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!

Ordinarily I am a steadfast advocate of reading series in publication order rather than series-chronological order (e.g. The Magician’s Nephew is the SIXTH volume of the Chronicles of Narnia, NOT the first.  It says so right on the cover of my copy!).  Even if a prequel shows up at some point both the reader and the author are heavily influenced by all the information conveyed by the series up to that point.  In a prequel a writer often doesn’t make the same effort to describe the setting or politics or magic or technology, etc. of their world from scratch because so much of that effort has already been spent in the books already published.  Asking a neophyte to begin with a later novel, even if a prequel, risks confusing and discouraging that reader because they won’t have the same fluency in the series that a veteran reader would.  I won’t say that this can’t be handled properly by a skilled writer but it is certainly a risk.  In the same way a skilled writer should avoid writing a prequel with the neophyte as their sole anticipated audience because all the necessary scene setting and exposition that a neophyte frankly needs risks reading like a “Remedial [Series] for Dummies” to the veterans.  Although, again, this unfortunate outcome can be averted by a skilled author.

Happily, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books fit together perfectly in publication order.  It seems my angst was the result of misremembering that publication order before I started looking into it closely.

However!  If I were to recommend an optimal order in which to read these marvelous books . . .  Wait.  What’s this “if” business?  I AM recommending an optimal order!  Ahem.  I think it’s best to read this series in publication order but with TWO real exceptions and an option for the Harper Hall trilogy.  This is because to my way of thinking there is the Main Sequence, the Harper Hall trilogy, and then everything else (which I’ll just call Ancillary here).  So here we go!  (I’ll update the links to the proper re-read posts as I continue this little project)

• Dragonflight (1968)
• Dragonquest (1971)
• OPTIONAL: Harper Halltrilogy -
  • Dragonsong (1976)
  • Dragonsinger (1977)
  • Dragondrums (1979)
• The White Dragon (1978)
• The Renegades of Pern (1989)
• Exception (minor): Dragonsdawn (1988)
• All the Weyrs of Pern (1991)

Those are the books of the Main Sequence and the Harper Hall trilogy.  Dragonsdawn is the odd duck in the list for two reasons, the more trivial reason being that it was published in the year before Renegades yet I think it fits better when read immediately after.  More importantly, Dragonsdawn is a prequel.  It is, in fact, the story of the very first humans to colonize the planet some twenty-five hundred years earlier in the timeline.  It fits best between Renegades and All the Weyrs because Renegades ends with the discovery of the Landing site and the uncovering of a still-functional AI computer system.  On the final page of Renegades the AI begins to recount the colonists’ early history to its awestruck audience . . . And finishes that retelling in the opening pages of All the Weyrs.  Dragonsdawn is that story.  When I read in this order it’s like watching a grand cinematic flashback before coming back to end the series with the bang that is All the Weyrs.

The Harper Hall trilogy was written and even takes place between the events of Dragonquest and The White Dragon and so can be read in this position.  The reason I read these later is because to me they are their own self contained story.  They are also explicitly Young Adult books written especially for McCaffrey’s teenage readership.  I’d argue that a neophyte can also comfortably wait to read these after the Main Sequence with the only difficulty being the otherwise unexplained appearance of Menolly and Piemur (the protagonists of the trilogy) as Jaxom’s close friends in The White Dragon.  I’ve even seen (and can almost agree with) the trilogy recommended as an alternate entry point for the series as a whole.  The reason I say “almost” is because Dragonsinger comprehensively spoils the big climax of Dragonquest (F’nor and Canth’s jump to and from the Red Star).  I think Dragonsinger is a brilliant reaction to that event from Menolly’s point of view but can take away from the impact if it’s the first version a reader encounters.  Menolly only experiences that event at second or third hand, F’nor and Canth are the primary actors there and their story is told in Dragonquest.

Enough talk, on to the Ancillary books!  First is the other exception to publication order:

• Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern (1983)
• Nerilka’s Story (1986)

These two books take place in the Main Sequence’s past and tell the story of how the people of Pern had to come together to overcome a plague that was running rampant through Hold, Hall, and Weyr in the midst of a Pass of the Red Star.  These events are referenced in the Main Sequence as the “Ballad of Moreta’s Ride” but are never fully described.  My memory of these two is almost completely gone at this point because I didn’t revisit them near as often as the others.

And all the others:

• The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall (1993) – a collection of short stories that take place in the years immediately after Dragonsdawn
• The Dolphins of Pern (1994)
• The Skies of Pern (2001)

There are at least a few others, including the books McCaffrey co-wrote with her son Todd, but they won’t be part of this re-read since I never got around to them in the first place.

I’ve also got two more books that I’m holding back as a surprise because they’re not Pern novels but they are two of my prized possessions.  But you’re just going to have to wait for those!

The White Dragon was Anne McCaffrey’s first novel to hit the Best Sellers list.  I’m convinced that it was due entirely to that spectacular cover!  Well, maybe just mostly due.  It is a dang good book after all.

Once again McCaffrey changes up the format and uses a different plot structure than either of the two preceding volumes.  The White Dragon is a straight up Bildungsroman (or Coming of Age story since I need to get in the obligatory tvtropes.org link (and the Death by Newbery Medal page linked there is a hoot, too!)).  There’s no overarching quest that Jaxom must accomplish although he does manage to single-handedly avert a war between two factions of dragonriders.  This novel simply follows the young Lord Holder as he navigates the treacherous path from adolescence to adulthood.

My copy is 467 pages long so I’m not even going to try to recap it to the same level of detail as I did the first two books but I would hope that for this one I really shouldn’t have to.  [NOTE from final proofreading: I totally failed miserably.]  Being a textbook example of a Coming of Age story doesn’t mean that it’s cliched or bad– quite the contrary!

