ICBIHRTB – Co-Geeking

Review of the First Pern Book: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

August 27, 2025February 16, 2025Eppu1 Comment

I’ve long been aware of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, if only on a superficial level—fantasy, dragons, getting a bit old but supposed to be good; that sort of an idea. While on the lookout for more cozy fiction in our local library, I randomly ran into Dragonflight, the first Pern novel, and decided to finally give it a go.

And before I get into my review: Spoiler warnings in effect! Also, a heads-up on one f-bomb.

It was interesting. No, truly—not the “interesting” interesting, the faux compliment or empty-nothings-version of polite interesting. Really, truly interesting. And it does feel somewhat old. (Published in 1968, so not as old as The Lord of the Rings, to put it into my own SFFnal context).

Humans settled the third planet in the Rukbat solar system and called it Pern. Contact with Earth was broken, however: after two generations, Rukbat’s stray planet (which follows a wildly erratic orbit) came close enough that deadly spores crossed over to Pern and dropped from the sky with devastating losses, not just among the settlers but native Pernese life as well—only solid rock and metal proved impervious.

To burn these devastating silvery threads from the air before they had a chance to land, men and women with high empathy and rudimentary telepathic ability were trained to work with “dragons” bred from indigenous life forms that resembled their mythical Terran namesakes. The process took generations, and a complex, stratified society with tithing responsibility was created to feed and equip the dragonriders while they focused on defence and training in their unfertile mountaintop abodes known as Weyrs.

Each time the stray planet—also known as the Red Star—passes close enough, the Threads fall for a period of 50 years. Then the wanderer swings far enough away and at least another 200 years (sometimes 400 due to the erratic orbit) go by in peace, which is long enough for the rest of the populace to forget and start resenting the tithes and scorning the dragonmen until the next 50-year Pass comes along.

The two main characters are Lessa of Ruatha Hold and dragonrider F’lar of Benden Weyr. We first encounter Lessa as a ragged kitchen girl who survived by serving those who betrayed her family and took over their lands. F’lar offers her a chance to impress a golden dragon, a future queen dragon, with whom she will share a telepathic bond, and to become a Weyrwoman, a co-leader of a Weyr, possibly with F’lar himself.

Over the couple of years it takes for her queen Ramoth to mature, Lessa learns more about the civilization on Pern, the ballads, the teachings, and what it means to be Weyrwoman. The major problem Benden Weyr faces is that another Pass is impending, but there are not enough dragons to protect all of Pern, for currently only one Weyr out of six remains populated; why dragonriders in the others disappeared hundreds of years ago is not known.

The setting falls into fantasy despite the science-fictional premise, but some details deviate from “pure” medieval-European-based fantasy. For instance, the dragons are able to breathe fire after chewing (fueling up on) a native rock called firestone; dragonriders use this ability to destroy as many Threads as possible while they are still falling. Dragons can also travel instantly from one place to another, or one time to another. Furthermore, all dragons are able to converse telepathically and willing to pass on messages from human to human. Finally, crafters (which I wish were talked about more) end up re-inventing flamethrowers to destroy spores that made it to ground.

The structure differs quite a bit from the typical structure of current fantasy novels. The book is divided into four sections that at times felt like they would’ve worked better as individual short stories. Apparently Dragonflight is actually two novellas squished together to make a novel, so that probably explains this tangle.

There were also confusing things. For example, some events span many Turns (the Pernese year) in a very short span of pages and this isn’t very clearly remarked upon. Somewhat annoying was the s’elling of d’agonrider n’mes w’th an a’ostrophe. There is a story-internal reason, but it’s only vaguely referred to.

Moreover, it was frustrating to me that Lessa kept leaping to conclusions and acting without thought; I would’ve liked to see more character development. The description of the society also remains rather narrow, since the POV characters are almost solely Lessa and F’lar. This feels to me like a deliberate choice by the author, not a flaw due to lack of skill, but your mileage may vary.

Some of the more disgusting details include F’lar’s tendency to call Lessa merely “the girl” and to grab and shake her, and yet he cannot fathom why she at times resents him. Hello, dude, could there possibly be a reason…?!? This might be a character development choice, but it never paid off, IMO. Also, during Ramoth’s first mating flight (with Flair’s dragon Mnementh), Lessa was pressured to stay in telepathic contact with her dragon to take advantage of the surge of sexual desire and to essentially manipulate a pairing of Lessa and F’lar, like their dragons.

Browsing reviews, it’s pretty clear that Dragonflight (and likely the rest of the Pern series) has a particular audience that cares deeply for McCaffrey’s approach and worldbuilding; the rest don’t. I can see why many people liked it, and I can also see why many people disliked it.

