Anne McCaffrey's
Pern
Pern began, in its internal chronology at any
rate, as an optimistic colony that wanted to
escape the confines of life on Earth and return to a
simpler, less technological society. So the colonists
travel by generation starship to a new planet, one
never before inhabited by man, and become friendly
with the only indiginous semi-intelligence--little
"fire lizards" or dragonets who can breath fire and
fly--oh, and teleport as well. But a few years after
the colonists land, they meet Pern's unfriendly
neighbor, a mychorriza that falls from the surface
of another planet in the system to the surface of
Pern for fifty years out of every two hundred or
so, devouring all organic life in its path. The
colonists are too far away to get help from earth
in combatting the rains of voracious "thread" that
fall, so they use genetic manipulation to transform
their little friends the fire lizards into telepathic
dragons that bond to a specific rider upon hatching,
and can fight thread in the air, before it destroys
all the life it reaches. The books are the stories
of these dragons and their riders, and of the struggle
to find an end to thread.
Anne McCaffrey recommends that her books be read in the sequence they were published, rather than by the internal chronology of the series, so, according to her suggested order, here are the books of Pern .
- Dragonquest (1968)
- Dragonflight (1971)
- Dragonsinger (1976)
- Dragonsong (1977)
- Dragondrums (1979)
- The White Dragon (1978)
- Moreta:Dragonlady of Pern (1983)
- Nerilka's Story (1986)
- Dragonsdawn (1988)
- The Renegades of Pern (1990)
- All the Weyrs of Pern (1991)
- The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall (1993)
- The Dolphins of Pern
- The Girl Who Heard Dragons ( 1994)
- Dragonseye (1997)
Links
Follow the dragon to return to the index.
This site created by Katrina Holliday.
Last update: May 27, 1997.