Jaxom is the young Lord Holder of Ruatha Hold who unwittingly Impressed the runt-ish white dragon Ruth back in Dragonquest.  Any teen would face additional stresses while growing up if they were a hereditary ruler or if they had to take care of and live with and grow with a creature to whom they’re strongly bonded both mentally and emotionally.  Jaxom is both.

On the political side he’s been the Lord of Ruatha since moments after his birth when F’lar killed his father Fax in a duel (at the beginning of Dragonflight).  It may be a position of privilege but even as he’s groomed for it he finds the requirements and duties and expectations suffocating.  Those expectations lay heaviest because his guardian, the Lord Warder Lytol is an extremely competent administrator of the Hold, is respected by every other Hold, Hall, and Weyr, and is the closest thing to a father that Jaxom has.  Lytol is also emotionally distant because he was once a dragonrider himself whose blue dragon died from injury years before.  Surviving and functioning after losing one’s dragon is vanishingly rare, most riders suicide under those circumstances.

Jaxom must also care for and work with the white Ruth who was not expected to live very long when he hatched.  It is now roughly seven years later and Ruth has not only survived, he has thrived.  He’s still very much a runt at half the size of the next smallest dragon and of an unprecedented color which leads to many people treating him as a freak.  Jaxom doesn’t appreciate that at all.  Things at least start looking up when he gets to ride Ruth in flight for the first time in the opening chapter.  However, the additional freedom of movement comes with some complications of its own.

While Jaxom may ride Ruth with official blessing, as a Lord Holder he is discouraged from even thinking about fighting Thread on Ruth.  But fighting Thread is what dragons do!  And thus Jaxom rails against yet another stupid restriction.  N’ton, the Weyrleader at Fort, is at least pragmatic about his dilemma: “Just don’t let anyone catch you trying to teach Ruth to chew firestone!”

Ruth does possess at least one bona fide talent: he has the best time sense of any dragon.  That is, he always knows when in time he is.  This comes in handy because early in the book when the exiled Oldtimers who had been stewing in their own bitterness in the Southern Continent (and causing all kinds of problems for the growing Hold there) steal a hardening Queen egg right off of the Benden Weyr hatching ground sands.  Within hours it mysteriously reappears in its proper place thereby obviating the punitive raid being contemplated by the Benden riders.  Dragon fighting dragon is a worst case scenario that nobody wants to see.  The returned egg, though, is obviously harder and much closer to hatching than its remaining siblings.  Jaxom and Ruth come across information that leads them to conclude that they are the ones who returned it and concoct a plan to execute the dazzling counter-caper.

Later, after Jaxom and Ruth have been officially training to fight Thread, they get to fly their first Fall.  Which they do despite the fact that Jaxom is feeling sick.  Like a small case of the sniffles would keep him from that, right?  Job done they decide to bathe and refresh themselves in a nice little secluded cove in the Southern Continent that Jaxom’s friend Menolly and Masterharper Robinton had recently discovered.  To his credit, Jaxom did leave a note which is a good thing because once Ruth is clean Jaxom lies down on the beach for a nap . . .

. . . And wakes up a month later having nearly died from a rare disease known as Fire-head.  Ruth had called for help as soon as he realized that Jaxom was seriously ill.  Instantaneous telepathic communication can be downright handy at times.  Jaxom had been carefully nursed by Brekke (established as an accomplished healer as far back as Dragonquest), and Sharra, whose ambitious brother Toric is the Holder at Southern who has had to put up with the Oldtimers interference while trying to both establish and expand his young Hold.  Over the rest of the book a romance develops between Jaxom and Sharra.  There are times when I think that this feels a little forced or rushed but fundamentally I think it works.

While Jaxom is recovering in the Cove two of the Southern Oldtimers pull yet another stunt that winds up with a dragon dying and his rider fighting F’lar.  This time F’lar does kill his opponent.  Since the dead rider had been basically the leader and worst of the lot down there, new leadership is chosen and steps are taken to rotate in new dragons and return the Southern Weyr to full fighting strength.  Unfortunately, in the aftermath of that fatal duel Masterharper Robinton suffers a heart attack.

Ah, Master Robinton.  He’s easily one of my all time favorite characters from this or any other author.  I’ve not taken the space to more than barely mention his name so far but he’s been a key character since Dragonflight.  Robinton is a sage, a wit, a wise arbiter, a voice of reason who skillfully uses his influence to more or less keep everyone working against Thread rather than against each other.  He’s easily the single most respected man on Pern.  So much so that in the midst of his heart attack many of the dragons take it upon themselves to speak directly to him to keep him awake and alive.

Master Robinton steps down as head of the Harper Hall then travels south by swift ship to recuperate in the same cove where Jaxom has been.  While he’s on his way volunteers from every Weyr, Hold, and Craft rush to construct a dwelling suitable for the Masterharper to enjoy his retirement.  The result is downright lavish and Robinton is floored by the effort expended on his behalf.

After another few weeks the Master Healer checks up on Jaxom and Robinton and declares both of them fully recovered from their respective maladies.  Robinton immediately puts Jaxom, along with Sharra, Menolly, and Piemur to work exploring inland toward the great cone-shaped mountain visible in the distance with the ultimate goal of finding the very first human habitation on the planet.  They’d been getting numerous vague hints on that subject from the collective memories of the wild Southern fire lizards which had been seeping into their dreams over the past weeks.  The wild fire lizards were excited to see humans “returning” since their collective memory showed them fleeing from an enormous volcanic eruption so long ago.

Sure enough, around the base of that old volcano are the obvious signs of man-made structures buried under the ash.  The explorers use Ruth to encourage the wild fire lizards to keep remembering any details they can.  Fairly soon they come up with the image of  long cylindrical objects with stubby wings swooping down out of the sky, landing in a vast field and finally opening to disgorge their human passengers.  The four young people and Ruth follow the fire lizards to the site of this new memory and proceed to excavate down to one of the shuttles.  They’d found the actual vehicles that their ancestors had arrived in!