I saw one reviewer complain that the main problem was solved “easy peasy because of time travel”. I’d say that’s missing the point; to me the focus isn’t how the lack of dragonriders was solved. Instead, the author concentrates on the attempts to get there. How to find the right people and put them in places where they can be most effective. Convincing others, the necessary political maneuverings, discussing possible strategies, etc., to try and wrangle out a solution to a deadly dilemma given these particular constraints. A kind of council of Elrond, if you like, but as a novel.

I found Dragonflight engaging enough that I started reading the sequel, Dragonquest. However, I soon found I didn’t have the motivation to continue the same kind of people-wrangling, when a lot of the interpersonal relations were antagonistic (I do like my stories with a heaping of Learning to Work Together), and especially because F’lar still fucking cannot stop shaking Lessa. I’ll be better off spending my reading time elsewhere, now that the novelty has worn off.

Image by Eppu Jensen

ICBIHRTB—pronounced ICK-bert-bee—is short for ‘I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Read This Before’. It features book classics that have for some reason escaped our notice thus far.

Diana Wynne Jones: Howl’s Moving Castle

September 4, 2023June 11, 2023Erik

I’ve been looking for cozy, comfortable fantasy reads lately, and I’ve seen several recommendations of Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Until recently, I had known this name only for the Studio Ghibli animation (which I have never watched either), and I was surprised to discover that it was a novel first. I have read and enjoyed some of Jones’s short stories, so I was hopeful about picking up this novel. Alas, my hopes were soon dashed.

The story follows Sophie, a young hatter who is cursed by the Witch of the Waste to turn into an old woman and to be unable to tell anyone about the curse. Sophie goes in search of someone who can not only break the curse, but recognize that there is a curse to break without her having to tell them. She ends up in the small cottage of the wizard Howl, which is enchanted to look like a mobile castle on the outside. Howl seems to take no notice of Sophie, but his pet fire demon Calcifer recognizes the curse and agrees to help her if she will in turn help him break his contract with Howl, which, for magical reasons, he can’t talk about either. So Sophie settles in as a sort of freelance housekeeper to Howl and his apprentice Michael, while keeping her eyes open for anything she can learn about Howl and Calcifer’s contract.

So far so fairy tale. It’s a strong beginning with a promising cast of characters an interesting set of problems for them to unravel. And then nothing happens. Nothing continues to happen for two-hundred pages, until the last twenty pages when all the plot that didn’t happen in the rest of the novel suddenly comes crashing in like five trains trying to run on the same track at once.

It’s not that the characters don’t do anything for all that time—there are trips to the royal palace, covert visits to sisters, and a jaunt to modern Wales, but none of them make any sense or accomplish anything for the characters. Indeed, most of what the characters do is senseless. Over and over again the novel repeats that Sophie does or says something “without knowing why.” Jones, of course, knows why, and most of these nonsensical acts turn out to be coincidentally relevant in the finale, but far too much of what happens in the story happens because the author is setting up what she thinks is a clever ending, not because it makes sense given what motivates the characters and what they know or think they know at the time.

Indeed, it turns out in the end that Howl knew about Sophie’s curse all along. So did her sisters, not to mention the powerful magic-worker one of her sisters was studying under, and they were all trying to help break the curse. In fact, almost everyone Sophie encounters over the course of the novel knew about her curse and was trying to help her all along, but none of them ever bothered to tell her so. Why not? For no reason I can see other than that it would have broken the dramatic tension before Jones was ready.

Although the story mostly takes place in Howl’s small cottage, I found the atmosphere more stifling than cozy. Howl is an irresponsible jerk who makes everyone around him clean up his messes (both literal and figurative) while he moons over one lady or another. He is moody and mean, given to sulking when he doesn’t get his way, and never shows appreciation for how much work the people around him are doing to keep him afloat. Sophie falls in love with him at the end of the novel, as a fairy tale demands, but for no reason that I can fathom.

The only interesting thing I can point to in the novel is how it cleverly remixes themes and elements from The Wizard of Oz. There is a living scarecrow, a wicked witch in a castle, a humbug of a wizard from our world lost in a fantasy land, and a girl in search of a way back to her familiar life. She even eventually acquires a faithful dog and magical traveling footwear. For all these echoes of Oz, the story never feels like a pastiche or homage; it reimagines and recombines these elements to form an entirely different story. If only that story were any good, it would be an impressive narrative feat.

Howl’s Moving Castle left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I think I’ve been put off Jones for a good while. Maybe someday I’ll give her other works a try, but I need to cleanse my palate a bit first.

Image by Erik Jensen

ICBIHRTB – pronounced ICK-bert-bee – is short for ‘I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Read This Before’. It features book classics that have for some reason escaped our notice thus far.

