Dragon Riders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

[petersusanlucyedmond]

any1 read them?
i thought they were really good

[Monkeh]

The books are called either:

Dragons of Pern
or
Dragon Riders of Pern.

Can't remember which. I do know that it's spelt Anne McCaffrey. I am good for something. Sorta.

Oh. Yeah I have read some of them. I really like the White Dragon books. They where my favourite.

[ILIKEPILLOWS]

The books are called either:

Dragons of Pern
or
Dragon Riders of Pern.

Can't remember which. I do know that it's spelt Anne McCaffrey. I am good for something. Sorta.

Oh. Yeah I have read some of them. I really like the White Dragon books. They where my favourite.

Have you ever read the Wariors series by Erin Hunter

[Rhyanidd]

I read "DragonSong" it was really cool. I think that McCaffery did an excellent job conveying the feelings of Melony...(or whatever the girls name was)....I can get absorbed in a book and be dead to the world but it takes a really good author to get me to acctually feel like one of the characters!

[inkspot]

There were at least two trilogies:
DragonRiders of Pern, made up of:
* Dragonflight
* Dragonquest
* The White Dragon

And a series set in the Harper Hall:
* DragonSinger
* DragonSong
* DragonDrums

I thought they were all really well done. She takes a fantasy world but there's no "magic." It's planet, Pern, colonized by humans long ago, and to defeat a natural enemy, the peopl began breeding some of the indigenous lizards into huge dragons ... really a great concept. But even better than the concept, I think, are the characters -- especially in the Harper series; it is about the historians of Pern, the singers the singers and teachers. MasterHarper Robinton and his assistant Mennolly, and their young sidekick Piemur each have such wonderful characters and fabulous stories.

I have stickied this Thread, so it will always be at the top of the Forum with the Other Fantasy Worlds so you can find it easily and add your comments.

[Rhyanidd]

I thought there were more than 6 books set in Pern though....

[Monkeh]

There's about 20+. and Anne McCaffrey's son just got his first Pern book published not long ago.

[Rhyanidd]

d'oh! I hate it when other authors write about something like that! They're never as good....

[Knight Aaron of Narnia]

I'm currently reading Dragonflight.
It's good so far a little hard to get into.
But other wise it's good.

[inkspot]

Sorry, yes, there are a bunch of Pern books. After the first two trilogies, I could not get into the other ones, I don't know why. The first two trilogies I found very engaging.

[Rhyanidd]

ok....*rolls eyes ar herself* oh well....

[holyboy]

Since it has been 2 1/2 weeks from the last post, I'm gonna iUnSticky this topic

[devils_advocate_for_evil]

I love her books, I've read everysingle "Pern" book that I could get. I also read her Crystal Singer series, the books in that were great too!

[Jennifu]

*brings another thread back from the dead*

I've read a ton of the Pern books, and loved them! They were some of the books that got me into fantasy in the first place. (Though in some ways they're more sci-fi.) I haven't read a lot of the newer ones. Unless a series is really good, I can only read so many books in that series before I get bored.

I've also read some of the books in the Acorna series and the Tower and Hive series, as well as a couple of her shorter stand alones. I really like her work.

[PrinceOfTheWest]

any1 read them?
i thought they were really good
Like Ink, I thoroughly enjoyed the first two trilogies, and then thought the material started to get a little stretched. But they were a wonderful concept! One thing that did make me laugh, though - I remember reading an interview with Anne McCaffery about them, wherein she said that she decided to write a story about a culture that had no religion. Knowing what history I do, I thought that was a hilarious outlook! As if you could have a human culture that went on for more that two generations without some kind of religious expression!

[Copperfox]

And McCaffrey proved you right. The Pernese culture could not help but attach a RELIGIOUS meaning, even if they didn't CALL it that, to the dragons and to the parallel space called "between."

Didn't McCaffrey once write a non-sci-fi romance novel in which a married man suffers from his wife's undeserved sexual frigidity specifically BECAUSE the wife is a dedicated Christian, and so this makes it all right for the husband to leave her for another woman? It would not surprise me, given her Pernese dragon-culture having marriage depend on how the dragons pair up, NOT on a normal commitment between the human parties.

[PrinceOfTheWest]

I never read that much McCaffery outside the Pern series, though I did find that in the later stories, where the Pernese discover more about their origins, the veneration of their ancestors began to look suspiciously religious.

I think McCaffery has a wonderful imagination and her stories are full of life and goodness. It's true that they reflect the modern mindset, and thus will never be fully satisfactory to me (Lewis & Tolkien have ruined me forever in that regard!), but to McCaffery's credit, she didn't try to use her stories as a propaganda vehicle for her point of view (as far too many modern authors do) - she just wrote the world she saw. I just find it an intriguing confirmation of an observation made by both Lewis and Tolkien: try as she might, she could not keep the transcendent out of the world she created. Even starting from scratch, with a totally free hand and the intention of making a strictly secular society, religion crept in toward the end. We humans were made for another world, and ultimately nothing in this world will completely satisfy us - even when we try making a world to our own specifications.

[Copperfox]

Well, here's a much smaller, less morally significant quirk in the Pern writing.

In all of the Pern books I have read, and I've read at least seven, there is a peculiar attitude regarding weapons. Any time human beings on Pern fight each other with more than bare hands, the only weapons EVER used are daggers. Not swords, axes, pikes, bows, quarterstaffs, maces, spears, whips, halberds, clubs, shuriken, garrottes, poison darts, nunchaku, tridents, hammers, guns, flamethrowers, grenades, mortars or cruise missiles. NOTHING but dagger-dagger-dagger-dagger-dagger!

The absurdity of this fixation can be seen in one of the early novels, when some rebellious Hold Lords gathered an army and tried to impose their will on Benden Weyr by armed force. What did they think they were going to do, kill all the bronze dragons with DAGGERS?