Return to Pern: All the Weyrs of Pern

All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

For my final Pern novel, I read All the Weyrs of Pern, which returns to the Ninth Pass of the original trilogy. It wasn't the last novel of the Ninth Pass ever written, but many people consider it the last good one, and the synopses of the later ones didn't appeal, so I was happy for it to be my last one too. I did skip The Renegades of Pern because it also sounded dull, but this created a bit of a discontinuity, as All the Weyrs picks up right from the end of Renegades, and it's at the end of Renegades where the Pernese rediscover the original landing site of colonists and make contact with AIVAS, the computer system who guided the original colonists, but I was able to figure out what was going on without much difficulty.

Published: 1991
Acquired and read: June 2023

So on the one hand, I'm glad I read this. It makes a fitting end to the story of the Ninth Pass: the Pernese don't just solve the problem of the Thread in terms of imminent Threadfalls, but also solve the problem of the Thread forevermore. Plus, an enormous number of changes begin working their way through Pernese society, thanks to the technological and scientific knowledge of AIVAS. There are some neat sequences of the dragons in space and on the Red Star itself, and the book has some satisfying tie-ins to Dragonsdawn and The Chronicles of Pern.

On the other hand, the characters don't really do anything. AIVAS gives them orders, and they obey, repeat, for hundreds of pages. It never really feels like anything is in jeopardy. Some characters are opposed to the changes to Pern society, but only bad, off-stage ones; wouldn't it have been more interesting if, say, F'lar and Lessa, had been more worried about the loss of status for dragonriders in a post-Thread society? But the book is a bit of plod as the characters all work together to executive AIVAS's plan with little conflict. The use of time travel drains even more suspense: you know things are going to work out before they happen because they have to work out based on the predestination paradoxes.

It's funny to read this shortly after Dragonsdawn and Chronicles because AIVAS is so significant here, but only mentioned in a couple brief asides, not even by name, in Dragonsdawn and Chronicles. From this book it would seem indispensable to the colonists, but it doesn't do anything at all in the early books! Also I think the explanation of the Red Star and the Thread we get in this book and Dragonsdawn makes a lot more sense than what we were told about in the original trilogy. No longer do we have a planet somehow reaching through space, but a planetoid disturbing objects found in the Oort cloud. The problem, though, is this new explanation doesn't account for the fact that there is no nighttime Threadfall!

The last Pern book I want to read is the one that doesn't exist. I want to read the book where a vessel from the Federated Sentient Planets comes to the Pern system... and promptly finds itself overwhelmed by a force of teleporting firebreathing dragons tearing it apart from the inside! What would dragonriders be like as a spacegoing defense or exploration force? Where is Dragons in Space!?

This is the final installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Introduction
2. Dragonsong / Dragonsinger
3. Dragondrums
4. The Masterharper of Pern
5. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern / Nerilka's Story 
6. Dragonsdawn / The Chronicles of Pern
7. Dragonseye
   

Return to Pern: Dragonseye

Dragonseye by Anne McCaffrey

This Pern prequel follows up on Dragonsdawn and The Chronicles of Pern, moving us to the tail end of the First Interval, just before the first return of the Thread in the Second Pass. Though it shares no characters in common with those books, it works to show the transition from Pernese society at the time of the First Pass to what we're used to from later books.

Published: 1997
Acquired: April 2023
Read: May 2023

I found this element a bit hit or miss. One thing it wants to set up is the transition to the Crafthall/Harper system. On the one hand, having all the computers finally go down, meaning educators decide to transition to easily reproduced songs, discarding most pre-Landing history, makes sense. (It is pretty jarring to see the word "PCs" used in a Pern book, though!) On the other hand, there's a single College in this book. How does this become the various Crafthalls of later stories? Well, one character is just like, "What if we were a bunch of separate Crafthalls operating on an apprenctice/journeyman system?" As sort of frustrated me in Chronicles, things don't slowly evolve to be like they are later on; instead some character just decides it will be that way. Similarly, in the two hundred years since the last Fall, the feudal system we know from the later novels has totally implanted itself... but why? Why did everyone decide this was best to the point of writing it up in an official Charter? That said, I did appreciate the explanation as to why fire lizards, so common in the time of Dragonsdawn, were all but mythical by the time of Dragonsong.