Review: Blindsight by Peter Watts

July 19, 2023May 7, 2023Eppu

Recently I’ve been trying to read more SFFnal classics among my normal selection. I can’t remember why I added Blindsight by Peter Watts (published in 2006) onto my library holds list. When it finally became available and I started to read, I discovered that one of the characters is called Jukka Sarasti (which is a Finnish name), so perhaps that was it.

Content note: spoiler alert!

The novel’s events start in the year 2082. A first contact situation arises after thousands of unknown devices burn up in Earth’s atmosphere in a coordinated manner and radio signals are detected near a Kuiper belt object.

Earth sends a ship captained by an AI (called the Captain) to investigate. Theseus is crewed by five augmented humans or transhumans, including their leader, a genetically reincarnated vampire (Sarasti). When the crew wakes from hibernation they discover that Theseus was rerouted mid-flight to a new destination in the Oort cloud. Orbiting a previously undetected rogue gas giant is an enormous, constantly growing object, presumably a vessel, which the crew dub Rorschach.

The Theseus crew begin studying Rorschach with telemetry and excursions despite some very hostile environmental conditions. Additional challenges are posed by psychological effects (hallucinations) and extremely fast, multi-limbed organisms on Rorschach, and on Theseus the crew’s aggravation with the narrator, synthesist Siri Keeton. Eventually relations between Theseus and Rorschach culminate in physical attacks, and only one crew member, Keeton, is sent back to Earth in an escape pod with copies of the information collected before Theseus detonates its payload to destroy Rorschach.

What was especially delightful is that—setting aside Sarasti, who as mission commander and a predator is kind of outside the crew anyway—Theseus’s crew consists of two men and two women, and everyone is described the same way regardless of the configuration of their bodies. Skills and personalities are what matter most. (This is especially enjoyable after reading certain other classic SF novels, which I will leave unnamed to languish in their stifling obsolescence.)

Another interesting detail is that Susan James, the linguist in the crew, actually carries three other personalities or cores in her head, all working and socializing in harmony, and collectively referred to as the Gang by the rest of the crew.

Blindsight turned out to have one suprisingly topical detail. The Gang figure out that despite conversing with the Theseus crew seemingly normally, Rorschach doesn’t really understand the communication. This sounds very much like the recent discussion of Chat-GPT and other AI engines, doesn’t it?

One of the strengths of Blindsight is that it fuses elements from both the so-called hard sciences and the social sciences. Surely SFF (and all storytelling, for that matter) is at its strongest when it’s questioning our perceived realities or possible realities, starting from what makes humans tick. I’m quite tired of SFF that takes bland “and then they went to x and did y” travel narratives and merely cloaks them in fancy wrappings.

Alas, Blindsight has quite a few horror elements and closes with a rather despondent situation. Despite being skillfully written and constructed, it’s therefore not for me.

Blindsight was followed (in 2014) by the novel Echopraxia to make up the Firefall duology.

ICBIHRTB—pronounced ICK-bert-bee—is short for ‘I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Read This Before’. It features book classics that have for some reason escaped our notice thus far.

Quotes: No Man’s Faculties Could Be Developed without an Extensive Acquaintance with Books

May 27, 2022October 15, 2022Eppu

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s speculative work The Last Man starts very much like a run-of-the-mill regency-era novel with its three-book structure. You even start to wonder whether much of interest is ever going to happen.

And then a plague hits. Book three, especially, where people drop off like flies, felt rather grim even before living through a pandemic myself. (I read it a few years ago.)

Since the plague aspect is a little too on the nose, I’m going to skip all of that for now. Instead, below is what the protagonist thought about reading:

“I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man’s faculties could be developed, no man’s moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books. To me they stood in the place of an active career, of ambition, and those palpable excitements necessary to the multitude.”

– Lionel Verney in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Sounds astonishingly like Mr. Darcy’s line about a truly accomplished woman who must improve “her mind by extensive reading” in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, doesn’t it? It must’ve been very much in the air in the early 19th century.

If you’re interested, a free e-version of The Last Man is available on Project Gutenberg.

Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2004 [originally published 1826], p. 124.

Image by Eppu Jensen

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

SFFnal Book Classics: Redemption in Indigo

August 21, 2019August 18, 2019Eppu

Redemption in Indigo was Karen Lord’s first published novel. It won a number of awards and nominations, including the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.

The description from Lord’s website reads:

“Paama’s husband is a fool and a glutton. Bad enough that he followed her to her parents’ home in the village of Makendha, now he’s disgraced himself by murdering livestock and stealing corn. When Paama leaves him for good, she attracts the attention of the undying ones—the djombi—who present her with a gift: the Chaos Stick, which allows her to manipulate the subtle forces of the world. Unfortunately, a wrathful djombi with indigo skin believes this power should be his and his alone.”

Redemption in Indigo has been called a contemporary fairy tale, a mix of Caribbean and Senegalese influences (chapters 1-3 are based on the latter), and a story of adventure, magic, and the power of the human spirit, complete with trickster spiders.

