Dragonflight / Anne McCaffrey

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2021 Re-read

I can still see why this appealed so strongly to me when I was in my twenties. I identified with Lessa's outrage when it is assumed that she can't do things or can't understand things that the men can. It's obvious that she is more intelligent than most of the dragonrider men, who behave like arrogant jerks. Also, the main characters are in their late teens, early twenties, so no wonder twenties me found them attractive, especially when the older people are represented as hidebound and rather clueless.
(McCaffrey was in her early 40s when she started publishing Pern material, but one has to wonder when she started writing it and why she made people her own age so uninspiring.)

F'lar is not as bad a jerk as some of the other men, but he's very much a 1970s character. His tendency to shake Lessa and to slap her when she gets “hysterical" is tiresome. (Women seem to get accused of hysteria whenever men don't want to listen to them). His casual assumption that a very young woman from a very different background will have the same sexual mores and experience as him is unfortunate, as is the fact that no one mentions to Lessa that when two dragons mate, their bonded humans follow suit. There's a lot to the dragon life that Lessa has to piece together on her own.

McCaffrey gives us a smart, strong female main character in Lessa, but then gives up the most of the authority to F'lar. I guess she couldn't envision women running anything besides the kitchens and the medIcal ward? Even the naming conventions for men are different, with the young men getting their fancy names with apostrophes when they become dragonriders, while women in the same circumstances don't. With queen dragons ruling the roost, there would have been all kinds of interesting directions to take Weyr politics, rather than just taking the safe, patriarchal route.

It's the dragons themselves that make this fantasy world interesting. I think all of us who love animals dream of actually being able to communicate with them a la Dr Doolittle. I think for twenty year old me, the thought of having a purpose & a planned out future because of a dragon-bond was very attractive too. No need to agonize over how to support myself or how to use my time. Now approaching 60, I'd be resentful of having a large lizard to take care of every single damn day. Plus, dragons to me look like they could be long lived critters, but they basically suicide when their bonded human dies. This doesn't seem like a good arrangement for dragonkind.

So, while I'm glad to have revisited a familiar place and people, Pern isn't my world anymore and I think I'll leave while I still retain some fondness for it.

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