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Fantasy. Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML:In Anne McCaffrey�s New York Times bestselling Dragonseye, join Weyrleaders, Holders, and Craftmasters in the creation of the legendary Star Stones and the teaching ballads of Pern! It's been two hundred years since the deadly Thread fell like rain upon Pern, devouring everything in its path. No one alive remembers that first horrific onslaught and no one believes in its return�except for the dragonriders. For two centuries they have been practicing and training, passing down from generation to generation the formidable Threadfighting techniques. Now the ominous signs are appearing: the violent winter storms and volcanic eruptions that are said to herald the approach of the Red Star and its lethal spawn. But one stubborn Lord Holder, Chalkin of Bitra, refuses to believe�and that disbelief could spell disaster. So as the dragonriders desperately train to face a terrifying enemy, they and the other Lord Holders must find a way to deal with Chalkin�before history repeats itself and unleashes its virulence on all of Pern. . . .… (more)
User reviews
I was very dissapointed with this book. It's OK, but nothing happened. Nothing. Nada. Zero. There was no action, no
However, the secondary plotline about preparations for Thread is pretty interesting. The second pass is coinciding with the breakdown of the last of Pern's advanced technology - they have a few computers, but all are on their last legs. Several characters are busy reinventing substitutes such as the abacus and the fountain pen. Not to mention revamping their entire educational system to ensure that all have the necessary survival skills, at the possible expense of the knowledge of life elsewhere. The characters involved in this plot - mostly educators and musicians - are much more well-rounded, with both strengths and weaknesses. And some of their solutions are very creative - I think it's worth reading for that aspect alone.
Red Star Rising is the story, told (in the third person) from the viewpoints of different characters, of the time when the colonists - now living in the northern hemisphere, know that the red planet, which brings the parasite Thread with it, is once again approaching Pern (the second time in their history). The original technology brought from Earth is finally failing, and they have to use their ingenuity to find alternatives; but dragons and dragon riders are now a firmly established facet of their society. Unlike the stories later in the chronology, the people of Pern do know about the original colonists, and pay heed to the stories of the renewed threat from the skies.
This is the story of how they set the traditions for the generations to come, of how to deal with the threat of Thread, of how to teach and spread knowledge without computers and printouts. I think the US title, Dragonseye refers to what are called the Starstones in other stories; the sculptures (for want of a better word) that are conceived of and set in place in this novel, that warn of the approach of the Red Star.
We get the story of a young woman
We get the story of an artist whose first commission is to paints miniatures of the young children of the Lord Holder of Bitra. Iantine learns just how badly a Hold can be run as he meets Lord Holder Chalkin who doesn't believe that Thread is really going to fall.
We see that various Lord Holders and Weyr Leaders as they meet to decide what to do about Lord Chalkin and get to know the personalities of the first group to fight Thread without old Earth technology but with dragons.
We meet the teachers who are tasked with finding a way to continue teaching their necessary curriculum now that the final computers have died. We see the development of the Teaching Songs and Ballads.
This was an excellent story that sets up the Pern that readers see in the books that take place in times long past this second Thread fall. The characters were engaging and the plot was fast moving.
I found this element a bit hit or miss. One thing it wants to set up is the transition to the Crafthall/Harper system. On the one hand, having all the computers finally go down, meaning educators decide to transition to easily reproduced songs, discarding most pre-Landing history, makes sense. (It is pretty jarring to see the word "PCs" used in a Pern book, though!) On the other hand, there's a single College in this book. How does this become the various Crafthalls of later stories? Well, one character is just like, "What if we were a bunch of separate Crafthalls operating on an apprenctice/journeyman system?" As sort of frustrated me in Chronicles, things don't slowly evolve to be like they are later on; instead some character just decides it will be that way. Similarly, in the two hundred years since the last Fall, the feudal system we know from the later novels has totally implanted itself... but why? Why did everyone decide this was best to the point of writing it up in an official Charter? That said, I did appreciate the explanation as to why fire lizards, so common in the time of Dragonsdawn, were all but mythical by the time of Dragonsong.
Overall, I think the idea of this book was much better than the actual book. The conflict ought to be, I think anyway, that this is the first return the Thread has made to Pern; there haven't been thousands of years of Passes and Intervals for Pernese society to organize itself around. Yes, they know from the predictions made in Dragonsdawn that the Thread will return... but the scientific predictions of experts often don't receive wide acceptance in society, as we know fairly well by this point in the twenty-first century. So some won't believe the Thread is really coming back; why do all the hard work of preparing for it? How do you convince everyone else it is coming back?
The problem is that only one Lord Holder doesn't believe it's coming back, and he is an awful awful person. He's a gambler, he's stingy, he doesn't pay his debts, he charges high taxes, he tacitly condones rape, and he tortures his citizens. So obviously he's a bad person, and obviously the other characters are going to take care of him. I think it would have been much more interesting for a character much more reasonable to doubt the coming of Thread, and for removing him to be a politically more difficult undertaking. It seems to me that the tension of this book ought to be if Pern will be ready for the Second Pass... but there's never any tension, because barring one guy, everyone is ready from the novel's very beginning.
Like all McCaffrey novels, it reads fairly easily (I allotted five days to read it and ended up zipping through it in three) and it has its moments, but it goes on a bit, and it felt to me like she ran out of plot about a hundred pages from the end because suddenly the book shifts to focus on two characters we barely saw in the rest of the book. As is too often the case in her later books, it loses the "hardscrabble" feeling that made the early Pern books. The return of the Thread is a moment of triumph! But surely it ought to be a moment of grim resignation, surely everyone ought to have been hoping the predictions were wrong, because the return of the Thread means that Pern is doomed to this terrible cycle for all time.