I found Redemption in Indigo intriguing and refreshing. Since it pulls from such different traditions than my native northern Finnish ones, I did occasionally have to consciously stop and adjust my expectations (like I did when I was reading Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death).

Anyway. Paama’s humor was a delight, slightly sarcastic at times, and I’m definitely a fan of well-crafted sarcasm (like Jane Austen’s). Her bit-of-a-dumbo husband Ansige cannot control his appetite, with consequences bordering the ridiculous. Lord also made some interesting structural choices which nod towards oral storytelling traditions.

The most enjoyable feature of the novel, however, was how seemingly small scale beginnings (a wife walking out on her husband) actually turned into life and death siatuations, and, yet, that wasn’t turned into a DRAMATIC OMG IT’S THE END OF THE KINGDOM / EMPIRE / WORLD (again)^TM story like so many western fantasy novels tend to be. Lord’s subtle telling just rolls smoothly on, forcing the reader to pay attention. I had more than one “Wait, what?” moment… Which, to be explicit, is a good thing!

Dr. Lord is a Barbadian ownvoices author, editor, and research consultant. Visit Lord’s website for more.

Image by Eppu Jensen

ICBIHRTB—pronounced ICK-bert-bee—is short for ‘I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Read This Before’. It’s an occasional feature for book classics that have for some reason escaped our notice thus far.

The Neverending Story Has an Anniversary Doodle

September 1, 2016May 20, 2018Eppu

Google tells me with a lovely doodle that it’s the 37th anniversary of the first printing of The Neverending Story by Michael Ende.

Originally published in German on September 01, 1979, Die unendliche Geschichte was translated into Finnish in 1982 (and apparently English in 1983, with the film adaptation in 1984). I can’t quite remember if I ever read it. At the same time, I want to recall a gorgeous tome with both green and red print, so I guess I must at least have been handling the Finnish translation at one point.

(No, I did not imagine the green and red print!)

While the movie version isn’t terribly well-made nor the first I saw in a theater, it is one of the first screen adaptations that made me realize I was a geek even if I didn’t have a word for it at the time. It’s purely for nostalgia that I own and occasionally rewatch it. I’m now wondering whether I should’ve bought the book instead.

Images: Falkor from Neverending Story by Sophie Diao via Google Doodle. Finnish translation of The Neverending Story (Tarina vailla loppua) by Katja Jalkanen at Lumiomena

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Ursula Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

February 3, 2016October 26, 2025Eppu1 Comment

My latest reading project rolls on with The Left Hand of Darknessby Ursula Le Guin (first published in 1969).

Genly Ai is sent to planet Gethen (also known as Winter due to its extremely cold climate) as an envoy for the Ekumen of Known Worlds, an interstellar conglomeration for trade and cultural exchange. His mission is to convince the planet to join the Ekumen, easier said than done on a world where the conditions are semi-arctic even at the warmest time of the year and where cultures and technologies change at a glacial pace. (Pardon the pun!)

I knew a little of Left Hand before reading it. I knew that it’s highly regarded, that the inhabitants of the world are androgynous (or something) and that there’s an arduous trek across a glacier (or snowy steppes or somesuch) that’s somehow significant.

I also knew that some people describe the book as being about gender. Gethenians are all of the same sex – or, rather, of no sex until their monthly reproductive cycle known as kemmer comes around. At that point, depending on who else is in kemmer nearby, a person may turn either into a Gethenian male or female, and it’s quite usual for someone to be both a mother and a father.

I’m not entirely sure yet what Left Hand is about for me. The Gethenian biology does get a lot of attention, but I suspect it’s because it’s so unfathomable to Ai. The importance of hospitality and cooperation in the cold climate is also significant, as are the balancing of opposite forces (like you-me or individual-society), the complex Gethenian honor system shifgrethor and their aversion to war. Karhide’s neighboring country Orgoreyn sounds like a communist regime, with its people described as units instead of citizens and its communal resources or endless bureaucracy; Orgoreyn may, in an unprecedented step, be moving towards starting a war with Karhide, and we might have a Cold War echo there.

Structurally, Left Hand avoids infodump by alternating the present-day narrative chapters with short chapters on Gethenian mythology. I was a little bothered by how much longer the primary narrative chapters were, for it made reading the novel choppy; I may well change my mind about that if I read Left Hand again.

I’ve seen Le Guin’s writing described as zen-like. The descriptor fits her style in Left Hand well, especially when she’s describing traveling across the icy landscape. A fascinating read, and one I may well like to get back to after mulling it over. Considering that I very much enjoy and have read Le Guin’s Earthsea stories several times in two languages, I can’t believe I haven’t read The Left Hand of Darkness before!

Image by Eppu Jensen

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