Dia: A very high tech setup I have here.
Duck: It does sound exceedingly high tech.
Dia: Also, I forgot my straw, which means I can't get my water in the blankets.
Duck: Oh no.
Dia: But I’m fine with that because I'm setting all of this up again.
Duck: There was one time in the last place I rented which you know, only had- only half the radiators worked, where I ended up podcasting, like one round of the D&D game, like, in my living room on the floor, with my back to the radiator, and then like blankets, and then a laptop perched. That was like…
Dia: My second-year room at uni was just badly insulated. It was in a weird part of the college that meant it was always freezing cold. And there was a point in winter when I had a cold and I was just feeling kind of rubbish. And I was so freezing cold that I ended up constructing a nest like using my laundry hanger and the radiator to pile blankets over the top of me to trap heat and just sleeping in a little nesty spot by the radiator. It was very cozy, but I don't know if it was advised.
Duck: Sometimes you have gotta nest.
Dia: Gotta nest. Anyway, do you want to talk about dragons?
Duck: I super want to talk about dragons.
Dia: Okay, so,
Duck: Although I failed to look up Marxism. So I'm not prepared to adequately summarize.
Dia: Okay, well, we can swap those then you can talk about Pern for a bit and I'll talk about drag-- I will talk about Marxism.
Duck: Yeah, alright, I’ll summarize what the thing is and then you could talk about Marxism, do the analysis, that works.
Dia: This works. Okay. Well, welcome to Analysis Roulette. I'm Dia. And we're going to talk about a Marxist analysis of Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey.
Duck: We so are, I'm so excited.
Dia: So, I think one of the things we said we were going to do as part of the episode but never actually did was a little quick rundown of our relationships with the series before we launched into the analysis.
Duck: To be fair, last week was Flat Earth and I didn't have any personal relationship with Flat earth.
Dia: I think my personal relationship to Shazam was made very clear.
Duck: Right, we've, we've communicated these facts.
Dia: We’ve communicated this, but I do think this week is the week where it's going to be the most relevant, um.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: Because I am conducting said Marxist analysis. And I started reading Dragonriders of Pern two weeks ago when I found out I was doing this podcast. So I have read three of the books, I have read Dragonflight, the White Dragon and Dragonsinger. I already can't remember what they're called.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Yes, Dragonsinger. And I will be completely honest with you, I read Dragonsinger. I listened to it as an audiobook on a night train back from a work event at one o'clock in the morning, so I have not incorporated it heavily into my analysis.
Duck: That's fair. That's fair. I first read the Dragonriders of Pern the summer I turned 13. I have a very distinct memory of being on holiday in a very picturesque part of Yorkshire. There were baby rabbits. And I was finally allowed to read the Dragonriders of Pern. So I have next to me a copy of Dragonflight that is so old that its original recommended retail price is £1.25.
Dia: Oh, the holy days.
Duck: And a copy of Dragonsinger which was a whole £2.50. I don't know whether that was because time passed or popularity increased.
Dia: Now that's Marxism, baby.
Duck: I don't have a copy of the White Dragon. But I have also read it. I have read, not every book in the series, because at some point, Anne McCaffrey started collaborating with her son, Todd, and then after she passed away, he continued the series, and I haven't read a lot of those later installments. But I have read kind of everything up through all the Weyrs of Pern multiple times. I've even read the one about the dolphins although I do not remember anything about it. I think I borrowed that from, from a library. So I've only read that one once. It's not part of our analysis however so we'll be fine.
Dia: The dolphins one is the only one I had any familiarity prior to this with because I read an excerpt from Island of the Blue Dolphins as part of an exam in year six and really liked it and asked my teacher what it was from and she gave me the dolphins Pern book, which I didn't read because I was like five and it was like I was really tiny and it was way too difficult for me. But I was aware of its existence and mildly resented it for not being the book I was looking for.
Duck: That's very sad.
Dia: I do understand the confusion because they are both sort of, they are both like, child appropriate books about dolphins. But one of them is about like the horrors of colonialism and one of them is about the benefits of colonialism. Very different vibes.
