Return to Pern: Introduction

Back in 2007, a friend of my mother's offered me any books I wanted from the collection of her late brother. I made off with sixteen books that interested me, which I read over the next two years.

The very first one I read was an omnibus hardcover of the so-called "original" Dragonriders of Pern trilogy by Anne McCaffrey. The Pern novels, if you don't know, draw on some fantasy tropes but are actually science fiction: they take place on an Earth colony called Pern, which every two centuries is threatened for fifty years by the "Thread," alien spores that devour all life. Without advanced technology, the Pernese use flying fire-breathing lizards to fight it off; dragonriders telepathically bond to individual dragons. While I wouldn't claim that I loved it, it did intrigue me, especially the world that McCaffrey had built around the dragons and the threat of the Thread, so I resolved to keep my eyes open for more installments.

The whole series had been a favorite of Hayley's when she was younger; she and a friend had read a Pern short story in a school textbook and loved it and tracked down everything McCaffrey had written about Pern from the library. Hayley had even participated in a Pern MUD, purely text-based role-playing, more like collectively written stories where each person is responsible for a specific character.

That opportunity actually came along just a couple months later, when another friend of my mother invited me to pick through the books of her husband. (Not dead in this case, just downsizing.) He had owned both Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern and Dragonsdawn, two prequels to the original trilogy, so I grabbed them. A couple years later, I was also gifted the "Harper Hall" trilogy, a set of YA Pern novels, by Hayley. (I think specifically because I had I asked for them, as the Masterharper, Robinton, was my favorite character in the original trilogy.)

Well, as is typical of my reading list, I finally got to the Pern novels this year, a mere sixteen years after reading Dragonriders! Talking with Hayley and my friend Christiana, I decided to supplement my reading of the five I had with five more that interested me. I of course wanted to read The Masterhaper of Pern, a prequel about Robinton; Moreta had a companion book called Nerilka's Story that sounded interesting. Hayley suggested that if I was going to read Dragonsdawn, I ought to also read The Chronicles of Pern, a set of short stories set in the same era, and Christiana said she always liked Dragonseye (also called Red Star Rising), another book set in early Pern history.

There are twenty-eight Pern books altogether; no one recommended the various ones written or cowritten by McCaffrey's children. I did want to know what happened after the original trilogy, though; everything I had picked was set concurrent to it or in an earlier "Pass." McCaffrey wrote four novels after the original trilogy set during the Ninth Pass, but discussing them with Hayley and Christiana and reading reviews made it clear it was a matter of diminishing returns as the series went on. As a girl in the 1990s, Hayley of course loved The Dolphins of Pern, but I was less keen as an adult man in the 2020s. I ended up deciding to pick up just one more Ninth Pass book, All the Weyrs of Pern, as a capstone to the whole series.

That then left the question of what order to read them all in. McCaffrey jumped all over the timeline, but I ended up deciding to mix publication and chronology. Basically, I would read all the books in a pass in the order they were published, and sequence the Passes in the order the first installment of that Pass was published (if that makes sense). This would give me rough publication order, but also mean I didn't jump around too much chronologically.

The exception was that I decided to save All the Weyrs for last, so my endpoint wouldn't be a prequel, but rather, the latest chronologically.

So here's the sequence I'll be following:

• Ninth Pass
• Dragonsong (1976)
• Dragonsinger (1977)
• Dragondrums (1979)
• The Masterharper of Pern (1998)
• Sixth Pass
• Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern (1983)
• Nerilka's Story (1986)
• First and Second Passes
• Dragonsdawn (1988)
• The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall (1993)
• Dragonseye (1996)
• Ninth Pass
• All the Weyrs of Pern (1991)

Since my copies of everything except the Harper Hall trilogy were already hardcover, I've been hunting down used hardcovers of the five books I didn't already own to match. This makes an okay-looking set; I was a bit careless and ended up with some ex-library copies, so I need to get those ugly stickers off the spines!

(Some of the covers are not great, but some are beautiful, especially the Michael Whelan painting on All the Weyrs. Inexplicably, modern editions crop it to a tiny detail.)

My first post reviewing the series will cover both Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, and will appear this coming Monday; the rest should follow over the next couple months.