Overall, I think the idea of this book was much better than the actual book. The conflict ought to be, I think anyway, that this is the first return the Thread has made to Pern; there haven't been thousands of years of Passes and Intervals for Pernese society to organize itself around. Yes, they know from the predictions made in Dragonsdawn that the Thread will return... but the scientific predictions of experts often don't receive wide acceptance in society, as we know fairly well by this point in the twenty-first century. So some won't believe the Thread is really coming back; why do all the hard work of preparing for it? How do you convince everyone else it is coming back?

The problem is that only one Lord Holder doesn't believe it's coming back, and he is an awful awful person. He's a gambler, he's stingy, he doesn't pay his debts, he charges high taxes, he tacitly condones rape, and he tortures his citizens. So obviously he's a bad person, and obviously the other characters are going to take care of him. I think it would have been much more interesting for a character much more reasonable to doubt the coming of Thread, and for removing him to be a politically more difficult undertaking. It seems to me that the tension of this book ought to be if Pern will be ready for the Second Pass... but there's never any tension, because barring one guy, everyone is ready from the novel's very beginning.

Like all McCaffrey novels, it reads fairly easily (I allotted five days to read it and ended up zipping through it in three) and it has its moments, but it goes on a bit, and it felt to me like she ran out of plot about a hundred pages from the end because suddenly the book shifts to focus on two characters we barely saw in the rest of the book. As is too often the case in her later books, it loses the "hardscrabble" feeling that made the early Pern books. The return of the Thread is a moment of triumph! But surely it ought to be a moment of grim resignation, surely everyone ought to have been hoping the predictions were wrong, because the return of the Thread means that Pern is doomed to this terrible cycle for all time.

This is the seventh installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers All the Weyrs of Pern. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Introduction
2. Dragonsong / Dragonsinger
3. Dragondrums
4. The Masterharper of Pern
5. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern / Nerilka's Story 
6. Dragonsdawn / The Chronicles of Pern
   

Return to Pern: Tales of the First Pass

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.

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.

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:

1. Introduction
2. Dragonsong / Dragonsinger
3. Dragondrums
4. The Masterharper of Pern
5. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern / Nerilka's Story
   

Return to Pern: Tales of the Sixth Pass

Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
Nerilka's Story: A Pern Adventure
by Anne McCaffrey

With these two books, I jump back to the Sixth Pass, a set of events occasionally alluded to in the Ninth Pass books through the epic song "Moreta's Ride"; these were McCaffrey's first attempts at telling stories outside of the framework of the original Ninth Pass. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern tells the story of a plague that swept across Pern and the desperate attempts to stop it, particularly by the Weyrwoman Mortea, her lover Alessan, and the Masterhealer Capian. Nerilka's Story is a very lean novel (possibly a novella by actual word count?) that retells the story of Moreta from the perspective of a minor side character in Moreta.

Published: 1983
Acquired: March 2008
Read: May 2023

Moreta is an unintentionally familiar read in the COVID era, a story about a respiratory disease that can kill you, quarantines, defiant leaders, and vaccine distribution. It's fairly effective, mostly because of its main protagonist, the eponymous Moreta. She is an older woman, one who has had children and as Weyrwoman, has had a lover, but has clearly never known love. The scenes between Moreta and Alessan are the emotional core of the book and its most effective. Moreta is a Weyrwoman: she must manage her weyr and assist her Weyrleader. Alessan is a Lord Holder; recently widowed, he needs to remarry to ensure the continuation of his bloodline. The two fall in love over runnerbeast (i.e., horse) racing and dance together, but then duty pulls them as the epidemic worsens across Pern. Yet, they manage to snatch moments together. There's an effective feeling of doom layered across the whole thing, and some decent uses of the time travel abilities dragons were revealed to have in the original trilogy. I like that McCaffrey was trying something a little bit different here, and I overall found it an enjoyable, occasionally moving, read.