With far too little effort (I know the colonists were a far more advanced civilization than ours but so much so that the shuttle door’s mechanism still works after 25 centuries? I call shenanigans!) they get the door open and get to step inside.  Actually by this point they’d called for several others to come witness and help out, including the Benden Weyrleaders, the Master Smith and others so quite a few were on hand for the opening.  Inside the find many interesting “artifacts” and also a large, fully detailed map of the planet.  This is a major find because to this point they had no maps of the Southern Continent.  In fact, Piemur’s job for the past several months had been to chart the Southern coastline on foot.  The Benden Weyrleaders see that even if they cede to Toric all of the territory that he currently claims (which is itself huge: nearly half the size of the occupied Northern Continent), most of the Southern will still be available to the Dragonriders.

This Coming of Age story can’t be complete until Jaxom gets the girl (Sharra, in this case).  About the time that the shuttles are being dug up, Toric calls his sister back to Southern Hold to tend to a “medical emergency.”  It’s just a pretense.  Toric does not approve of his sister’s choice because even if Jaxom is a Lord, it’s only over a “table sized Hold in the North.”  Armed with the new information from the map, the Benden Weyrleaders bring Toric in to see the shuttles and to finalize the boundaries of his Hold (They had earlier made an agreement that Toric could permanently Hold all the territory he managed to control by the time the Oldtimers died out.  The recent changes at the Southern Weyr meant that some alterations to that agreement were called for.).  Toric pretty much gets exactly what he wanted so he’s happy.

While that meeting is in progress Jaxom and Ruth rescue Sharra from Southern Hold where Toric had confined her and jump between to the shuttles where the meeting was concluding.  Jaxom pointedly informs Toric, “Place and time are no barriers to Ruth.  Sharra and I can go anywhere, anywhen on Pern.”  Ironically, Toric is impressed by the “lordling’s” spunk and revises his estimation of Jaxom upward and finally bows to the inevitable.  The story concludes with the annual gathering of all the Lords Holder at which the newlywed Jaxom will be confirmed Lord of Ruatha in his own right and now longer under the authority of Lytol.

Obviously a lot happens in this book.  I spent a lot of time talking about the final third of the book (and barely scratched the surface, believe me!) because in my opinion the discovery of the colonist’s shuttles is the key event that kicks off the rest of the Main Sequence.  It’s the point at which the series falls firmly on the Science-Fiction side of the Speculative Fiction super-genre.  Before this one could argue that it’s mostly Fantasy with just the barest hints of science peeking through at times.  With the shuttles unearthed the story’s foundation is unambiguously Sci-Fi.  It’s a trick that I don’t think I’ve seen used by any other author that I can remember reading.  I have seen a few worlds built by other authors in which some unimaginably huge cataclysm shakes our world and then a few hundred or thousand years later the story takes place in a pre-industrial fantasy setting complete with magic (and not in a Clarke’s 3rd Law sense, either).  McCaffrey’s Pern is a different beast altogether, one for which she has been laying the science-fictional groundwork for since Dragonflight‘s first publication in 1968.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing a post soon about the best order in which to read the Pern books.  The next book I’ll be writing up, however, is The Renegades of Pern since it substantially overlaps the events of this book.

The Oldtimers, remember, are the five Weyrs that followed Lessa 400 years into their future to save the planet from thread in her current time.  Now seven years into this present Pass they are starting to show the strains and stresses of long service and the knowledge that the end is still decades away.  While all dragonriders enjoy a measure of privilege in their world, some of the Oldtimers are beginning to overreach and to claim additional entitlements.  Dragonquest opens with two Oldtimers attempting to claim as a tithe item an ornate knife that was specifically created as a wedding gift from the Smith Crafthall to Lord Larad of Telgar Hold.  Their attempt is thwarted by F’nor’s intervention.  Unfortunately this comes at the cost of a nasty knife wound to F’nor when the irrationally worked-up Oldtimer attacks him.  The two Oldtimers return (knifeless!) to Fort Weyr but face less-than-thorough justice from their leadership.  F’nor’s wound is serious enough that he is sent to Southern Weyr to recover.

That one event is the spark that lights up this tinderbox.  That one event kicks off all of the other events in this book.

The sins of (some of) the Oldtimers, which include other improper material claims and improper hunting of Hold herds for dragon feeding as well as dereliction of duty during threadfall, can no longer be rationalized away since they did, after all, save the planet.  Holders and Crafters are coming to resent the Weyrs despite the protection they offer.  Holder confidence is further shaken when Thread suddenly deviates from its heretofore predictable pattern of fall.  The Oldtimer Weyrs feel insulted when riders from Benden, the only modern Weyr, consistently side with Hold and Hall against them.

Now add to this volatile mix F’nor’s discovery (while recuperating at Southern) that fire lizards can be Impressed and kept as pets.  Fire lizards are “dragons in miniature” with virtually all the same abilities as their larger cousins and everyone simply has to have one (at least!).  Aside from size, the only real difference to fire lizards is that they’re not capable of language but are perfectly capable of communicating by emotions and, to a lesser degree, images shared telepathically with the people who Impress them.

The distribution of  fire lizards becomes a central factor of Southern Weyrwoman Kylara’s [slut!]* machinations with Lord Meron [asshole!]* of Nabol Hold (remember those names from the end of the last post?).

And to round out the setup for this novel, technological sophistication is starting to slowly progress once again.  At the time the present Pass began Pern was a pre-industrial society.  No printing press (records are kept on cured hides), no mass production, no steam or petroleum power (although there were a few specific applications of water wheels for mechanical power).  Early in Dragonquest the Smith Craft Master Fandarel develops a version of the telegraph in an effort to improve communication.  Additionally, a master Woodcrafter, Bendarek, has independently developed paper for the first time from the old growth hardwoods that grew up over the Long Interval.  These and other newfangled nuisances annoy various Oldtimers, Holders and even other Crafters, especially once a precocious young Lord Jaxom rediscovers a long unused suite of rooms while on a visit to Benden Weyr in which I as a modern reader recognize implements of a scientific laboratory.  That discovery leads to many questions about what else may have been lost or forgotten over the centuries.

