I’m skipping over Dragonsdawn for now for reasons I explain in my previous post. The story of The Renegades of Pern happens over all the years of the original trilogy but with the bulk of it spanning the four or five years leading up to and including The White Dragon.
When I was a kid I ate this book up. Having finished reading it a few weeks ago (yes, I’m behind on these posts, but I’m not letting myself start Dragonsong until I get caught up again!), I’m now of the opinion that Renegades, while a perfectly cromulent novel that is quite engaging and does flow smoothly, is the weakest of the Main Sequence.
This time I think McCaffrey tried to do too much with one book.
Renegades is a story of the poor, outcast, and downtrodden inhabitants of Pern, precisely the type of people that you don’t see much of in the first three novels. The prologue is a collection of ten vignettes that introduce most of the key “renegades” and how they fall on hard times even before the first Thread Fall of this Pass. The final vignette (and therefore the most important) introduces Thella, the ambitious and competent (but not at all a people-person!) older sister of Lord Larad of Telgar Hold who believes she should have been confirmed Lady Holder in his place. Larad informs her that she’s to be married off which, of course, she disagrees with. Vehemently. Instead subjecting herself to such a fate she leaves Telgar hold in secret with some supplies and a plan to become a Holder in her own right.
Thella is without question the Hero of her own story. Indeed, most of Renegades can be read as a story where Thella is the protagonist, albeit as an anti-hero. She knows exactly what she wants–a hold in her own name– and sets out to get it. The unexpected return of Thread temporarily throws off her schedule but she adapts and starts recruiting a band of followers who can help her acquire all that she needs, if by other, less legitimate means.
She achieves most of those objectives through well planned and daring raids on smaller holds and habitations throughout the northern continent. She is so successful that several Lords of major Holds and more than a couple Weyrleaders regularly meet for skull-sessions on how to curtail Thella’s activities. Masterharper Robinton even assigns a journeyman from his Hall to infiltrate the band of renegades: an accomplished portrait artist who manages to leave packets of sketches in strategic locations.
Early in the story Thella visits one of the characters from the prologue who tells her of young girl who is able to hear dragons. Thella immediately concludes that having a person with that ability within her control would be immeasurably useful for better avoiding detection and patrols while on her raids and begins planning the girl’s abduction.
Now, I’d like to point out that even my middle-school-aged self noticed a few holes in that plot. Namely: what’s to stop the girl from calling for help at the earliest opportunity or, at the very least, deliberately providing false information to the bandits at an appropriate time? Nevertheless Thella puts kidnapping Aramina at the top of her To-Do list.
If I’m sticking with the idea that Thella is the protagonist of her story then it’s interesting to note that said story follows the tried and true Try/Fail structure (which I first encountered explicitly in this Writing Excuses podcast). I was pleased to see that McCaffrey had also seen the gaping holes in Thella’s reasoning and has the first two abduction attempts ultimately fail. The second attempt was arguably better executed than the first but Aramina is soon rescued by young Jayge whom we met way back in the first chapter. At this point the two young people decide to disappear.
Unaccountably, so does Thella. And it’s only page 216– the end of chapter nine.
Chapter ten opens one page turn and two years later with news of the theft of the Queen egg by the Oldtimers. Or in other words, about a third of the way into The White Dragon. At least this time we get to see these events as they affect other viewpoints, specifically Holder Toric and young harper Piemur on the Southern Continent.
This is where Renegades starts morphing into a different book. At the time it was published Dragonsdawn had already come out. I’m willing to bet that McCaffrey had also written a draft of All the Weyrs of Pern or at the very least had a detailed outline done before even writing Renegades. I say this because it seems like she knew exactly how to get through the end of White Dragon and to the ultimate finale of the series in All the Weyrs but needed a way to fill in the gap. The transition in Renegades isn’t quite as abrupt as it probably seems from this post because McCaffrey did weave in some of the Southern story bits through the first section but the shift was noticeable this read-through.
In any case we get to see Piemur’s take on Jaxom’s illness, the arrival of Robinton at Cove Hold, and the initial investigation of the colonists’ Landing site. In The White Dragon Piemur never mentions his encounter with Jayge and Aramina (they’d taken work trading animals to Southern Hold but gotten shipwrecked by a storm, fortunately washing up at the ruins of a colonist’s habitation which they set to work restoring) during his exploration of the coastline. The justifications he makes up for not revealing their survival until after the events of White Dragon conclude shows that this is a clear retcon.
It’s still the 15th year of the present Pass when White Dragon ends and word starts to filter north of the new Hold established by Jayge and Aramina. Thella appears out of nowhere to hear this on page 314 and begin plotting anew. She’s had a few setbacks of her own and so takes rather a long time to prepare for a final attempt at Aramina. . .
. . . because the next chapter (14 for those following along at home) flies us through two more years of excavations and discoveries at Landing. The most important of these are the evacuation plans the colonists used to move from the Landing site to the Northern Continent when the volcano they’d been living under blew its top. Those plans included labelled maps that provide the key for making more targeted excavations than had been the practice to that point.
But not before Thella and a new band of thugs make their way to Jayge and Aramina’s new place. This final showdown is pretty epic: dragons are called, resourcefulness is shown, guard dogs are hidden in a tree, and Jayge defeats Thella in single combat on page 360. Now, from Thella’s point of view that’s probably not a great ending for her story but Jayge is actually the Good Guy™ not her, so tough luck.
That’s also not the end of Renegades. Yet. Back at Landing Piemur’s new girlfriend follows a hunch and gathers enough help to excavate the building marked ADMIN/AIVAS because the map also mentioned the extra measures the colonists had taken to protect that particular building. Once they get through the layer of ash they notice that the structure had been covered in tiles similar to the ones covering the underside of the remaining shuttles. They’re obviously an ad hoc attempt to protect against heat damage and so they methodically begin to remove them, uncovering black glass panels not seen at any other location they’d investigated.
Soon after they find the building’s entrance and make their way inside where they encounter the Artificial Intelligence Voice Address System. Their meticulous excavation of the solar panels allowed AIVAS to charge its batteries and return to operational status for the first time in twenty-five centuries. Hey, a technological civilization advanced enough to colonize other planets can certainly design hardware hardy enough to survive centuries of inactivity, right? Anyway, once AIVAS works through the lingual shift and the inconvenient fact that the last authorized users died twenty-five hundred years ago it treats those present to a full audio-visual rendition of How It All Began.
Which is exactly the story told in Dragonsdawn.
The Renegades of Pern is by no means a bad book. With more than twenty years of writing behind her at the time Renegades is published, McCaffrey just doesn’t do “bad” anymore (if ever). I do think it’s obvious that Renegades is one and a half stories, though. The whole story was the raison d’être for this book but the half story is what needed to be told to set up the grand finale in All the Weyrs of Pern. Fortunately that grand finale is a doozy and I can’t wait to get to its post!
