This book was fun. Its got people-who-strongly-dislike-each-other-to-lovers, its got dragons, its got time travel, its got a strange mashup of science and fantasy. The only thing that really irritated me was the names, and the book did begin with a lot of jargon, but it was smooth sailing after the first chapter. ( )

I had forgotten how much I loved this series. Thank goodness I refound it. I was looking for a GOOD dragon story after a middle of the road cookie cutter dragon story unrelieved by average prose.

There are enough books in the series that I'll have plenty to keep me between new releases.

THank you Ms. McCaffrey!
( )

Het verhaal krijgt van mij de volle vijf sterren, maar het taalgebruik in het boek is dermate abominabel dat ik er een ster vanaf trek. F'lar gedraagt zich als een kleuter, en hij moet leren met z'n handen van Lessa af te blijven. Als ik nog een keer lees dat "F'lar Lessa door elkaar schudde", dan krijg ik een beroerte. Ik ga nu deel twee in het engels lezen, en hopen dat het in de originele taal wat beter loopt. ( )

I'm revisiting the Pern novels via audiobook after something like...20 years or more since the last time I read one. Dragonflight was originally published in 1968, assembled from shorter installments which were published in science fiction circulars starting in 1967. So that places us firmly within second wave feminism. This era OF COURSE had some major blind spots, which now as a fully grown adult living in 2024, blare at me with neon lights. So re-reading this book, I'm getting tonal and emotional whiplash between deep love/nostalgia and cringing realization that some elements have aged pretty badly.
So. Reader beware. I do believe there is more good than bad in this book, and as McCaffrey's work matured into the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and then finally the very earliest of the 00s, it of course changed, and I wonder how she might have reshaped some of her earlier works if able to do so with a more modern lens.

Anyway, the good: The world building in this series, begun in this book, is astounding, and in my opinion on par with the greatest of the greats. The setting is a world, Pern, that has descended into feudalism from the technological advancement of its original interstellar colonists due to thousands of years of having to survive an unexpected ecological disaster. (This being a deadly organism, "Thread," falling from the sky which devours all organic material and originates from an erratically orbiting rogue planet in Pern's solar system). The series thus embarks upon this feudal world rediscovering it's ancestors' technology and egalitarian culture. The plot is appropriately high stakes and gripping, as well. Due to unstable orbits and celestial mechanics, the world has had a hundreds of years-long reprieve from Thread, and most of Pern believes it will never return. There are some truly thrilling moments as the protagonists attempt to prepare for the return of disaster, convince others it is going to happen, and save the world.

The kinda bad: It all starts with F'lar and Lessa, two people brought together by chance and fate, who may not LIKE each other particularly much, but admire each other deeply and have a shared goal of bringing Pern out of the dark age into which it has descended. Unfortunately their relationship is one that, had McCaffrey been writing it in the 90s instead of the 60s, might have been easier to read, at least in this first book. F'lar repeatedly demonstrates that he finds Lessa "incredible" "intelligent," "remarkable," etc, but he's also a bit of a classic 1960s male character in that every time he's frustrated by her, he shakes her, in a rather genre-y, sign-of-the-times sort of way. Later in the book, he literally shakes her once in anger, and then within the same page, shakes her in love and affection. Much has also been made of the sexual relationship in Dragonflight and whether it is assault. Did McCaffrey intend to write a rape? No, I seriously doubt it. It's just that taken through the lens of what we as a culture now understand with regards to consent, it feels wrong. Having read all of the novels, one realizes that the problem is systemic - McCaffrey evidently wanted a fun, sciencey way to make her sex scenes unique, by making them influenced by the psychic link with the dragons that causes the humans to wish to mate when the dragons do. So how do we square that with true consent? How can any human truly consent when they are completely subsumed within the mating lust of their psychically bonded dragon? In that respect, literally every dragon rider is stripped of their ability to consent and the real problem with Dragonflight is basically that literally no one told Lessa about it beforehand so she ends up reading as "confused and surprised" when it's all happening. If a TV series or movie option ever gets off the ground, this needs to be handled or altered in some way that doesn't feel terrible, but I don't know what the solution is.

The ALSO VERY GOOD: THE DRAGONS. The dragons are the consistent voices of reason and the emotional anchors that keep the humans from becoming at times irredeemable. Whenever F'lar is being unfair, his dragon Mnementh is the one telling him he's wrong. Pernese dragons are the platonic ideal for human-dragon bonding and set the template for all the future variations thereof in fiction.
All in all...I love this book despite its problems, though l do prefer later books in the series, as both McCaffrey's writing and worldview matured. It's feminist writing by an author who was living the era and subject to the tropes of the time. ( )

Very interesting story and has altogether sold me on Fantasy books. Writing mostly worked. The story was pretty strong despite relying heavily on nonsensical space-time continuum faith leaps, which I generally prefer to avoid.
Am very curious to see where the next book goes though this first book ended fully. Somebody accidentally sold me the second book in Edinburgh before I had read the first. Thus, it looks like I will continue the series. ( )