Status
Available
Call number
Series
Collections
Publication
Del Rey (1997), Mass Market Paperback, 416 pages
Description
On the planet Pern, two farseeing dragon riders train their troops--mounted on genetically engineered dragons--for the battle with the Thread, an evil force. Portents of all sorts, including violent storms and erupting volcanos, point to the Thread's coming, but most of the planet prefers to ignore them, lulled into complacency by 200 years of peace.
User reviews
LibraryThing member DragonFreak
Two hundred years after the first fall and nobody but the dragonriders know that the Thread exists and a very stubborn Lord Holder named Chalkin is going to ruin everything.
I was very dissapointed with this book. It's OK, but nothing happened. Nothing. Nada. Zero. There was no action, no
I was very dissapointed with this book. It's OK, but nothing happened. Nothing. Nada. Zero. There was no action, no
Show More
suspension, and only one semi-shocking part that had nothing to do with the book and didn't amount to much. And everything in the plot was predictable and understandable. Anne McCaffrey could've done a lot more to this book, but she didn't Show Less
LibraryThing member timepiece
The main plot of this Pern novel, set just prior to the Second Pass of thread, is about a despotic Lord Holder who refuses to believe the danger is real. Unfortunately, the villain is a little too villainous - he's really a caricature, with no redeeming qualities, making you wonder why his subjects
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.
Show More
aren't willing to rebel more. Though seeing him brought down is still quite satisfying.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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jamespurcell
A neat story to fill in some of the early gaps in Pern's history.
LibraryThing member humouress
This is subtitled The Second Chronicles of Pern, so I assumed that, like the The Chronicles of Pern : First Fall, it was a collection of short stories. It is actually a novel (known in the US as Dragonseye), and I found this was one of the rare Pern novels I hadn't read before - so all's well. Both
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.
Show More
Chronicles fill in the gap between the stories of the original colonists from Earth and the later Pernese of Moreta's and then Lessa's times.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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member comixminx
Umpteenth re-read. Noticed this time round that they seem to leap fairly quickly to some pretty full-on corporal punishment (castration for rape) that surely the original settlers would have been too liberal for??! I think AMcC is possibly being a little hasty in her indication of the transition
Show More
from an sf society (in Dragonsdawn) to a quasi-mediaeval society (the 'Present Pass' books). Show Less
LibraryThing member kmartin802
It is two-hundred years since the first Thread fell on Pern. Old Earth technology is failing or has already failed. Old attitudes are going away except for some die-hard traditionalists. This story follows a number of people who are getting ready for Thread to fall.
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.
We get the story of a young woman
Show More
named Debera who was Searched but whose father didn't tell her that she had a chance to Impress a dragon because he had made other more advantageous (to him) plans for her future. When she finds the letter, she runs away from home followed by her father, the man he made the deal with, and her potential mate. She gets to the hatching ground in time to Impress the green Dragon Morath.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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Stevil2001
This Pern prequel follows up on Dragonsdawn and The Chronicles of Pern, moving us to the tail end of the First Interval, just before the first return of the Thread in the Second Pass. Though it shares no characters in common with those books, it works to show the transition from Pernese society at
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.
Show More
the time of the First Pass to what we're used to from later books.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.
Show Less
Language
Original publication date
1996
Physical description
416 p.; 6.91 inches
ISBN
0345418794 / 9780345418791
Local notes
Dragonriders of Pern, 2nd Pass
DDC/MDS
| Fic SF McCaffrey |