Duck: Yeah, and I mean that is, more or less, Pern.
Dia: Yeah. But yes, I, as stated,I hadn't read these books. I am a big fan of both epic space fantasy and dragon-riding books as a genre. I think it's actually the only major dragonrider book series I hadn't read. And the only reason I hadn't read it is because I read one of Anne McCaffrey's other books when I was about 11 and absolutely hated it. I've since been told that the Acorna books are just not good.
Duck: No, I haven't-- I have read several Acorna books and I would not, they're not they're not the best, that they're not McCaffrey's best works. They're also just not particularly, you know,
Dia: They're fine. I think…
Duck: They're fine. But they do not stand alone as greats of literature.
Dia: They over promised to me when they offered me space unicorns.
Duck: Yeah, that's fair.
Dia: I just don't think they could live up to the excitement that I as an 11 year old had at the idea of Star Trek, but unicorns.
Duck: Right, and if I was trying to actually sell Acorna, I would sell it as alien baby adopted by three platonic dads.
Dia: Yeah, whereas I went in expecting Star Trek with unicorns and I was sorely disappointed.
Duck: Right. It's,
Dia: Which is, yeah.
Duck: It's not really about unicorns. It's alien baby adopted by three platonic dads and that's fine. It's fine.
Dia: It was fine.
Duck: It didn’t really reshape sci fi the way the dragon books did.
Dia: No. And it definitely-- these books definitely did shape a genre because like have, having said these are the only dragonrider books I can think of that I haven't read. I can see these in every other series, except maybe the, um, How To Train Your Dragon books. Like there is a lot of them. And like, it's, I'm reading them going oh, okay, like Eragon. This is like Game of Thrones. This is like, The Dragon Rider. This is like The Dragon Whisperer. There's a lot of books that I was reading this going, oh, okay. I know this.
Duck: Yes. And when these books were being released, they won an array of awards, you know, they won Hugos and things. And they have a legacy, that there are various works, you can pick out through sci fi and fantasy as genres that form the canon.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: In the sense of, that define the terms of the genre, and contain the tropes that become, just become tropes you don't need to explain. These books are why you don't need to explain being telepathically bonded to your dragon.
Dia: Yeah, and I think they're also a lot of those books are ones that actually suffer if you go back to read them as someone who's already entrenched in the genre from seeming unoriginal, because you have read all of the tropes they invented.
Duck: Right. They seem a bit simplistic. They seem a bit unoriginal. It's like reading Lord of the Rings and going okay, so the orcs are just always evil. That's boring.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: We've moved past this. Why are there no dwarf women, we've moved past this and well, this is because this had defined… those tropes.
Dia: Like there were definitely moments reading this where I was going, Okay, you have been explaining this to me for two pages. I'm with you. It's okay. You can move on.
Duck: Right.
Dia: I got it. Psychic dragons, we’re good.
Duck: The psychic dragons.
Dia: I’ve read Eragon.
Duck: Right. But Eragon is absolutely just written by someone who'd read these books and absorbed, this is how dragons work.
Dia: What if this was Lord of the Rings? And sexy?
Duck: Yeah, that's Eragon.
Dia: I like Eragon, but it is one of the least original books I've ever read in my life. And I mean that as a positive. It's a really fun book. It is just a mishmash of all of the author’s favorite tropes, and I think it works. But it's also very funny. If you then read the books, it's based off and go, oh, okay.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Hi Christopher, I see we are watering at the same trough.
Duck: Which actually circles us back to something I did want to mention, which is that the dragon of-- dragons of Pern books are adult sci fi. But they very much straddle that line where you can give them to a teenager.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: They're not written as young adult, but they are not particularly gritty. They are not particularly long. Bad stuff happens, but they're not really focus-- you know, they're not torture porn. They're not focused on…
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Like adult political wrangling. Enough happens in them fast enough for a teenager to be interested.