Published: 1986
Acquired: April 2023
Read: May 2023

Spoilers for Moreta: at the end, following the death of Moreta, Alessan marries minor character Nerilka "Rill." Nerilka's Story retells the plague from her perspective. It follows some Pern tropes that will be familiar to anyone who's read Dragonsong and Masterharper: Nerilka's family is mean to her even though she's gifted, Nerilka strikes out on her own, everyone realizes how awesome Nerilka is, the end. It's 182 pages long, but there are pictures and generous typography; I blew through it in one day. Though I was generally entertained, I feel like the central question I had—how did Alessan come around to Nerilka so quickly—was largely unaddressed, going by very fast at the end.

I think the publishers knew this wasn't up to much; the dust jacket insists this is a gift to Pern fans (a gift you had to buy yourself in hardcover?) and the pictures—which are not very good—and the maps and other appendices seem like padding.

This is the fifth installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers Dragonsdawn and The Chronicles of Pern. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Introduction
2. Dragonsong / Dragonsinger
3. Dragondrums
4. The Masterharper of Pern
   

Return to Pern: The Masterharper of Pern

The Masterharper of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

My memory of the original Dragonriders of Pern trilogy was that Robinton, the Masterharper of Pern, was my favorite character, carrying me through parts of the book I found less interesting. So it seemed logical to me that I would follow up the Harper Hall trilogy with this prequel about the life of the Masterharper.

Published: 1998
Acquired and read: April 2023

Well, whatever made Robinton my favorite character in the original books, there's absolutely no trace of it here. Like Menolly and Piemur, Robinton is an obnoxious prodigy, able to compose amazing music from a young age, and basically better at everything than everybody else. And that's it, that's the book! He never seems to struggle, he just is the best at everything he does. I think McCaffrey doesn't really understand excellence; she seems to think it some kind of effortless superiority. Some of the most excellent people you know work the hardest and struggle the most, but you wouldn't know it from reading a McCaffrey novel. And why does Robinton have to be the best composer, the best singer, the best player? Surely the skills required to be Masterharper are not these technical ones, but the skills of leading men and having wisdom? These are skills Robinton never demonstrates in this book. Why is he picked as Masterharper? It's not clear, he just is. How does he adjust to this new role? As boringly effortlessly as he does everything else.

On top of all that, Robinton can hear all dragons talk, which totally contradicts the depiction of Robinton in the original trilogy. Wow, he's just so so special. Actually, a lot of stuff doesn't line up; Menolly's boyfriend Sebell is aged up by a whole generation here, and Robinton's mother was a harper when the Harper Hall trilogy made clear there were no women harpers prior to Menolly. Why write a prequel if you can't make it join up right?

This book was a tedious, awful slog that made me hate a character who had been one of my favorites. I've seen it said that as the Pern series went on, McCaffrey lost sight of what made it work in the original books. For the readers, Pern was an awesome place you'd want to live, but that hadn't been true for the characters. But as it went on, that became true for the characters too. The Pern of the 1990s has had all its rough edges rounded off, and that loses what made Pern work to begin with back in the 1960s.

This is the fourth installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers Moreta and Nerilka's Story. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Introduction
2. Dragonsong / Dragonsinger
3. Dragondrums
   

Return to Pern: Dragondrums

Dragondrums: Volume Three of the Harper Hall Trilogy
by Anne McCaffrey

The Harper Hall books are less a trilogy and more a duology about Menolly and then a single book about Piemur, the young harper who was introduced as a side character in Dragonsinger. Piemur has a beautiful prepubescent voice... and Dragondrums opens with that voice breaking as Piemur goes through puberty, so now he needs to carve out a new space for himself at the Harper Hall.

Originally published: 1979
Acquired: July 2010
Read: April 2023

Piemur is a fun character, but like Menolly in the previous two books suffers from the fact that he's pretty much great at everything he does. He has to transition into drumming... and wow, he's the best drummer in the history of drumming, and everyone hates him for it. Wouldn't it be more interesting if for once in his life he had to work at something? There are lots of shenanigans here about the Old Timers on the Southern Continent, and Piemur works as a sort of spy to assist the interests of the northern weyrs and holds, but he pretty much adapts right away. Like Menolly in Dragonsong, he ends up in a situation that seems like it ought to be a struggle, when he's on his own in the south, but actually it's more like an extended vacation. Piemur was fun as a scampy side character in Menolly's story, but brought into focus, he has the exact same weaknesses as a protagonist as she does.

