Sky Dragons: Dragonriders of Pern

I love Anne and the world she created. She was innovative and dating with an unique writing style. I’m not a huge fan of the additions of books that change the history and try to usurp the brilliant plot twists. Going back to build dragon strength was hers and it is redundant when the same tactic was “done before”. Its like stealing the achievements and victories of her heros. This book was worse in taking a ridiculous delight in deliberately making the timing factor such a boring and poorly explained phenomenon. The story is not at all like one of Anne’s. Her books centered on characters and their deeds, not the whole blah blah blah of sex and lovers/ loving. If that is the story Todd wants too tell then he should build his own world to do so and not muck up this one. I want a refund for the waste of money and words that were, as I said, redundant and needlessly complicated. The ridiculous addition of all of Jirana’s seeings and the focus on babies and families and love love love is just too much to stomach. I will re-read Anne’s books many times but this and the others that twisted her world are off to the scrap heap. If you love The Dragonriders of Perm, then do not ruin your love or waste your money.

I wanted “The Skies of Pern” in paperback, and chose the cheaper option on the search list which happened to include Kindle. When I selected the paperback option, the book offered was changed to “Sky Dragons”. I did not want this book and I don’t particularly like reading Todd’s work to be completely honest (so I might be biased against his writing).

I attempted to read this book and could not get past chapter 2 because of how dramatic and choppy the story line was. Within what I read I noticed there was a lack of continuity checks, such as Timing. In the earlier books a big deal was made about flying between times too close or too much made people unstable but in “Sky Dragons” none of the characters seemed phased at being in 3 times at once. The book was written as if the reader already knew all the characters, which I understand it is a sequel volume but suddenly introducing a character into a scene with no prior knowledge of them is confusing.

Whenever someone takes over the writing of someone else’s work you can expect that it won’t be as good as the original. That’s bound to happen as it is not their world. I enjoy Todd’s writing for itself. He has his own style and many of the complaints about the “forgetting” by the time Anne’s books are set that other readers complain about are answered in her books with the deteriorated records.

The main mistake in this book, and unfortunately he based the book on it, that I cannot forgive him is that the Dawn Sisters are in a geosynchronous orbit above Landing. That means that they do not move from that location. He has them actually orbiting the planet following the dawn. That one mistake makes this story line harder to digest, though with the curve of Pern the original use of the Dawn Sisters may work. The map at the front of Dolphins of Pern shows that it may be possible. That’s all the spoiler I’m giving.

This should have been named the ‘The Rainbow Dragons’.
I bought this book because I love science fiction and Anne McCaffrey did a good job with this series. If I was interested in gay/polyamor drama I would have bought a book about just that. By the time I got done with the book I couldn’t tell you who was sleeping with who and who was what orientation. Neither should have any prominence in a science fiction book. Science fiction should be science fiction; period. Worst Pern book I have read and I will not be buying any more of this series.

Okay, I’ve finally had it. I’ve got to express my annoyance with this book and its immediate predecessors. I finally know why Anne McCaffrey litigiously prohibits fan fiction based on her work: she’s been saving that honor for her son to write it.

Written, ostensibly, by the mother and son team rather than Anne alone, this book and it’s immediate predecessors are about the beginning of the second pass of deadly thread. I say “ostensibly” because I barely hear Anne’s voice in these works at all. What I do hear is a writer working out his own issues through his mother’s legacy. I’m not connected enough to this fandom to know how involved she is any more, but from where I sit with my Kindle, it looks to me like Todd’s running the show (into the ground). Either that, or he got a hold of all the illicit fan fiction he could find and cobbled it into these books.

The books in this series center on a ceaseless procession of females with alternative sleeping habits surrounded by men who are either hopelessly weak or abusive egotists. They lack the tight plotting and sharply drawn characters that I love about Anne’s solo works. Character traits are endlessly belabored (yes, we get it, Fiona is afraid to sleep alone and has a slightly distasteful thing for sleeping with babies. Don’t tell me again!). Through this and the previous two or three books (seriously, they all run together) the riders are lost in an endless series of time shifts, spending years raising more and more generations of dragons to go forward in time to fight thread that will soon be falling. In this volume they eventually settle on the tops of dense, tall broom trees to escape the wild cats and tunnel shakes on the ground. They cover the tree tops with canvas and wood platforms. And never deal with what’s got to happen to the dense foliage when you cover a tree top. It’s this kind of sloppy logic that annoys me.

These books experiment with all the stuff that the first books didn’t dare: Can a rider whose dragon is injured ride someone else’s dragon? Can girls partner with blue and green dragons? (and yet, for some reason, we don’t go so far as to have them impress with browns and bronzes) If someone is lost between, are they really dead? I did appreciate the more detailed description of the effect of a dragon mating flight on the people of their weyr — the emotional impact on everyone, not just the dragons’ riders. But then Todd felt the need to openly acknowledge, even belabor, homosexual relationships among the dragon riders — answering the question that didn’t really need answering of what happens when two dragons both partnered with male riders mate.

Finally, if all this went on during this time period, how is it that absolutely none of it is in any of the records that the characters in later books comb through to solve their versions of the same problems? (For that matter, why are we solving the same problem and not something, oh, I don’t know, original?) If dragons’ time travel ability is so commonly known in this era, how was it completely forgotten by the time of the later books? Okay, that sort of cultural forgetfulness can happen, but I’m incredulous.

It’s not that I object to the girls riding dragons (but so many of them! rank upon rank of girls! so many the reader can’t possibly keep track of them, or even begin to care), or time travel, or the challenge of the aftermath of plague. I do object to sloppy writing and self-indulgent plotting (not to mention sloppy copy editing of the Kindle editions I read). I’m disappointed. I’ve always enjoyed the dragon rider books, but this one and it’s immediate companions are like, well, bad fan fiction.

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