young women are jealous of her. (Also, other women who aren't her friends are generally depicted as sluts.) Everything she does, no matter how stupid at first sight, ultimately turns out to have been exactly the right thing to do.
Really one gets quite fed up with both F'lar and Lessa at some points.
The world
Pern is a planet that was in the distant past colonised by humans. Every 200 or 250 years a rogue planet called the Red Star comes close enough to Pern for c. fifty years to throw down spores called Thread. This Thread voraciously consumes all organic matter. The ancient Pernese reacted by genetically engineering local wildlife into fire breathing, flying dragons and bonding them to telepathically gifted humans, who form the top tier of a rigidly feudal society. Together, these teams of dragon and rider rise up in large squadrons and burn the Thread out of the sky while it is falling. Also, the dragons can teleport (!) and, under special circumstances, jump through time.
The need to bond dragons to humans is well justified in that the dragons are fairly short-sighted and impulsive without human guidance, showing for example a tendency to gorge on food. And unfortunately the early settlers soon lost their space age technology, what with having a very small starting population and a metal-poor planet, so that solving a technological challenge by leaving your descendants GMO animals seems like a good plan.
The funny thing is, and here it probably just shows that I am a biologist, that I can easily take the teleporting and fire breathing in stride but am rather bugged by the biology.
First, the Thread. How the hell does that even start to make sense? Maybe later books offer a better explanation, but Thread eats organic matter so voraciously as to be physiologically impossible; it is more like concentrated acid than like a living, growing organism. What is more, it eats and grows so quickly that it soon consumes everything and dies in turn. This is just not how life works, and the word parasite, although used explicitly by F'lar, is completely misapplied, as a parasite would be stupid to kill its host so quickly. And how does the Thread persist for thousands of years on the Red Star if it is so voracious? What does it eat there? It just does not make sense.
Next, the dragons. Again, teleporting, physically impossible but no serious hurdle for my willing suspension of disbelief. Fine. Fire breathing, ditto. The main time travel gimmick of the story, it has to be said, is actually really stupid, both because it is caused by itself and because the narrative puzzle that it solves is introduced just a few pages before. (Seriously, this should have been developed in the first quarter of the book, feeding the reader little clues here and there over the next chapters, but no... Imagine a crime mystery novel where the murderer gets introduced for the first time on page 209 and then convicted on page 211 and you get an idea of how this felt.)
But what really bugs me about the dragons is their reproductive biology. There are five colour groups:
- the very rare golden queen dragons, which are female and fertile, and whose female riders automatically become the boss women in dragonrider society;
- the relatively rare bronze dragons, which are male and fertile, and whose male riders have high status (the riders of the bronzes who mate with queens get to be the boss men in dragonrider society);
- brown dragons, male and sterile, bonded to male humans;
- blue dragons, male and sterile, bonded to male humans;
- green dragons, female and sterile, weirdly also bonded to male humans.
Finally, at the time of the first novel the dragonriders have just spent 400 years reduced to a single dragon nest, with only a single queen at each given moment in time, so that she would always have had to mate with her brothers. Realistically the inbreeding would have been lethal, but instead it turns out (at the beginning of the second book) that those 400 years have made the dragons larger and more fertile than before! You fail genetics forever.
But okay, maybe others will dismiss the genetics, reproductive biology and physiology issues just as I dismiss the physical ones. The main problem is still that the book was actually not very well written. I had read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell just before the first Pern novel, and I am sorry to say the difference was striking.
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