Beyond Between · 11:39am Nov 28th, 2011
Dear Loyal Followers, Interested Visitors, and Confused Passersby:
It was to my great sadness that I learned that Anne McCaffey recently passed away.
If you are not immediately concerned and the name doesn't quite ring out at you, let me tell you a story, one that has been dear to my heart since the first time I lifted a certain book off of the shelf of my local library.
The cover looked liked it was specifically designed to capture the attention of pre-teen boys. It featured some kind of knight-like figure among a cliff face, surrounded by some exotic specie of what appeared to be birds of prey. That he was seated upon a pure-white dragon, seemingly looking out across a valley to where his duty called was "the clincher".
Despite the warnings of the librarian that it wasn't the type of story that a nine year old boy would be interested in I had polished the entire book, The White Dragon, off in a about two days of constant and fanatical reading.
Thus, I was introduced to the world of The Dragonriders of Pern. My choice of novel to begin the series wasn't perfect as the hero, Jaxom, had already been through two other adventures with his dragon, Ruth, before this one. Yet, I am thankful that I did. This gave me the impetus to read the rest of the stories in the series, or at least as many as there were when I was a kid. They were tough reads for an elementary schooler, but then most fifth graders didn't read all of Where the Red Fern Grows in one sitting like myself either. What helped me through the Pern novels was the absolutely fascinating world McCaffey had built...
One begins the series believing it to be fantasy. It is an agrarian society, one with feudal aspects. Wood disks divided into fractions have only a representative value, prices are set by guilds, and it has a structured society. The people live in cities called "holds"...pretty basic fantasy stuff.
The kicker is this...a selected few, mostly nobles but anyone who shows talent for it, can be selected to be a dragonrider. Yes, you can learn to ride a dragon. This is not just for "shoots and giggles", but it has a real purpose. Once you live in the "weyrs", the barracks built inside extinct volcanoes, your job is to fight the Thread.
Thread is the most destructive thing I've ever read about in a science-fiction (yes, science-fiction!) series. The stuff is simply nasty. It is a trans-mutagenic fungal spore...it devours life. Most of the trees on Pern have succumbed to it. The second it hits the ground it begins devouring any organic life. The Pernese people wait and train for many, many, many "turns" (years) for the arrival of the Red Star which showers their world with the horrific stuff.
The only way to kill it is in the air. From the back of your dragon...with fire! Yes folks, the first example of "Kill it with Fire" pre-dates the meme!
A dragonrider must imprint himself upon his dragon, must literally sit with the egg in his lap, sometimes for days as he awaits it's hatching. The dragon becomes his family (Huh, hatching a dragon, living with it so that you can work together, becoming a family...sound familiar MLP:FIM fans?).
This sounds all well and good, but soon one realizes that this isn't a purely fantasy novel. It turns out that Pern is really a colony world, it's inhabitants brought there generations ago on transport starships. The dragons were genetically engineered to fight the Thread. The Red Star is actually another planet in the Rukbat system, one that passes through an Ort cloud, the decimated remains of another planet in the system...one literally torn apart by the Thread.
As it does Thread gets caught in it's gravity and spun across the system...into Pern's orbit. Hence the story as described above.
As the series wrapped up McCaffey left us with an important question. How does a society change? The Pernese people had re-discovered the science of their ancestors, and using time-travel had become able to literally redirect the orbit of the Red Star. How does a society who had spent thousands of years preparing itself for "war" learn how to survive without it?
We'll never know. Anne McCaffey passed away the day before Thanksgiving at 85. Like fellow author Brian Jacques earlier this year, she takes her unique little world with her to the spaces "beyond between" as she called them.
I can only be thankful for that she shared her world with us, and for those long ago afternoons when I was able to visualize myself, flamethrower in hand, lifting into the skies above a little world to battle Thread.
Stay Awesome,
-T.D.
