Krishna
A dragon story with a difference in the beginning – as in explaining how the dragons came to be – with a scientific twist. How? Read on. Otherwise, an ordinary story.
Ann McCaffrey is setting up the environment for a series as this is the first book in the dragon series. This is the first book in the series called ‘Dragonriders of Pern’. If you liked this book, you have many more to read after this.
The book ends kind of abruptly, perhaps for the seek of baiting you to read the other books. Even some trivial questions were left unanswered. Annoying, if you like your books, even those in the series, to end in a logical point.
Humans colonized the third planet from a G-type (whatever that means) star, because it had air and water. Then humans who colonized them fell into disrepute technologically and forgot about the people who settled there and those people forgot their ancestors. The colonized planet was named Pern. That was the entire world that those people knew about. However, there was a rogue planet that came close to Pern, and to counter the “Threads” which were a threat, these people genetically engineered an animal, called the ‘dragons’ due to their similarity with the old earth legend (Legends survived among the colony but not memories of the motherland – legends presumably carried by the colonists and propagated to the successive generations).
Lessa has a premonition of danger.
Meanwhile F’lor and F’nar go to visit Flax who is a ruler and who they suspect of one step short of rebellion. As dragonmen who ride on dragons, they are respected and powerful and seem to throw their weight around. They are there to search for the new lady (queen) among the harems of the subservient kings and Flax does not have anyone suitable.
They then come to Ruatha the final hold which was destroyed and subjugated by Flax. Lessa lives there and is silently sabotaging his visit and is puzzled by so many dragonmen visiting there in tandem.
Meanwhile Lady Gemma who is forced to attend the banquet by the evil Flax undergoes birth pangs in the ruined banquet, but not before the dragons feel a surge of power indicating a hidden Weirwoman in the Hold. In trying to save Lady Gemma, Lessa learns that she is an ally and hates Fax but Lessa dies in childbirth.
Lessa is discovered and taken to be the nominee for queen for all of Weyrdome. She wins the affection of the new queen dragon and bonds with it. Wins respect by her abilities but realizes that the head, Rigul is not the right leader for the dragonmen.
F’nor finally tells her why Rigul hesitates to take decisions and why F’lar waits patiently.
When the dragon queen mates, the dragon whom she mates becomes her mate for life and the humans who are riders become mates for life too. Weird. When F’lar is sent off at the right time away, someone tips him off so he comes back on time and wins Lessa too. (Who tipped him off? Even the author poses this question emphatically but does not answer at all!)
When the new dragon flies, it is time for Lessa to go between, a kind of teleportation to other places. Lessa also finds out that she can transport between times – by accident. They go and put out the Threads which have started falling and which are disastrous to the kingdoms with great risk to themselves.
Now there are some interesting but confusing stories about time travel and how they communicate both forward and backwards in time. Lessa finally makes the great leap backwards 400 years to meet her ancestors.
This story flows through fine but suddenly ends as if she just put the pen down (or stopped pounding the keyboard) at some arbitrary location thinking ‘Anyway I need to continue this in book 2 so this will do!’
6/10
– – Krishna (Feb 2019)