Review: Dragonquest

Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Dragonquest, the second book in the Dragonriders of Pern series, feels like more of the same. There are dragons (obviously), there are dragonriders, and there are lots of disgruntled nobles. This installment features several predictable but slow-moving plotlines, and hints of stories or developments I hoped would McCaffrey would capitalize upon, but to no avail.

There are two main related story threads: the first is the discovery of fire lizards - the small creatures from which dragons were eventually bred, long ago; the second is the discovery of secret rooms inside some of the Holds that contain long-forgotten technology. This technology (namely a telescope) allows the dragonriders to take a closer look at the red star that causes all of their problems.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the cause of most of the problems in this book is Kylara. She has turned out to be a raging entitled bitch who sleeps around. Not exactly surprising, given the previous book, but still - I was hoping for better. She doesn't have a single redeeming quality, and is never presented in an empathetic light. She runs the Southern Weyr but doesn't do any of the work, instead leaving it to Brekke. Brekke is a young woman who is entirely capable and pure and doesn't even want to have sex with F'nor because she only wants to have sex with one person, and that person will have to be whoever flies her dragon. We also have our whore-madonna dichotomy set up quite nicely.

As soon as she finds out that the fire lizards can imprint on non-dragonriders, Kylara gives a clutch of eggs to her main lover - a lord - upending the entire hierarchy of Pern, in terms of both the balance of power between lord holders, dragonriders, and the craft holds, and the careful negotiations between the holds. F'lar and Lessa solve that problem fairly easily by giving away fire lizard eggs like candy on Halloween, but several of the lord holders (now emboldened by their dragon-like companions) are insistent on traveling to the red star to defeat the Thread at its source. Meanwhile, F'nor and F'lar are trying to figure out other ways to beat Thread, including grubs that seem to eat burrows of Thread and magically heal plants that have been burned by it, and finding another planet in the system that accounts for the recent irregular Threadfall.

Then Brekke's dragon rises to mate, and Kylara's dragon, due to Kylara's sluttiness and irresponsibility, attacks it, which results in the deaths of both of their dragons. This traumatizes Brekke. I'm not sure what the narrative point of this is, except to give the madonna a horrifying "first time" and castigate Kylara for being a whore and a bitch.

F'nor tries to jump to the red star and comes back, with his dragon, horribly injured.

My main problem here is that there is very little build to this book. There's not a plot, per se; there are a series of linked events that follow each other, but there is no build-up, and there's little relationship between any of the several sub-plots (like the young lord of Ruatha imprinting on a malformed white dragon). This book exists to move the world forward, not to move any story anywhere at all.

I also had some difficulty stomaching all of the mysterious unknown technology from the past - unknown to the characters, immediately obvious to the reader, and discussed in-story in cartoonishly oblivious ways, as if the reader shouldn't guess what the instrument is until the big reveal to the characters. It was painful to listen to.

And, obviously, there's the nauseating portrayal of women. I get that these were written in the late 60s, early 70s, and I should probably be satisfied that there are women at all. There are even brief pretensions toward an equal rights movement in Pern, when Brekke thinks about her young female ward and tells F'nor that the child would make a great dragonrider - even on a bronze, green, or blue dragon - and that maybe women and girls should have the chance to impress all dragons. But that's quickly discarded (at least for this book) and then it's a return to Brekke the pure and sweet and perfectly good, Kylara the vain, slutty, stupid, and bitchy, and Lessa, the firecracker who can only be tamed by her man, for whom she'll keep house and be a good sex object. Those are my words (mostly), but that's exactly how the book portrays them, with no exceptions. It's the three oldest tropes in the book, and at no point are they subverted. Even when Brekke and Kylara both suffer the loss of their dragons (which, to be fair, *is* Kylara's fault), everyone reaches out to Brekke and tries to pull her out of her stupor, while they confine Kylara somewhere distant. The nicest thing anyone does for Kylara is decide not to kill her. I remember reading the Harper Hall books as a kid, and loving the women in those books for their power and rebellion. I'm tempted to re-read that series instead of continue with this one.

Overall, it was an okay book to listen to while working out, but nowhere near as good as the one I'm listening to now! (Stay tuned for my review of the audiobook version of "Lagoon" by Nnedi Okorafor.)

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Review: Dragonflight

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I listened to the audiobook version of this, and was briefly concerned afterward that I had been listening to an abridged version. I checked, and I wasn't, but I almost wish I had been. Then, some of the awkward dialogue and incredibly superficial treatments of certain plot holes and relationships might've made more sense. Sadly, despite this being the origin of a much-loved epic fantasy series (with some sci-fi elements!) it was a bit of a disappointment. There was definitely a lot of fun and I'm super into the whole world McCaffrey creates here, but the melodramatic characters, misogyny, and plot inconsistencies bothered me a lot, and the prose didn't add anything to the story.

I want to briefly explain my comment on the misogyny: the second book is already kind of improving on the situation, but Dragonflight makes me cringe SO MANY TIMES with its treatment of all the women. Sometimes it's just cheesy writing, and sometimes it's because that cheesy writing leads to some startlingly sexist moments. Early in the novel, in an example of the first kind, Lessa bathes and checks herself out in a mirror and thinks about how long her hair is and how childlike her features are. (The fact that certain male characters talk about how hot she is and how childlike she looks in the same sentence is, perhaps, an example of the second kind of cringe.) But in general, my second-kind-of-cringe complaints have to do with 1) the overall structure of the Weyr, which doesn't make sense to me* and 2) women's treatment of each other. For most of my complaints about (1) see below, but I will say this: when gold dragons mate with other dragons, the riders feel incredibly lustful toward each other and generally also have sex. But green dragons - whose riders are men - also have mate with other dragons - whose riders are also men. This is COMPLETELY ignored and (based on book 2) it seems like the green riders just kind of go into seclusion? Why don't gay people exist here? The direct conclusion of the logic of the novel - ESPECIALLY given how loose the sexual mores of the Weyr are - basically mandates gay relationships between riders. But instead, that entire issue is ignored. With respect to (2), the only women besides Lessa in the Weyr are servants, and Lessa basically dislikes them because they're women. Kilara, the second queen rider, is a composite of every negative stereotype about women and is given almost no depth (even when she's a bigger character in book 2). Everyone, especially Lessa, just wants to get rid of her, and Lessa is furious and jealous any time Kilara even talks to the man she's interested in. It comes off as a caricature of female relationships. I guess there's a small chance this might actually be the point, but I think it takes those character traits way too seriously for that to be the case.

*I will say that Dragonquest is already addressing the sexist aspects of the Weyr directly and I'm only about 1/3 of the way through, and I suppose it's believable that men would prevent women from ever even trying to ride dragons other than the gold.

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