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A review by jenmcgee
Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey
3.0
I loved the Pern books as a young teen, then eventually fell out of love with them, in part because the author's pretty bizarre views on sex and sexuality became more and more clear. But I found this in my bookshelf and decided to revisit Pern.
I think what surprised me this time around was how annoyed I was by the basically pro-feudal worldview of the books. To summarize the backstory of Pern in brief, every 250 years alien spores called Thread fall from a passing meteor onto the planet, so the Terran settlers bred dragons to ride and burn the Thread out of the sky and established a feudal system where all the farms and fisheries functioned to provide tribute to the dragonriders. However, through a quirk of orbits Thread failed to fall one time, so as the first series begins it's been almost 500 years without any need for dragons, and the feudal system has kind of started to fall apart as people decide Thread is a legend. Of course, then it comes back and all those ignorant farmers realize how terribly wrong they were and learn proper respect for the dragonriders again.
(You can see that as an adult my sympathies kind of lie with the people who break their backs to maintain a ravenous standing army that's only needed every 200 or so years, but the basic Pern narrative ---as I remember it--is very much Crude Stupid Rural Folks versus Sophisticated Charming Elites.)
Re-reading it, it's not a huge mystery why teen-aged me would enjoy a book about a sensitive, misunderstood, brilliant girl whose community is too hidebound, sexist, and plodding to recognize how amazing she is; a girl who through pluck and ingenuity finally finds her rightful place in a community of creative, intelligent people who affirm that she's brilliant. It's a very fun wish-fulfillment romp at that level!
I think what surprised me this time around was how annoyed I was by the basically pro-feudal worldview of the books. To summarize the backstory of Pern in brief, every 250 years alien spores called Thread fall from a passing meteor onto the planet, so the Terran settlers bred dragons to ride and burn the Thread out of the sky and established a feudal system where all the farms and fisheries functioned to provide tribute to the dragonriders. However, through a quirk of orbits Thread failed to fall one time, so as the first series begins it's been almost 500 years without any need for dragons, and the feudal system has kind of started to fall apart as people decide Thread is a legend. Of course, then it comes back and all those ignorant farmers realize how terribly wrong they were and learn proper respect for the dragonriders again.
(You can see that as an adult my sympathies kind of lie with the people who break their backs to maintain a ravenous standing army that's only needed every 200 or so years, but the basic Pern narrative ---as I remember it--is very much Crude Stupid Rural Folks versus Sophisticated Charming Elites.)
Re-reading it, it's not a huge mystery why teen-aged me would enjoy a book about a sensitive, misunderstood, brilliant girl whose community is too hidebound, sexist, and plodding to recognize how amazing she is; a girl who through pluck and ingenuity finally finds her rightful place in a community of creative, intelligent people who affirm that she's brilliant. It's a very fun wish-fulfillment romp at that level!