The situation on Pern is obviously far, far from stable.  And while there’s not a single, main plot that Dragonquest is built around, there are four or five smaller plot threads that contain all of the action.

First up,  the tension between the Oldtimers and the Benden riders finally comes to a head when T’ron, the leader of Fort Weyr, duels the Benden leader, F’lar over the modern rider’s tendency to stick his nose where it doesn’t belong:

“Yes, Oldtimer, Benden Weyr concerns itself with Ista and Igen, And the Holds of Nabol, and Crom, and Telgar, because Benden dragonmen have not forgotten that Thread burns anything and anyone it touches, Weyr and commoner alike.  And if Benden Weyr has to stand alone against the fall of Thread, it will.”

F’lar defeats T’ron without killing him and exiles T’ron any riders who wish to follow to the Southern Continent.  Since most of R’mart’s High Reaches Weyr chooses to go south, the newly displaced Southern riders move into High Reaches.  Southern was chosen because it is both out of the way and also because the Southern Continent is thoroughly seeded with a type of grub that is a near perfect defense against Thread.  I’ve largely elided that detail above but how the grubs are discovered and their function determined is a significant sub plot of its own.

Now at High Reaches Weyr, Kylara [slut!] is much closer to Lord Meron [asshole!] and they continue to make trouble.  They’re also involved romantically which leads directly to the greatest tragedy of the series.  I’ll try to keep it short, I swear.  When a gold dragon rises to mate she broadcasts her emotions with enormous strength.  Other gold riders take their dragons far away as a standard practice.  Brekke, rider of Wirenth (and the only other person besides Lessa who can telepathically hear every dragon), and F’nor had previously developed a relationship and they come up with the harebrained idea that F’nor’s Canth would fly against the usual bronze dragons when Wirenth’s time came.  Bronzes are traditionally the only dragons to fly golds since they’re the largest males.  Brown Canth, however, is as large as many of the bronzes and figures he’s got as good a shot as any of them.  When Wirenth rises the other golds scatter but Kylara [slut!] doesn’t go far enough.  She’d only gone to Nabol Hold.  To see Meron [asshole!].  Their amorous activity ends up triggering Prideth who was due to rise soon herself.  When Prideth sees Wirenth leading her bronzes (and an upstart brown) through the sky she jealously launches herself after them.  There follows an absolutely epic battle between the two gold dragons and the All Hands response that tries to separate them.  Eventually the more nimble Wirenth locks herself onto Prideth and takes them both between.  They never return.  Both women are left catatonic by the psychic trauma (serves Kylara [slut!] right!) but I’m always nearly bawling over Brekke’s loss.  But I’m a bit of a softie, after all.

A week or so later the clutch at Benden is ready to Hatch although this particular occasion isn’t as joyous as it usually is.  F’lar and Lessa have the even-more-harebrained idea to present Brekke as a candidate for the gold egg on the theory that she’d almost certainly Impress the new queen due to her ability to hear all dragons.  The little queen very nearly picks Brekke but is scolded away by her fire lizard and chooses another girl instead.  Fortunately that intervention helped snap Brekke out of her catatonic state and she begins to recover.  Also at this Hatching is a very small, almost runt-ish, egg that is having trouble hatching.  That same precocious, ten-year-old Lord Jaxom takes it upon himself to help the poor thing out of its shell.  You’re right!  Jaxom Impresses little Ruth who is indeed a runt at half the size of his siblings and who has a white hide instead of the gold, bronze, brown, blue, or green that every other dragon has been.  This, of course, causes all kinds of trouble: How can Jaxom be both a Lord Holder and a Dragonrider?  What happens when the poor thing dies (as it surely would!)?  Those questions and others will be the main focus of the next book, The White Dragon.  But I bet you saw that coming.

Finally, over the second half of the book several Lords Holder, including Meron [asshole!] (naturally), have been increasingly grumbling about the Weyrs’ apparent “reluctance” to fight Thread at its source: the wandering planet known as the Red Star.  They’ve convinced themselves that, with the discovery of the powerful telescope among the items in the Benden rooms, it should be straightforward for the dragonriders to find a visual reference good enough for them to make the jump between.  F’lar has a difficult time getting them to realize that even if conditions on the other planet would allow them to survive (which was certainly not proven) that it would still be a logistical impossibility to char the entire surface.  Meron [asshole!] is the most incorrigible of the Lords and fair monopolizes the telescope looking for a reference good enough for his fire lizard to use to make the leap.  The fire lizard, being a perfectly sane creature, is having none of that and is so upset that it leaves Meron [asshole!], possibly permanently.  At least, I’ve never seen whether it ever came back.  F’nor was present at that particular viewing and once Meron [asshole!] leaves, takes a turn at the telescope.  He sees a feature that he thinks might work as a reference and asks his own fire lizard (a queen) if she could do it.  While the reference really isn’t good enough for her, her much stronger reaction to F’nor’s request is outright terror of the Red Star.

“Canth,” he said taking a deep breath, “You said the coordinates I gave her were vivid.  Vivid enough–for you to take me to that fist I saw in the clouds?”

Yes, I can see where you want me to go, Canth replied so confidently that F’nor was taken aback.

