Dragonriders of Pern

About the Dragonriders of Pern series

On the planet Pern, humans bond telepathically with giant, fire-breathing dragons and ride them into the sky to combat Thread — a mycorrhizoid spore that falls like corrosive rain from a wandering neighbor planet every couple of centuries, devouring anything organic it touches. Anne McCaffrey began the series in 1968 with Dragonflight, and it became one of the foundational works of science fantasy: colonists from a lost Earth expedition, generations removed from their technological origins, now live in a feudal society of Weyrs, Holds and Halls, genuinely believing dragons and Threadfall are simply how their world works, while the reader is let in on the science-fictional truth underneath the fantasy trappings.

The series ranges freely across Pern's internal timeline rather than telling one continuous story — Dragonsdawn covers the original colony ship's arrival, the Harper Hall trilogy (Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, Dragondrums) follows a gifted young singer named Menolly during the same period as Dragonquest, and Moreta jumps back centuries to a plague crisis that becomes Pernese legend by the time of the main dragonrider novels. McCaffrey wrote the core of the series alone through 2001; her son Todd McCaffrey then began co-writing new Pern novels with her, continuing the series into the 2010s and beyond her death in 2011. Its themes of ecological survival, found family, and women claiming authority in a rigidly gendered society were unusually progressive for the fantasy shelves of the late 1960s and helped make McCaffrey the first woman to win a Hugo and a Nebula Award.