Dia: Yeah. They are, thinking of the dolphin one that I was handed to the child. It was an inappropriate book to give to a baby Dia who must have been between five and eight. But it was reasonable that it was in my primary school library.
Duck: Yes, yeah. And the dolphins one particularly is, and Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums are slightly more young adult because they have young adult protagonists.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: As does the White Dragon.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: I don't think this is particularly a flaw. It's just a thing worth knowing about the books is that they are playing in that kind of slightly younger space.
Dia: Yeah. So do you want to give us a very brief rundown of what is happening in these books?
Duck: I will do that. There is, for those who have not read the books, and who do not want to be spoiled for the books. We should decide whether I'm allowed to talk about what happens in all the weyrs of Pern, which is where the setting gets kind of redefined by the spoilers.
Dia: I mean, I feel like that has to be for you to decide because I don't know.
Duck: That's fair. Let's, let's talk about the world as a closed entity that as it presents itself rather than…
Dia: Okay.
Duck: I will, I will say up front there is, these are actually sci fi. And in some of the later books, how this world connects to space colonialism happens. Because part of the reason this world seems very strange is that it's not an evolved world. It's a colonized world. This is not really secret. It just isn't at all obvious. From the first couple of books.
Dia: Yeah, you're informed this on page one.
Duck: Right, it’s--
Dia: But you are not invited to think about it deeply.
Duck: Yes, the author clearly knew where she was going in terms of the worldbuilding, but it doesn't really crystallize on the page until later books.
Dia: I think having just read them for the first time, it feels like the author is giving you an excuse as to why this world exists. And if I did not know that there were many, many more books, which, I've been told a reasonable amount by friends who like them, I would have assumed this was just backstory as to why there are dragons.
Duck: And it is, and then eventually it becomes there are plots around that as well but also offers like there is the backstory, space colonialism. Now we're on this planet, there are dragons. Super cool.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: That is the premise of the book. There are dragons. It is a medieval pastiche, we are all probably if we read sci fi and fantasy familiar with this concept, people are using non-mechanized tools for the most parts. So they are weaving on non-mechanized looms, they are doing subsistence farming. They are traveling at the speed of a horse and cart for the most parts. They do not have electricity, they do not have steam. They do not have computers. If you want to kill someone, you do it with a knife. We're at that level of technology. And we have dragons and the people who ride the dragons live in their own settlements called weyrs. There are six weyrs, or there should be six weyrs, at the start of the first book Dragonflight, there is one remaining weyr, and the dragon riders are recruiting to find people to ride the the new crop of dragons the latest clutch of dragons that’s soon to be hatched, in which there is for the first time in a long time a queen egg. You can identify the queen dragons in the egg because they're golden eggs instead of like mottled. You can't tell what's in all the other eggs but you can spot the queens. So they are trying to recruit both a lot of young men to ride the rest of the dragons and a young woman to ride the queen dragon and they find Lessa of Benden. Is it Benden? I got that wrong. I've got that wrong.
Dia: It’s Ruatha.
Duck: It’s Ruatha, thank you. Yes, Lessa of Ruatha, who is the secret survivor of the slaughter of the ruling family of Ruatha. She is hiding out just in the hold being a scullery maid, and is spotted for latent psychic powers basically.
Dia: Powers which she is using to be a menace, yes.
Duck: Right, which she is using to be a menace. And they're like, well, we need a queen rider you have the appropriate psychic sensitivities to be a good queen rider. And also we're dragon riders and we do not have to have anyone's permission including yours to tell you that you are being tithed to the weyr, basically, we can just come and get you because the weyrs and the dragons protect the world of Pern from something called threads which fall from the sky every so often and would kill everything if the dragons did not go up there and breathe fire and fight them. Nobody really believes in threads anymore because they haven't fallen for 400 years. Nonetheless, we have legal powers based on being the planetary defense against threads so you're coming with us. Lessa proceeds to become the queen rider, have a series of arguments, have some very complicated personal relationships with the male dragon riders. And I do mean complicated. There's a lot of emotional turmoil with various dragon riders. Not all of whom she is even close to sleeping-- Because this is another thing is that when the dragons make the riders also mate because of psychic like overwhelm. Yeah.