This is the third installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers The Masterharper of Pern. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Introduction
2. Dragonsong / Dragonsinger
   

Return to Pern: Dragonsong and Dragonsinger

Dragonsong: Volume One of the Harper Hall Trilogy
Dragonsinger: Volume Two of the Harper Hall Trilogy
by Anne McCaffrey

As I said in my introduction to this series of posts (see below), I read the original Dragonriders of Pern trilogy over fifteen years ago, though I have occasionally reread bits of it in anthologies. McCaffrey returned to Pern with the YA-focused Harper Hall Trilogy, which documented the struggles of young harpers Menolly and Piemur. The first two installments, Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, were actually published between books two and three of the original trilogy, and take place during the second. They make up one long story, and the third Harper Hall book is distinct from them, so I am going to tackle them together here.

Originally published: 1976
Acquired: January 2010
Read: March 2023

I can see why a certain type of person would love these books, but that certain type of person is not me. Specifically, that type of person is a teenage girl, ideally one who feels a bit like an outcast. Menolly lives in a Sea Hold on Pern, where her father is Lord Holder; she has a talent for music, but women on Pern cannot be harpers, and her father assiduously enforces these gender norms. Menolly is injured, and might never play again—and her family, in a pretty shocking moment of cruelty, allow her to believe this and don't treat her wound as well they might. This is all pretty well done stuff; my favorite part of the original Pern novels was the world that McCaffrey built up, getting to see the social structures oriented around the threat of the Thread, and Dragonsong expands that. Menolly navigating this world is tough and interesting reading.

Menolly ends up running away, and that was where the book began to lose my interest. The running away itself is fine, and Menolly shows some resourcefulness once she Impresses some fire lizards and saves them from a rising tide and keeps herself safe from Threadfall. (A fire lizard is a smaller cousin to a dragon; like a dragon, it can go between, but they can't talk.) But in the second half of the book, basically all conflict disappears. Once established in her fire lizard cave, Menolly doesn't really struggle anymore; then she gets rescued by a dragonrider and taken to a Weyr and the last quarter of the book is just people being terribly nice to her. No conflict, no climax. I can see why you would love this if you were an awkward, unusual-feeling teenage or preteen girl, but it was pretty boring to read as an adult.

Originally published: 1977
Acquired: July 2010
Read: April 2023

Dragonsinger moves Menolly into the Harper Hall, to be trained as a harper. It's a pretty typical boarding school story in many ways: Menolly must make friends, take lessons, and avoid the bullying of the worst students and school officials. It's fine, but again, it feels like Menolly never really does anything. It wants to be a coming-of-age story, but Menolly doesn't really grow or change; it's just that at the end of the book, everyone is like, "oh Menolly you're so awesome" and she becomes a journeyman. And she is indeed awesome: best at composing, best at singing, best at everything. A quick read, and it's interesting to delve into the mechanics of the Harper Hall, but again there was little to hold my interest.

This is the second installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers Dragondrums. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Introduction
   

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.

Archival Review: The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

Hardcover, 750 pages
Published 1978 (content: 1967-78)
Acquired March 2007
Read December 2007

The Dragonriders of Pern
by Anne McCaffrey

Last March, a friend of my mother's gave me the opportunity to look through those books that had belonged to her now-deceased brother and make off with what I wished.  He was an sf fan, and almost all of the books were sf ones, including some old Star Trek hardcovers.  This is the first of that collection of books I have gotten around to reading; it collects the three novels in the original Pern trilogy, Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon.  I enjoyed the first-- Lessa is an interesting protagonist, full of contradictions, strong, and sometime too much so.  Unfortunately, once time travel entered into the mix, the story became a bit too predictable-- it was all "wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey" in a way that removes all concept of jeopardy or suspense.  Dragonquest I found somewhat tedious-- the internal political squabbles of the dragonriders hold little appeal-- but it established my love for Masterharper Robinton.  The White Dragon was better, focusing as it did on one boy and his struggles.  But while I found the books themselves average, the world McCaffrey has built, centered around aiding the Weyrs and fighting the Threads, yet fallen away from both ideas, fascinates me, perhaps more than the stories themselves, and it was always the reason I wanted to keep on reading.  It and Robinton, at least.