Dragonsflight is the first book in the Dragonriders of Pern series. Think fire breathing, teleporting, telepathic dragons who, with their human riders, fight off swarms of devastating alien worms falling through space from another planet, and you’ve pretty much summed up the basic premise of the story…
Dragonsflight tells the story of a woman named Lessa and how she rises from her ignoble status as a slave wench in her conquered homeland to queen of the noble dragonriders, who fight the devastating threads when they fall from the sky every 200 years. The threads are strange alien worms that live on a red planet that crosses the path of Pern, the home planet of humans and dragons. Only the dragonriders can defend Pern from their attacks.
However, it has been nearly 400 years since the last thread attack, and most of the people on Pern believe that the threads are nothing more than legend. The dragonriders have dwindled until only one half-populated weyr remains out of the five that once were. The other humans have grown powerful, and they start to challenge the ancient customs of the dragonriders–customs such as the search, where the dragonriders travel to the various holds and choose among their women one strong enough in mind and spirit to merge minds with the new queen dragon, greatest of all their dragons.
Lessa is chosen by the rider F’nor when he comes to her hold on search and is taken to the weyr, where she learns the ways of the dragonriders. When she melds minds with the newly hatched queen dragon, she becomes one of the leading women of the weyr. But as the red star grows nearer, the humans refuse to believe in the coming danger, and it takes her and F’nor to work together to find a way to save the planet Pern from falling to the ancient menace of the threads.I enjoyed this novel, but I honestly found it a little bit hard to really get into it. I didn’t really relate with any of the characters, and there weren’t any really big surprises in the story itself. The world of Pern was pretty cool, and the different communities of dragons and humans were also pretty cool, but it just didn’t seize my interest the same way that other sci fi / fantasy worlds have.
However, it was a good story overall, and I can see how other people really could get into it. Dragons in general are pretty fascinating, and dragons that think like humans and form a close-knit telepathic friendship with their human riders are even cooler.
I think that part of the reason it just didn’t grab me the way that Mistborn or Citizen of the Galaxy did had to do with the writing itself. The story is written in an omniscient point of view, where McCaffrey switches viewpoint characters in the middle of the narrative. When it’s from one character’s point of view, she keeps things fairly limited to his/her perspective, but not so much that she can’t switch to another at any moment.
Frank Herbert did the same thing in Dune, and he created a world that I really took some interest in, but he also gave a lot of physical descriptions of the world. There were not so many of those in Dragonsflight, though there were a few–enough to understand what was basically going on, but not quite so much that I felt I was actually there.
I think that I had a hard time relating to the characters because the story was more about them thinking through their problems than about them actually changing. F’nor and Lessa didn’t change much in the story–they were basically the same people after as they were before. They were in much different positions, but I couldn’t see how they’d really grown on a fundamental level.
I think that the story was more plot driven than anything else. The world of Pern went from a state of imbalance to a restored order, and the story started at the point where the key character (Lessa) entered the action. The story wasn’t all that much about the world of Pern or the characters of Lessa and F’nor as it was about the action itself, and for that reason it was probably harder for me to really get into that. Unless I really feel that something is at stake–a character or a world that I really love–the action is a little bit empty.
Don’t get me wrong–I still think that this was a really good story. Your reading experience might be very different from mine, and it will be just as right for you as mine was for me. Other people can and have really come to love this world and the people in it. It was just a little bit hard for me to get into it. But it’s still a good fantasy story.
