Book review of Anne McCaffrey’s first book in the Dragonriders of Pern series, Dragonflight. Published in 1968 by Ballantine Books.

Summary

In this fantasy world, there is a moon which occasionally passes close enough to threaten all life on Pern by releasing destructive plant spores—threads—which implant themselves in the soil and leech out the nutrients so the land becomes barren and empty. The residents of Pern have dragons and dragon riders to defend them from these aerial attacks; but the last thread-fall happened almost four centuries ago and the folk of the land have begun to disbelieve the tales of the danger. Their lords are considering a rebellion against the dragon protectors who depend on their holds for levied supplies of food and textiles.

The other problem facing the dragon riders is that they no longer have as many weyrs (dragon nests) as they used to. They fear they’ll not have enough forces to face the threads when they come. In an effort to rebuild the dying weyr, F’lar searches for a suitable rider for the unhatched Queen egg. He stumbles across Lessa, our protagonist, who is a lord’s daughter in hiding after her hold was attacked and her family massacred by a greedy neighboring lord. Lessa possesses great powers, and a daring spirit. F’lar sees in her an opportunity to rebuild, and an opportunity for himself to rise to the powerful position of Weyr Leader.

Lessa does bond with the golden Queen dragon when she hatches, and must learn how to fill the position of co-leader for the weyr. When her dragon grows up enough to fly, F’lar succeeds in seizing the position of Weyr Leader by getting his dragon to mate with the Queen. This makes him Lessa’s consort as well. The two of them never cease butting heads over how to lead the weyr, with Lessa wanting to take risks with her power, and F’lar cautioning a strategic, pre-planned approach to things. In the end, Lessa defies him and undertakes a dangerous flight back 400 years to get reinforcements from the ancient weyrs. She’s convinced F’lar will be furious with her when—or rather, if, she manages to return—but when she makes it back unscathed he’s actually just relieved. The two of them and their reinforcements take on the threads and are triumphant.

Recommendation

I underwent a good bit of culture shock while reading this book. It’s pretty short, compared to a lot of fantasy, and I don’t remember how this title ended up on my list. Maybe because Anne McCaffrey won so many awards for her writing? I don’t recall where I heard about this book or why I added it to my reading list for this year. But it greatly disappointed me and I was prepared to write a critical review of it. However, before sitting down to list my complaints as a reader, I decided to look into the author’s story, and what I found out about Anne McCaffrey cast this book in a whole new light.

Dragonflight isn’t the first story McCaffrey wrote. She actually was first published in 1952 when her short story about women impregnated by aliens won a Sci-Fi writing contest. She later wrote a novel about which she said, “I was so tired of all the weak women screaming in the corner while their boyfriends were beating off the aliens. I wouldn’t have been—I’d’ve been in there swinging with something or kicking them as hard as I could.”

My initial criticisms of Dragonflight were that 1) Lessa is only as brilliant as she is a tool for the male character to use, 2) the character’s unhealthy sexual relationship is portrayed as excusable, and 3) the story begins from Lessa’s POV and appears to be about her, but ends in F’lar’s POV with him thinking about how best to control Lessa’s impulsivity. Lessa is described as spiteful and sweet. And even though she is a woman who tries to not be a dainty flower in need of rescue, her talents are most often seen as troublesome and a threat to the men’s authoritative handling of situations. In other words, this book is subtly misogynistic, despite being written by a woman.

What gives me pause, is that Anne McCaffrey was a woman who appears to be aware of the pitfalls of portraying women as weaklings, and yet the belief system of her times has so deeply ingrained itself into her mind that she can’t imagine a female protagonist who carries the story alone, or is admired by male characters for her strengths instead of them feeling threatened. In the midst of her efforts to write a different kind of story for a woman, she still relies on her character needing to be the most beautiful, the most powerful, and carefully manipulative in order to survive in a man’s world. It makes me wonder what sort of world Anne McCaffrey lived in. She divorced her husband and described that relationship as troubled and acrimonious. What does it say about her that the first time she was pregnant she wrote a story about impregnation by aliens which was solved by infecting the alien babes with a deadly virus? Her other short story The Lady in the Tower was something she wrote because she “thought of the story when wishing herself alone”.

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight might not read as something very deep or very admirable in light of today’s views on women, but I don’t know about the rest of her books. Perhaps her writing evolved as times changed. Perhaps she discovered a greater independence and ability to acknowledge her own worth after her divorce. I’ll have to read one of her later books sometime. This dive into Anne McCaffrey’s personal story has reminded me something very important—a writer is more than just an abstract creator, they are a person under the influence of many factors, trapped in a moment in time. My writing will also be a product of the ideas and influences I’m digesting, integrating, and pushing back against. And, for many writers, the writing itself isn’t static. You grow and change, and so does your writing. So instead of being quick to judge a writer like Anne McCaffrey by this one story, I would like to appreciate the changes she did make, and the resolve it took for her to try to imagine something different for readers of her time.