And so he and Canth make the attempt with precisely zero preparation.  It’s an interplanetary step between which takes far longer that the short hops about Pern.  They arrive to superheated air that’s not breathable and filled with dust that basically sandblasts skin and hide.  Canth’s psychic scream of anguish can be felt by every dragon on Pern and most riders.  It’s only because of Brekke’s equally strong cry, “Don’t leave me alone!” that they’re able to find their way back between to Pern.  Too damaged to fly, every other dragon teleports into position to catch them and bear them safely to the ground where heroic efforts are made to save them.  Dragonquest ends with confirmation that both man and beast are on the mend and that their mad jump had put to rest the idea of fighting Thread on the Red Star.

I knew that scene would be coming up on this re-read but it wasn’t until a few pages before that all of the details came back and hit me full force.  It was literally a “WHOA” moment where I had to stop reading and sit for a while.  Softie that I am I’d been struck by the memory that it was Brekke’s anguish that guided them back home.  More than that though was the memory that this scene will be revisited in the second Harper Hall book, Dragonsinger as experienced by one of my all-time favorite characters, Menolly.  Being a Harper in training she sets her experience of the event to music which I think makes for an even stronger telling than in Dragonquest.  Still, all of those details resurfaced in an instant and literally took my breath away.

I am positively thrilled that I could react so strongly to this book I’ve known for twenty years now.  And who says you need a single central plot when for slightly smaller ones can be braided together so effectively!

* – “Slut” and “asshole” are the traditional audience callbacks for the characters Janet and Brad respectively in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Their application to McCaffrey’s characters is much more apt and, more importantly, amuses me.

Well done, WP!

In other news, I just got the past 9 months worth of book purchases into my library spreadsheet, 25 titles in all. Over half of those I would recommend in a heartbeat. Perhaps someday I’ll get around to doing a quick write up like I did last time. But not tonight. It’s after midnight and well past my bedtime .

Twenty years or so ago I was smuggling this very book to junior high by tucking it into the (freaking huge) inner pockets of my trés cool (snerk) denim jacket.

Okay, the jacket was not the least bit cool but, by George, that thing was functional. I could store a week’s worth of food in those pockets or, more commonly, a couple day’s worth of food and a hard cover book. I would brazenly have the book out in class and be nigh oblivious to whatever was going on. I was the definition of the stereotypical bored G/T kid. To the best of my memory, this loathsome, despicable habit (see, teachers, I did learn my lesson! Eventually.) started with Dragonflight.

Twenty years ago I’d have been unable to say whether Dragonflight is fantasy or science fiction. On the one hand it has Dragons! (That teleport! And breathe fire!) Lords! Swords! And no guns! On the other hand its preface very explicitly states that the planet Pern is the third out from its star, Rukbat (“a golden G-type star”) colonized by humans some 2,500 years before the story opens and the dragons were genetically engineered in order to fight a menace known as “Thread” that falls from Pern’s skies due to the “wandering planet” or “Red Star” that swings by every 250 years. These days I don’t hesitate to classify it as science fiction, especially in light of later books in the series which I’ll be getting around to eventually.

For those of you who have not read any of these books, be warned: I’m not going to make any effort to avoid spoilers. The initial trilogy is older than I am and the statute of limitations for spoilers is long past.

Dragonflight is unusual for a main sequence Pern book. Only it and All the Weyrs of Pern have a coherent, linear driving plot; the other volumes follow the men and women of Pern as they react to and overcome the problems caused by Thread. Dragonflight is a straight Save-the-World-by-Breakfast story.

When the story starts, no thread has fallen in four hundred years — twice the normal interval — and most think it is gone for good. Bolstering this view is the fact that instead of six full communities of dragonriders (known as “weyrs”) there is only one whose last breeding female dragon is dying. Her final clutch of eggs, fortunately, includes the egg of a new breeding queen dragon and groups of riders are searching through many of the planet’s Holds for suitable candidates to Impress her (i.e. form a life-long telepathic link with the newly hatched dragon).

Gah!

I’m really not interested in writing a play-by-play synopsis of the book so I’m just going to assume you’re just as familiar with it as I am (you can look it up on Wikipedia or something if your memory needs to be jogged).

So the world needs to be saved because Thread is coming but only a tiny handful of riders even believe so, no one has been making any sort of preparations for the predictable crisis, and instead of six weyrs filled with thousands of dragons ready to meet the threat there are only 218 left at Benden Weyr. The first ray of hope comes when Lessa Impresses the young Ramoth causing a change in leadership at the Weyr with the proactive F’lar taking charge. He successfully diffuses a “revolt” by the Lords Holder that believe the Weyr is obsolete and forces them to resume supporting the riders who will soon be protecting them from Thread.

One of the cool dragon abilities that really fired my imagination is their ability to teleport from one location to another once in flight. This is, of course, a strategic advantage which F’lar used to resolve the above conflict. A dragon depends, however, on a clear mental image from its rider of the intended destination to successfully make it between. All riders are rigorously trained in doing so in order to prevent fatal accidents. Well, all riders except Queen riders since during the long interval Queens traditionally don’t fly at all. Lessa ignores such a silly tradition (Queens have wings, after all!) and after minimal practice decides to visit her home Hold of which she has very clear memories. Except that she hadn’t been back for three years and the very clear image she give Ramoth is of a morning mere days before she was taken to the Weyr.

That’s right! Dragons can move between times just as easily as between places. Every good science fiction writer loves a good paradox, right? Existing twice at the same time is debilitating and dangerous but it’s too powerful a tool to ignore. Once Ramoth’s first clutch (which included another Queen egg) is hatched and grown enough to fly F’lar and Lessa concoct a plan to send them all ten years back in time (to an isolated location) to give them a chance to mature and even breed more dragons before Thread starts falling which by this point is mere months away. Four years is all they manage despite the isolation; living twice in the same time is just too rough.

