face the strange

As I mentioned on my last Pern post, Dragonsdawn was always the most memorable Pern book for me -- for my sins, and sins indeed they are. That said, having reread it, I can understand exactly why I found this so compelling. This was the book that sold me on the fantasy of planetary exploration and colonization as a delightful and desirable experience! You could go to a beautiful new world and discover baby dragons and have random islands named after you! You could build a new Utopian society! Is Anne McCaffrey's vision of a Utopian society uncomfortably libertarian? Sure, but I was ten, I didn't know what libertarians were, I just understood that Sorka was having a very cool time as a happily free-range child exploring the Pernese landscape. I don't think it was until I read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars as an adult that I fully came to terms with the fact that going to space actually sounded like a deeply unpleasant time, logistically speaking, and let the faint wisps of the Dragonsdawn dream of First Feet Down on a beautiful new planet that's functionally just like Earth with bonus charming telepathic fauna dissipate into the ether.

I mean, it is sort of an open question though: early Pernese culture, potential paradise or libertarian cult? I do think McCaffrey knows that the colonist's blissful vision of If Everyone Has Enough Land For Themselves We Can All Just Be Chill And Not Actually Bother Society-Building is doomed to some degree of failure on account of bad actors, even before it's interrupted by Thread. She could have just made it a book about dealing with Thread and developing dragons about it, and it would probably be a better book if she did, but she's so grimly determined to put some bad actors in just to demonstrate she knows they exist. This at least is my theory of how we got Evil Sexy Avril Bitra, perpetrator of history's most inexplicable heist. "If I go on this fifty-year mission, I can steal some diamonds, steal an escape pod, launch myself back out into space, and get picked up back in a society that's moved on a hundred years from the one I left! Probably they'll still want diamonds and I'll re-adapt just fine!"

So, I can understand, I guess, why Avril Bitra. I don't understand and don't think I will ever understand why Avril Bitra's narrative foil is a would-be tradwife who nonconsensually aphrodisiaced her way into marriage with a man who has never shown any romantic interest in anything except cave systems and then spent the next eight years making a shocked Pikachu face about the fact that he continued to not be all that into her. Why is Sallah Telgar's plot in this book? What is it doing here? Why is Avril Bitra evilly torturing Sallah on the spaceship given so much page space and weird psychosexual intensity when literally nothing about this plot actually impacts the colony's situation IN ANY ACTUAL WAY? I thought a reread would leave me less confused about all this than I was when I was ten and in fact I think it did the opposite. Anne, please ... you must have had some thoughts about this, thematically, structurally ... I'm coming to you, hat in hand, asking for answers.

I do think it's very funny that in the years between 1968 and 1989 Anne McCaffrey decided that it was a bit embarrassing that she'd built biological differences into her dragons such that the queens don't breathe fire, and decided to blame it on the fact that the dragons were genetically designed by an Extremely Traditional Chinese Grandma instead. Is it also racist? Yes, extremely. But if we start talking about all the unfortunate well-meaning racism in Dragonsdawn we'll be here all day and I don't have that much day left. Racism aside I did find myself unexpectedly somewhat moved by the subplot I did not remember at all in which Kenjo Fusaiyuki, a guy who has made a Profound Mistake in moving to an isolated colony planet that's dedicated itself to being low-tech and abandoning spaceflight, desperately hoards fuel for as long as possible to put off the time when he will have to at last give up for good and all the thing he loves most and is best at in all the world.

And you know who could've saved Kenjo Fusaiyuki's life, if she had stopped to help the two guys Avril Bitra clonked on the head instead of uselessly pursuing her into space? YES, IT'S ANOTHER SALLAH TELGAR CRIME. Sallah Telgar, you have so much to answer for.