Book review: "Renegades of Pern" but really musing on the Pern series a whole

I have just finished reading "Renegades of Pern" by Anne McCaffrey, one of the dragon series. Some months ago, I decided to re-read the entire series. Although I owned a number of the books, as usual, I could not find them, either lost in the clutter of the house or lent to people and never returned. But fortunately Brisbane City Council library has all of the series except one of the later books, so I have been mostly reading the library's books.

Of course, reading the Pern series has interesting sequencing issues, as the series hops back and forward in time somewhat. Does one read the books in the order they were written or in the chronology of Pern itself? I opted for the order in which the books were written, although towards the end of the series, I read a few out of order because I'd stopped caring.

Without a doubt, the Pern series starts well with Dragonflight and Dragonquest introducing the world of Pern, the Thread that threatens life on the planet, and the dragons that fight thread and the society that has evolved in that context. I'd call it good science fiction, but I know many people prefer to call it fantasy. Whatever.

The series then gets a bit too interested in minor characters IMHO (such as Menolly and the harpers) and the introduction of fire lizards seems a bit of a distraction to the main storyline. I find the abilities of fire lizards somewhat confusing, they seem to be able to do or not do useful things, based more on what is convenient for the plot rather than any consistent set of abilities. In fact, it's really Robinton the Masterharper and Piemur the apprentice, rather than Menolly who are the significant characters later in the series. Menolly floats in and out throughout the series, as if Anne McCaffrey was a bit embarrassed to have introduced her as a major character and then felt she couldn't drop the character, but really Menolly seems to be pregnant in the later books and doesn't contribute much at all. Anne McCaffrey has a lot of strong female characters, but Menolly seems to fade away compared with some of the others.

I initially thought the White Dragon was another "minor character" book, but later in the series Jaxom and Ruth the White Dragon turn out to be more major characters.

Then the series branches off into all different points of Pern's history. Moreta Dragonlady of Pern is quite a good free-standing story, but doesn't contribute anything much to the overall development of the series.

The series gets going again with Dragonsdawn, the story of the founding of Pern by a high-technology society and the events (Thread and earthquakes) that lead to the society's decay into a more low-tech society that we know from the start of the series. Again, from a sci-fi perspective, the evolution of the society in response to events is very good. Anne McCaffrey is back on form.

Then one is again lost in a tangle of novels and short stories about many of the minor characters at all points of Pern's history, sometimes re-telling the same events from their point of view. While it all adds colour, these stories don't tend to contribute much to the overall events of the story line.

Then we get All the Weyrs of Pern which despite its name is primarily focussed on the rediscovery of the Ancient's artifical intelligence system that begins to guide the people of Pern out of their feudal/medieval world back toward high technology. It's all a bit too easy with such a super-intelligent AI system telling them what to do. One has to be impressed that the AI system survived that length of time and one has to wonder why the ancients never bothered to seek its advice to aid them in their times of troubles -- it certainly has the answers for all problems from the re-invention of paper to the destruction of the Red Star.

Finally, having blown up the Red Star, you might think it was game over for the series, but that is not the case. There are a number of books, some co-authored with others, and frankly this is when I had to confess that I had stopped caring about what happened on Pern to a vast cast of minor characters. Renegades of Pern is one of these many stories, following various major and minor characters, re-telling events from their point of view. All a bit of a yawn.

So, the dragon/Pern series is well worth reading but you can stick to the main backbone novels that tell the end-to-end story and give a lot of the other stories that add a lot of largely irrelevant detail a miss, if you can't be bothered.