When the first Thread falls, there are still five empty Weyrs and nowhere near enough dragons at the remaining Weyr to protect an entire planet. Pern is a world still in need of saving. Once again the wild and headstrong Lessa risks her life and Ramoth’s to attempt something only she thinks could work. Working from vague hints, old records, and even a single teaching song she’d concluded that the five missing Weyrs had left at the end of their Thread’s Pass and come forward in time to continue the fight. The trip nearly kills them both. Time spent between is a function of spatial and temporal distance, not the few seconds most riders had ever experienced at once. But, the trip is a success and Lessa leads the five missing Weyrs out of the past and into her own time in time to meet the second Thread fall. World saved! Where are the pancakes?

That was still too much of a synopsis but I hope it’s clear that Dragonflight followed a well known plot. I intend to show how this contrasts with Dragonquest next time.

Still, I loved this book as a kid. It was just as good on this re-read. I loved how it was a story of F’lar and Lessa versus the world (Mostly. They did have some help.). I loved McCaffrey’s dragons. They’re still the archetype against which I measure any other dragon and most I find to be lacking . Her dragons are big, strong, intelligent, intimately linked with their rider emotionally and telepathically, and fulfilled an absolutely vital role in their world. I also loved how a dragon’s name always ended with the letters “th.” I wanted to be a dragon rider so much I could taste it.

For this read through I was able to more thoroughly appreciate how Lessa and F’lar (and others) had to work their way out of a truly dire situation. They were totally screwed. With basically no one believing that there was any threat from Thread anymore there was nobody gearing up to prepare for it. In fact, dragons had dwindled in number to within an inch of extinction. And it was only due to a key ability of the dragons themselves that they were able to find and recruit dragonriders of the past to meet the current threat.

Now, about this trick of time traveling . . . I don’t actually have any problem with it. If dragons can teleport through space based on clear references from their riders it seems straightforward that moving through time as well might be possible as well. No, I think my main nitpick here is that the time traveling capability remains unknown for so long. Lessa is the first to discover the ability in 2,500 years of human/dragon history. I know that in later books, specifically Moreta (published in 1983, and which is set several hundred years before Dragonflight), those earlier dragonriders discover and use the time traveling ability to solve a different crisis. I’ll look again when I get to Dragonsdawn, the novel that chronicles Pern’s initial colonization, because it may have been an issue even that early in the planet’s history. In either case, knowledge of the ability is forgotten soon after those stories conclude which seems convenient to me.

Dragonflight also introduces several other much loved characters (or hated — I’m looking at you, Lord Meron and Kylara) who will get their day in the spotlight in later books: F’nor, Masterharper Robinton, Mastersmith Fandarel, Lytol, Brekke, etc.

This isn’t a perfect book. I noticed rough spots in the world building where it seemed that McCaffrey hadn’t quite decided how this or that would work but would be ironed out in later books. There’s an abrupt shift in how communication between dragon and rider is described from Part One to Part Two. In the early section (which I think is basically an earlier short story of hers that she took off and ran with to create the full novel Dragonflight) we never see a dragon’s words. It’s always the rider reporting “my dragon said” or “my dragon feels” or “my dragon is restless” even though all such communication is acknowledged to be telepathic. In Part Two we get full conversations with dragon speech in italics. For example:

“Did F’nor remember to . . .” [F’lar] began aloud.

F’nor never forgets your orders, Mnementh reassured him testily. Canth told me that the sighting at dawn today puts the Red Star at the top if the Eye Rock. The sun is still off, too.

What this book got right was its solid Save-the-World-on-a-Deadline story; strong, intelligent characters who got out and tackled their problems head on; and a world that the ten-year-old me wanted to disappear to and that 32-year-old me can think, “yeah, I could still go for that.”

To be perfectly honest, this news hurt.  A lot.

Anne McCaffrey’s books, especially the Dragonriders of Pern series,  have long been the most valued in my collection for they were the first “adult” books that grabbed hold of me to such an extent that I would re-read them over and over throughout the years.  My memory now is a little fuzzy but I think I was ten or eleven when I first discovered Dragonflight on my dad’s bookshelf.  It and its two immediate sequels were the hard cover editions printed in 1978 – ’79 with the gorgeous Michael Whelan art on their dust jackets.  I still have them, having liberated them from my father’s library and annexing them jealously into my own at some point in high school.  They are a bit worse for wear I’m afraid, with tears in the dust jackets and a food stain or ten scattered over the pages and covers, but the bindings are in great condition.

Once I’d burned through Dad’s collection of Pern books (which also included Moreta and the Harper Hall trilogy) I was terminally hooked.  Renegades of Pern and All the Weyrs of Pern became two of my most treasured early personal purchases and I was apparently young enough to get them when they were still in hard cover themselves (’88 and ’89 respectively).

For many years thereafter if a book had Anne McCaffrey’s name on it, I bought it.  On my shelves at this moment are 29 of her titles: gobs of Pern, the Crystal Singer trilogy, The Rowan series, To Ride Pegasus and Pegasus in Flight, the Brain and Brawn books, and an omnibus of The Planet Pirates co-written with both Elizabeth Moon and Jody Lynn Nye.  And I know that I’ve read at least a few others that I don’t own a copy of for whatever reason.

Granted, 29 out of over 500 books that I now own is nearly a drop in the bucket, but that 29 is easily the largest number of books by any one author on my shelves.

Point is, Mrs. McCaffrey, through the books she wrote, had an enormous impact on my life.

By the time of her death it had been several years (I want to say eight or nine, but I’m afraid I didn’t keep track) since I last read any of her books.  Once I’d made it out of college the near-yearly re-reads had honestly become more habit than joyous events and so I set them aside in favor of newer obsessions like the Wheel of Time.

About a week after, the tail end of November, I decided that it would be entirely fitting to go back to my roots and read, once again, every Anne McCaffrey title  in my possession.  This time, however, I’m older and far more widely read than my teenage self.  I’m also a bit of a wannabe writer myself (which, interestingly, dates back to at least 8th grade when I spent my English class “Journal” writing Pern fan-fiction– although I didn’t know it was called that at the time): I’ve been paying attention more and more to the craft that goes into the books I read, how stories are structured, how characters are given life and handle the conflicts their writers throw them into, etc.  I devour any commentary an author makes regarding works of theirs I’ve read and I’ve spent way more hours than I care to admit over on tvtropes.org.