Dia: I will also say she has a lot of arguments with a lot of men who have very similar names and I have the Wikipedia page open in front of me as we record as a defense against forgetting which one is which.
Duck: Yes, she does. And if you have ever read any sci fi, especially any sci fi that's even slightly leaning into pastiche, you will have come across, like, names with unnecessary apostrophes in?
Dia: Love an unnecessary apostrophe.
Duck: All the Dragonriders of Pern take names with unnecessary apostrophes in. They like. And eventually, when you read enough of them, I think McCaffrey didn't do the best job of explaining how you were supposed to pronounce any of these names. So you kind of assume that there's meant to be like a glottal stop. But reading on it is supposed to be a shortening, it's supposed to be an, um, my brain has forgotten what the word is?
Dia: Abbreviation?
Duck: Abbreviation. Thank you. Yeah, it's supposed to be an abbreviation because then you're shouting from Dragon back to Dragon back. You need a short name, although you don't need to do this because dragons are telepathic with each other and with their riders. So it doesn't quite follow. But when you when you see sci fi and fantasy, because sort of knowingly, archly, putting apostrophes in names, this is why. But it does mean the names are quite similar. Yeah, we have F’lar and F’nar.
Dia: Now I'm going to be honest, I mentioned that I listened to this as an audiobook. I listened to this as an audiobook by someone who did not have the same accent as me. And it took me a while to realize they were two different people.
Duck: It's also--
Dia: It was not until they were talking to one another that I went, Oh, okay, this isn't just one guy who's very self involved.
Duck: Yeah, there's F’lar and F’nar, who are brothers, who work closely together throughout the books and have very similar names. This is just how there's also a dragon called Mnementh. At least I assume it's Mnementh because I can't pronounce MN as an initial consonant any other way. But it's spelt with an M. There's some wonderfully strange choices with names in the books, this is slightly on a tangent. Anyway Lessa has all these arguments with various, um, various entitled men, because although these books do not really dig into the ethics of colonialism, they are very much about patriarchy. So she has a series of arguments with a series of men who have power over her but also she is the queen rider so their power doesn't stretch infinitely. And through a series of events, thread is going to come back, we've had 400 years and it hasn't shown back up but now it is going to show back up and there is only one weyr, which is Benden weyr that is left. And they are doing their best, okay, they are really trying very hard, but are, but they all, but they cannot do it. But they are there's, there's one of them and there should be six, and they cannot do it. The thread comes back and you know, it becomes clear from the first through first few battles against waves of thread that they are going to lose through attrition and exhaustion. So Lessa turns herself to the question of why is there only one Weyr left because it's not that they were disbanded, they vanished one day 400 years ago, after the last pass of thread, they just all vanished. The other five weyrs, all the dragons, all the riders just disappeared. No one knows where they went. They didn't leave a note. They just went, like they left behind cookpots, they just disappeared. So Lessa works out that we have five missing weyrs and we're five weyrs short. And perhaps between these two problems, we can form a solution and works out that dragons, who can teleport by the way, I didn't mention this. This is just accepted as fact in the books, dragons are telepathic and they can teleport place to place. Turns out dragons can also travel in time.
Dia: I think the teleporting and time travel might have been the only worldbuilding detail I had no idea existed before coming into this.
Duck: And it's not one that your average dragon copycat picks up, they don't usually have the-- like you usually have the telepathy, you don't normally have the teleporting But they can teleport in time and space.
Dia: I think if you're not in space, if you're in like Middle Earth, or I’ve forgotten what Eragon’s country was called, or for that matter, like Berk…
Duck: Right.
Dia: It doesn't-- you don't need to teleport because you have a dragon, you have limited space to cover, and your dragon can fly.
