Title: Dragon Song
Author: Anne McCaffrey
Date: 1976
Publisher: Atheneum (originally)
ISBN: (for new edition shown above)
Quote: "O Tongue, give voice to joy and sing / Of
life and promise on dragon's wing!"
Fair disclosure, because as a teenager I wondered why
some librarians hesitated to acquire the "Harper Hall of Pern" series
for teen readers: Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series got a
publicity boost from a magazine less family-friendly than Analog by incorporating a trace of kinky sex.
On the hypothetical planet Pern, "sensitive" people rule because some
of them bond telepathically with the huge dragons that protect the planet from
its greatest hazard--fungus infection from a nearby planet whose orbit passes
close to Pern's for a few years in alternate centuries. Ordinary humans are
married, often by their parents' choice not their own, but dragonriders, whose
social status is like that of knights and noblemen in a medieval court, mate
when their dragons do.
In the fictional history of Pern, the planet was
settled by Space Age humans from Earth, but they lost contact with Earth and
have devolved back into an almost feudal sort of social arrangement. People know how to read and write, but paper is scarce and electronic communication unknown.
Messages not carried by dragonriders are transmitted by drums. Academic
knowledge is preserved and passed on by Harpers, mostly in the form of jingles.
"Folk singing"--as it was done in the 1970s, by educated people who
had learned more songs from books and records than directly from older
singers--is thus important, while symphonic music, though not forgotten,
has become a pastime in which Harpers occasionally indulge.
At the period when this story begins all Harpers are
male. Menolly's teacher-friend Petiron thinks Menolly ought to become an
apprentice Harper but hasn't bothered to tell his fellow Harpers that his best
student happens to be a girl. Once he has observed evasively to Menolly that
she's tall and skinny enough to pass for a boy. Are we to understand that Harpers
are so ignorant that Petiron thinks people's body shapes don't change after age
fifteen, that on Pern years are longer and people's body shapes really don't
change after age fifteen, or that Petiron's thinking this way is evidence of
senility? No one will ever know because Dragon Song opens with Menolly
singing at Petiron's funeral.
Menolly's ultraconservative parents don't want her to
"presume to compose music," to continue tutoring the younger children
or work closely with the new Harper when he arrives, or even to enjoy singing
with the whole "Sea Hold" settlement (if her voice can be heard, the
new Harper, a single man, might become interested in Menolly rather than her
unmusical older sister). To keep her in her place her father beats her, her mother
gives her extra chores, and Menolly will always suspect her parents of
deliberately aggravating an injury that threatens her ability to play the
guitar. So she runs away and lives in a cave overlooking the sea, for part of
the summer...
It ends happily. Pern stories always do. McCaffrey's
peculiar gift was to invent a world that echoes and exaggerates the bleakness
McCaffrey found as an American immigrant in Ireland, then give characters a triumphant,
Humanistic ending where each adventure not only rewards the protagonist but
leads directly to progress for Pernese humankind.
(Anne McCaffrey was a Secular Humanist even before she
was revulsed by the sectarian violence among so-called Christians in Ireland.
Pernese people, however sensitive, creative, and empathic they credibly seem to
be, never express any religion or spirituality of any kind. In that respect
they seem a bit alien; when queried about that McCaffrey told the artist Jody
Lynn Nye that the Pernese have evolved a different look, as well as a different
mindset, than Earth humans.)
Despite the elements of science that place the whole
Pern story sequence in the category of "science fiction" there is a
certain ineluctable Irishness about it all. The alien menace of Thread is a
sort of giant mutant sort of super-Stachybotrys mold. Pernese dragons
look like enormous winged lizards, but they are warm-blooded and somewhat
intelligent; for all practical purposes they're horses. The dragons' ancestors,
little winged lizards with the ability to teleport themselves out of sight when
strangers approach, are domestic pets, their habits often suggesting cats and
at other times hens. The main characters, despite having evolved a physical
type as well as a culture that would seem "different" on Earth, are
still human; many of them are likable. They speak a distinctive dialect, a future-Irish-English with its own glossary of "Pernese Oaths" (Pernese people swear a good deal, invoking dragons and Thread rather than religious beliefs; "come flood, come fire" morphs into "come flood, fire, or'Fall," and so on). Menolly seems especially likable; quite
a few Internet users chose screen names that identify themselves with her, and
although the name "Menolly" was not being given to humans in the
1970s, quite a few McCaffrey fans have reportedly given it to their daughters. These factors make Pern one of the most plausible and (despite its bleakness during its Turns of Threadfall) pleasant fictional worlds ever invented.
