BOOK REVIEW: The Skies of Pern by Anne McCaffrey.
Ah Pern. Pern books are the junk food of books to me: not very good and I feel a bit icky after but I still read them. In fact the only one I would consider is actually good is Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern. Far too many plots and characters ripped from old bodice ripper romance, not enough dragons. They frustrate me, as the setting and social set up is interesting and would provide lots of interesting plots, but in the end is just background to annoying romances. They are at their best when there is a solid plot to hold things together, like Moreta or even Dragonflight, but when there isn't McCaffrey's old fashioned view of gender and sexuality is a lot harder to ignore.
But onto this particular book, the Skies of Pern is the last book McCaffrey wrote on her own and set in the Ninth Pass. Thread will soon be gone forever, deu ex machina AVIAS turned itself off like a good little plot device and Robinton was dead and everyone was sad. So, the Dragonriders face an uncertain future having just put an end to their reason for existing. Isn't it handy that meteors could strike Pern, and the dragons have discovered they have the telekinesis to be able to deal with this threat? Just as handy as finding a talking wall that could tell them how to eradicate Thread for ever.
This is what really frustrates me about these books, too many authorial hand outs. It would be interesting to see the Dragonriders deal with the fact that they will become irrelevant and losing their privileges, but instead we get a bit of angsting them boom, solution falls from the sky.
But this isn't the main plot line, there are the Abominators, those against AVIAS and all the technological changes it brings, then there is the romance between F'lessan, who it seems inherited a good dose of condescending assholeness from his dad, and Tai, who has a mullet and very little personality, then the pair and their dragons get attacked by felines and F'lessan's dragon gets crippled.
The book suffers from a similar mess of plots as in Dragonquest, but at least in that one it was entertaining, in a "huh, if you like kinky sex and are promiscuous and selfish you get your mind destroyed, if you are a doormat your problems will just go away and you'll be left with your man, good to know," kind of way. This one is just dull. Understandable resistance to such a sudden shift in technology is treated as silly people being silly not to trust the magic talking wall, yet this takes up too much of the book, and no dragons are in sight! The romance, well, it's not a McCaffrey novel without some skeevy romance, and mating flights are still non con, despite F'lessan's blethering on about "choice". He is the only one there, his dragon is going to mate with Tai's, so there is no choice at all. But of course she is fine with it, and after the issues left by her previous flights have gone away thanks to F'lessan's magic penis.
With Golanth getting crippled, and no longer capable of flight this would leave the pair facing a dilemma: would their relationship survive other males flying her? Would they just have to deal with this? This being McCaffrey, in the next book this problem will be overcome quite quickly. In fact it is heavily hinted that Golanth will find a way to fly using telekinesis. God forbid mating flights be treated as just a fact of nature and not magic non con sex between twu luvs.
The meteor strike and resulting tsunami is well done, the Dragonriders riding to the rescue could have provided enough plot to be the single focus, and would have been a lot more interesting. Instead the book gets bogged down with the boring Abominators plot, only really picking up again when F'lessan and Tia get attacked by cats, even though the logic of that doesn't really stand up (though seriously, just their dung will keep cats away from fields, yet they attack two fully grown dragons?)
At it's worst, this book is just dull with a few flashes of interest, and when things get interesting again the book just stops. And like a sucker I'll probably read the next book if it finally gets published because I need my fix.
Not been brave enough to try the books by her son, the screaming horror of canon breaking scares me too much (whers do WHAT now?).