Dragonsdawn
The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall
by Anne McCaffrey
After Moreta set a precedent, McCaffrey continued to write prequels to her original Pern novels, jumping even further back, to the original settlement of Pern, in a pair of books: Dragonsdawn, which depicts the coming of the first colonists and the coming of the first Threadfall, and The Chronicles of Pern, a collection of short fiction set before, during, and after the First Pass. Prequels are a tricky business: fans like to complain about them, but fans must also consume them because people keep making them. I think there's a balance you have to get right. At its best, a prequel can take tantalizing hints of backstory and make them in a compelling story in its own right; at its worst, prequels join unnecessary dots and rely too much on familiar images and ideas.
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Published: 1988 Acquired: March 2008 Read: May 2023 |
These books are probably somewhere in between those two poles. Dragonsdawn thankfully skews toward the first. It doesn't totally line up with the hints we got in prologues to the earlier Pern novels, but it's an enjoyable story in its own right, so it doesn't matter. It's divided into three parts; the first is all about the colonization of Pern, giving us a cast of characters coming to this new world after a long journey, all eager to make a world of their own for various reasons. We get to see what the colony ought to have been like in great detail, and we know as readers what hints they cannot interpret correctly about the doom to come. The second section jumps ahead eight years, with the coming of the Thread, and the reactions of the colonists to this devastating threat.
I read a comment on Reddit recently that I really liked and summed up my feelings about Pern very well: "There's a hardscrabble vibe to Ms. McCaffery's early books that disappeared by the later ones." The first couple sections of Dragonsdawn recapture this vibe really effectively; these people have to work for what they are doing, they are not comfortable.
It's got some great twists and turns in it, particularly what happens when one character steals a shuttle and tries to get away from Pern; I also appreciated the clarification on the Red Star. In the original books, it seems scientifically risible: how could a planet launch organisms at another? how could the Red Star follow Pern in its orbit for fifty years but not the other two hundred? Dragonsdawn makes it clear that in fact the Red Star picks up organic matter in the Oort cloud and drags it into the inner solar system, and it passes right back out, but it takes fifty years for what it's dragged to all be used up. (Though this explanation makes other aspects of Thread a bit of a nonsense: why doesn't Threadfall happen at night? how does it happen with a regularity so predictable you can know where every Threadfall will happen fifty years in advance?)
There's also a real disconcerting shift here, in that though you know intellectually from the earlier books that the Pernese are descended from Earth humans, it's a much different thing to see them in spaceships, talking about the Federated Sentient Planets (apparently used in McCaffrey's other sf) and its space wars, and referencing facts about Earth history, geography, and culture. It's just not right! And that's what makes it work as a prequel: it's familiar enough to line up with the Pern you know, but different enough to be interesting.
I will say, though, that once the dragons come along, it gets less interesting, because it becomes more obvious how things are going to play out. Will the new dragon species breathe fire? Well, yes. Will they figure out how to go between? Well, yes. The last section becomes a sort of boring inevitability.
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Collection published: 1993 Contents originally published: 1991-93 Acquired: April 2023 Read: May 2023 |
This feeling continues into the weaker stories of The Chronicles of Pern. Will the first Hold be established? Well, uh, yes. Will there be more Weyrs? Of course. McCaffrey has a somewhat annoying tendency to not let things evolve from what we saw in Dragonsdawn to where we started in Dragonflight, but to depict it as happening in a single moment as a single decision. For example, in the story "The Second Weyr," we learn that one guy made the decision about how Weyrleaders and Weyrwomen would be picked, and his rule was followed for the next thousand years exactly as is without any changes. It doesn't feel historically real. Another story is mostly about how someone got across a river in order to set up how Ruatha Hold got its name: dead boring exposition of something I didn't care about. Another story tells the evacuation of the Southern Continent from Dragonsdawn in more detail, and falls victim to the "cozy" problem of later Pern novels; what ought to be a harrowing trip comes across more as a heartwarming story of an old guy rediscovering love. Plus despite being titled "The Dolphins' Bell," I felt like the dolphins were barely a factor!
"The Survey: P.E.R.N.ᶜ" isn't really a story but is kind of neat to read, about the explorers who first discovered and classified Pern. For me, though, the real standout of the whole book, and what made it worth it, was "Rescue Run," about a Fleet ship coming into the Pern system and checking for survivors. The final line of the story is a genuine killer. A great read, Anne McCaffrey at her tough best.
This is the sixth installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers Dragonseye. Previous installments are listed below:
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