One of the special charms of Dragon Song and Dragon
Singer, the stories that focus on Menolly, is the high proportion of filk
(fictional folk music) in both books; we're given a singable lyric as each
chapter heading, sometimes another one in the text, and lots of details about
how these songs are sung. It's possible that McCaffrey inspired more filk
composers to write songs about Pern than any other fiction writer has ever
inspired--before she observed that filkers were writing songs that conflicted
with her story, and told them to desist.
Consider "There are fire lizards twined in my raven black hair, and I can't get'em loose, and they're cutting off my air"...the writer known as Ozarque, who had a strong sense of humor,
clearly imagined this song being sung in the humorous-complaint-about-something-the-complainer-really-loves,
mom-blog genre. Menolly, whose long hair will have young fire lizards twined in
it at intervals during her adventures, and her teacher Robinton do say things that suggest such a song.
But she wouldn't sing it, said McCaffrey. Fire lizards, like Pernese dragons, are very sensitive
to their humans' emotions and, if their human were in fact trying to
"get'em loose," they'd blink out of sight, and in any case Pernese
English is derived from Irish English not Ozark English...
Right. Some fiction writers actually rely on other
writers' variations on our visions; others don't want anyone else's visions
beclouding our own. McCaffrey was the only person allowed to write about
Pern. Filkers should stick to the lyrics in the books.
Well...although it's only a feel-good fantasy story in a feel-good fantasy series, there are a lot of things to like about Dragon Song. That's why there have been so many editions and the vintage copies, like the one I have, are becoming harder to find. Amazon isn't even showing the edition I have for resale in real life, although a truncated version of the cover painting was used on the cover of this audiocassette version:
For those who don't like the new editions of the Harry Potter books where Hermione is drawn as Black...I don't think that's necessarily a racist reaction. As an adult who read the printed books before the movies, I expected "Hermione Granger" to resemble...
 |
| Hermione Gingold; 1950s photo donated to Wikipedia By Estudiontin - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22004886 |
Young people who saw the movies first can't be blamed for thinking Hermione Granger ought to look like Emma Watson, even if the books do mention Hermione's frizzy hair...
 |
| No frizz problems for Emma Watson in this photo donated to Wikipedia By Emma Watson GoF Premiere.jpg: Zaheer12aderivative work: Paris 16 (talk) - Emma_Watson_GoF_Premiere.jpg, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7324471 . |
And I think, although the very first edition showed a generic startled-looking face that was obviously a cartoon, Menolly really looks like the picture on the first paperback edition and audiocassette cover--so who's that character on the new book cover? I mention this by way of warning. The Pern series is, like the Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes series, the kind of fiction that sucks readers into the illusion so intensely that we become attached to our mental images of what unreal people would have looked like if they'd been real. Beware. Beware.
Unfortunately Anne McCaffrey is no longer able to sponsor a charity through our Fair Trade Books system, but the whole Pern series was popular enough and has been out long enough that, so far as I know, any book in this series is available at our minimum price of $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. The Harper Hall Trilogy
(volume one about the harper girl, volume three about the drummer boy, and in volume two they bond as friends not a couple) is pocket-sized. You could fit it and the adult Dragonriders
trilogy and another paperback from the series, or even two, into one $5 package, which makes this web site's pricing more competitive than Amazon may initially suggest.
(volume one about the harper girl, volume three about the drummer boy, and in volume two they bond as friends not a couple) is pocket-sized. You could fit it and the adult Dragonriders trilogy and another paperback from the series, or even two, into one $5 package, which makes this web site's pricing more competitive than Amazon may initially suggest.
No comments:
Post a Comment