As I’m writing this post I’ve already made it through Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon and I’m in the middle of reading The Renegades of Pern.  So far the re-read has been everything I hoped it would be.  Although my memories of this beloved series are surprisingly strong, I’ve laughed and cried just as much (if not more) as I did when I was younger.  I loved these books unconditionally when I was a kid and I’m thrilled to see that the ember of that love was not cold and dead after all these years, merely banked and patiently waiting.

As I’m reading these books I’m thinking about them all the time and remembering all that I can about what it was like to read them long ago.  If only I had an outlet for my reactions this time around . . .  Oh, wait!  I have this here blog-type-thingy!  Sure, it gets only a couple of hits a day (truly desperate spam bots I’m betting, or maybe my Dad.  (Hi, Dad!)) but it’s on the internet and so maybe someone will wander by someday and also wish to raise a digital glass to the memory of Anne McCaffrey.

I have no schedule in mind, no self imposed deadlines to fulfill.  In fact, time is (always) a little scarce with the community theater production of Guys and Dolls I’m in soon, cycling season will be kicking off as soon as I can get some daylight after work, I actually have to read all these books sometime, and the dragons in Skyrim aren’t going to kill themselves. . . .  But, if all goes well, over time I plan to post a little something about each book and how it affected me then and now and with reactions and recollections as they occur to me.

Many people can point to at least one author whose works touched them or even changed their lives.  Anne McCaffrey, you were mine.  Rest in peace.  And rest in the sure and certain knowledge that you touched countless lives.

About the inactivity all I can say is, “I suck.” I read a boat load of books still, I’ve put more miles on the bike so far this year than I did all of last year, and I’ve been working both on-stage and back-stage at the local theater more than ever. Which means there’s not a whole lot of energy left over for blogging about books and such.

One idea that I’d been toying with was to do a detailed summary-with-commentary series of posts about Peter Orullian’s The Unremembered and do so in the style of Leigh Butler’s Re-Read of The Wheel of Time over on tor.com.  I even put off starting the book until I had more time to do so, never found the time, and so said “screw it!” and started reading anyway.  I’m about half way through so far and it’s not bad, pretty good in fact.  But to be honest I think my expectations for it based on its pre-publication hype may have ended up a tad too high.  It hasn’t blown me away, I’m afraid.  At the half way point I think I’m finally getting into the groove of this story and if I’d actually done the summary-with-commentary series from a blind start I think I would have been less than charitable in several places.  Of course, that may have made for great material here but I actually don’t like bad things about other people’s work if I can avoid it, especially in a public setting.  It might still be possible to do that post series later as an actual re-read.  I’ll still bring up some of my initial reactions but at least I’ll be able to say that any uncharitable responses may have been premature.  There is a lot to like about this book.

The other thing that could stand a big revision is my About Me page.  It’s now 2.5 years out of date.  I’m sure I’ll get around to this in a few more months. . . .  My photography efforts should also be downgraded from a permanent page since I never developed a full fledged passion for the hobby.  I do know just enough to be truly dangerous though.  Mwahahahaha!

[Update - 8/28/2011: Well, I didn't do a "big revision" of the About Me page but I did go back and get rid of all the "just starting out" type of language.  My core identity has remained rather consistent over the past two years for some reason and doesn't require a major update.  Who knew?]

Let me assure you, I’ve still been reading!

That photo shows all of the new books that I’ve bought and read since then.  It doesn’t include the half dozen that I’ve bought but not yet gotten around to, nor does it include the books that I’ve had for a while but decided to re-read.  On that front I went back to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy but never finished Blue Mars (got distracted), Tad Williams’s first two of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (again, got distracted but also see this post from a while back about my feelings about Williams), I don’t think I did a full WoT re-read but certainly got in TGS a couple of months ago, nor is Lord of Emperors in there even though it’s like a second half of Sailing to Sarantium.  I guess I should have included the other two Kushiel novels by Carey since I’d only read the first one by the last update.

Okay, briefly then:

Shadowrise and Shadowheart are the two concluding novels in Tad Williams’s Shadowmarch series.  I know that I’ve mentioned to some people in face to face conversations that Williams seems to center his fiction around different  versions of faeries, Fair Folk, Sidhe, etc.  In fact, I’ve gotten the impression that it’s like he’s trying to tell the “perfect” fairy story because he keeps coming back to that theme.  Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Shadowmarch, The War of the Flowers, and even the Otherland series (more of a couple of cameos in that one though) all feature the conflict between humans and the various guises of the Fae.  War of the Flowers is still my favorite of all of his work but Shadowmarch is the best of all his Faerie series so far.  Otherland may be better but it’s a different kind of story and one I need to give a second shot to.

Jim Butcher continues to release books in his excellent Dresden Files series and the next one, Ghost Story, should hit stores in July.  Changes, however, completely lived up to its title!  While each of the Dresden novels are self contained stories, Butcher has been deftly weaving an epic overall arc throughout the series and Changes is the fulcrum where [Stuff] Gets Real™ as the kids say.  Side Jobs is a collection of short stories set in Dresden’s world and covers the entire time-span of the current series.  There’s some truly excellent stuff in there.

Towers of Midnight is the 13th Wheel of Time book and second of the three final novels being completed by Brandon Sanderson.  This series is in the best of hands and virtually all of us fans are ecstatic with how well Sanderson is handling the demands of this story.  ToM brings us right up to the very brink of a global war.  Tarmon Gaidon is at hand.  Unfortunately we all have to wait until next March to see the end of all.

Sitting on top of ToM is Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium.  I’ve owned a copy of the second book, Lord of Emperors for a long time but had somehow lost this first one.  When I saw they’d re-released Sailing I didn’t even think twice.  I snagged a copy and added it to whichever books I was actually in the store for that day.  Simply said, I love this duology all to pieces.  Actually, I don’t think there’s anything by Kay that I haven’t loved, his stuff’s just that good.

Just barely visible at the top of that stack is Jackie Morse Kessler’s Hunger.  This is a short YA novel that I picked up based on its Big Idea piece over at Whatever.  I was intrigued by the idea of what would happen when a young, anorexic teen girl is chosen as the Horseman of Famine.  I really liked what she did with that idea and I can’t wait to see what happens with the other Horsemen as the series continues.

Peter V. Brett’s The Desert Spear is at the bottom of the next stack over and is the second in his Warded Man trilogy.  A quick search didn’t find any info on the release date for the third book but I expect it sometime this year.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this series so far.  My only nit pick is that I don’t think Brett laid enough groundwork in the first novel about the different “castes” of demons because the higher-functioning ones that show up in Desert Spear seemed to me to come out of nowhere.  Perhaps I’ll see something I missed when I get around to reading both again next time.

Sanderson’s The Way of Kings is going to be the next Big Series™.  It’s the first in a planned series of 10 which he calls The Stormlight Archive and I think he has knocked it out of the park with this one.  There’s so much going on that when I finally closed the back cover I sat there for a moment, took a breath, and immediately turned right back to page one for a second read-through.  In all honesty I should have popped on here and done a full write up.  Hmm, maybe I ought to read through it again so that I can!

Instead of starting with Brent Weeks’s Night Angel trilogy like any normal person, the first book of his I decided to pick up was The Black Prism.  Now I have to wait for the next book in the series because I really enjoyed it.  It’s got a pretty neat world, great characters and conflicts, and a magic system which is utterly unique (if not quite as . . . plausible as some others I’ve seen.  It was fine once I got used to it though).  What struck me most early on was Weeks’s frequent use of modern English idioms.  It very nearly knocked me out of the world for a bit but once I decided to roll with it everything just flowed.

Dead or Alive is Tom Clancy’s latest book.  To be perfectly honest I didn’t ever expect to hear from him again considering just how close to reality the ending of Debt of Honor came 7+ years prior to 9/11.  When Teeth of the Tiger was released I really didn’t care for it, 1) because Jack Ryan was basically retired as the main character and 2) because it just seemed to have been phoned in.  Dead or Alive, co-written with US Navy veteran Grant Blackwood, picks up where Tiger left off, retcons 9/11 into the Jack Ryan universe, and proceeds to tell a tale about the search for the OBL figure.  I’d say that Dead of Alive is much better than Tiger but not up to the standard of Rainbow Six and previous.  I freely admit that this could be due to some combination of rose tinted memories and Disgruntled Fan Syndrome.

Hmm . . .  Pat Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear . . .  I’ve got more than 1700 words about it for you right here!

One of my family members gave me Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games for Christmas and I sucked it down in very nearly one sitting.  So of course I head out and buy Catching Fire and Mockingjay.  If that’s the quality of literature available and marketed to teens these days, all I have to say is I was robbed!

I’m guessing it’s obvious that I’m now kinda skimming through the rest of the photo.  I’d already sort of mentioned Ian M. Banks’ Culture novels in an earlier post.  Consider Phlebas was quite fun.  I eventually finished The Player of Games and ended up enjoying it for different reasons.  Use of Weapons, however, gets my vote for the best of the three.  It’s not so much non-linear as bi-linear with the “main” timeline starting at point B and proceeding to point C and the supporting story also starting at point B (or thereabout) but working back to point A.  I’ll definitely be working my way through the rest of the Culture novels.

The Broken Kingdoms is the second of N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy.  I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms before and it was really good.  Broken Kingdoms picks up right where 100K leaves off and follows a completely new viewpoint character as she experiences the fallout from the first book.  I’m also looking forward to the conclusion of this series.

The leftmost stack is the start of Steven Erikson’s (and Ian C. Esslemont’s!) Malazan Book of the Fallen series.  I’ve been hearing about it for several years now and, since the final volume, The Crippled God, just came out, I figured it was time to dive in and join the throngs of fans for this series.  I’m in the middle of Memories of Ice (the third of the main series) and House of Chains is next so I haven’t actually read that one yet.  This is also a Big Series.  The first book tosses you right into the middle of a war and the characters are so well drawn that I had no idea who I was supposed to cheer for.  I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this series is not Human vs. Human but rather Human (and other races) vs. the Pantheon of Deities.  Makes things a bit more like David vs. Goliath, wouldn’t you say?  Esslemont seems to be handling related stories in the Malazan universe but doesn’t seem to be writing books in the main cycle.  Night of Knives is the only one of his I’ve read so far though so I could be wrong.  For what it’s worth I’m following the order that tor.com is doing in its Malazan Re-read of the Fallen.

And finally, down in the foreground is Rothfuss’s The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Under the Bed.  Don’t let the cover fool you: THIS IS NOT A CHILDRENS’ BOOK!  It’s a delightfully twisted tale meant not for any preschoolers but rather the preschooler’s parents.  This also I quite love to pieces.  The illustrations by Nate Taylor always have truly excellent visual gags throughout.  Definitely pick it up if you’re at least old enough to leave school campus for lunch.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t talk about the books not in this picture?

Finally, up there in the background is the main cause of my scarce-ness ’round these here parts.  When all was said and done at the end of October last year I’d ridden a total of 2003.92 miles.  At that point the theater again became my favorite time sink as I was on the cast of White Christmas and then worked backstage for Oklahoma.  Cycling season is back in full swing this year and I even managed to get a much earlier start, rolling over 500 miles since Jan 1 yesterday.  That extra 25 pounds I was complaining about last March is gone.

Life is good!