Duck: Right. Whereas in Pern the dragons can be near instantaneous transportation.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: You know there's, there's loading and takeoff problems and then you just jump to somewhere else and land again. Turns out you could do this in time. So Lessa, jumps 400 years back in time, picks up the missing weyrs, jumps them forward in time. Now we are saved and we can fight thread because we have a sufficient number of dragon riders, and they know what they're doing because they just finished fighting thread in their own time. They're not learning from scratch. They know what they're doing, and the world is saved. It manages, to its credit, to get through these events in about 250 pages, which like…
Dia: It keeps pace considering how much exposition I felt like there was at points it is cracking on with the plot,
Duck: Right, there is a-- I’m going to get on my high on my soapbox for a moment. Modern genre writing leads to readopt the get through the book in 250 pages approach. Because if this was written in 2020, this would be like a four book series just to get through the first book. I think it's better as a short book. I think pace is good. Actually.
Dia: If it was a modern book, we wouldn't get dragons until at least page 400.
Duck: Right, the dragons arriving at Ruatha would be the end of the first book.
Dia: And there would still be a dragon on the cover to bait you into purchasing it.
Duck: And it would be so sad. Anyway, I shall now leave the soapbox again. But that is my position is that we should respect the pace of these books. In The White Dragon, we are some years in the future. And we follow the adventures of Jaxom who is the soon to be-- He is the heir to I think it's Ruatha again, isn't it?
Dia: It's Ruatha again, yeah. It was a plot point in the first book, and I assume we met him in the second one I didn't read. And he is now a character.
Duck: Yes, I think he pops up. There is quite a lot throughout these books of storylines interweaving so you quite often will get little cameos or things happening in the background that you don't know about. But Jaxom has, was-- Lessa didn't want to leave because she was the heir. So she made this deal where it was like, Well, if the Lord's wife who is currently giving birth, if that's a son, then he can be Lord of Ruatha and I will come and be queen rider. And it worked out. Jaxom is teens. He is at a hatching at the weyr and there's one dragon egg that’s like half-size and like abandoned off in a corner. It's, nobody thinks it's going to hatch. But it's clearly you know it is a viable egg. It is starting to hatch but it can't get through the shell. So Jaxom runs down. He's not supposed to be a dragon rider. He's supposed to go and be Lord of Ruatha. But he runs down and cracks this dragon out of its shell and bonds with it. It's like baby geese. You look into their eyes and it forms telepathic bond. And now well, now you are the dragon’s rider, it’s, you’re stuck with it. And it's a little half s-- well, not even half size, because it's a very small, white dragon. Dragons are not supposed to be white, there's an array of colors with an array of status is attached. None of them are white. So it's not a proper dragon. And he's not a proper dragon rider. So he's allowed to just take it home and raise it at home instead of in the weyr as a fighting dragon because no one thinks it's going to survive anyway, because it's a runt and this is Ruth, the white dragon. And we follow their adventures as Jaxom comes to terms with this sort of dual identity of being the next Lord of Ruatha and being a dragon rider and trying to prevent war between the dragon riders because a queen egg has been stolen, to set up and to renew the bloodlines that are different weyr, they're doing dragonrider politics. And none of them are very good at negotiating. But they're all quite good at breathing fire at each other. And he's trying to avoid this happening. And he does some some more fun time travel stuff where he goes and steals the egg back in the nick of time. And then dragonsinger, we follow…
Dia: I feel like we can probably, because we're doing analysis, but just because I'm noticing we're getting long, we can probably pepper that in as we go.
Duck: Yeah, that's fair. I will also rattle through very quickly. Yeah, one paragraph summary of Dragonsinger. There's a girl called Menolly, she's really good at music. And she's got a bunch of fire lizard shoulder dragons. And she's ended up in the Harper Hall kind of by accident. But she's brilliant at everything. That's it. That's the story.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: I love her. But Dragon Song, which is her introduction is a better book because dragon song is runs away from her abusive father to live with the cave and have shoulder dragons.
Dia: And that is…
Duck: It's the dream.
Dia: An excellent story. And I think a story which has been told an infinite number of times, and I do not care.
Duck: Right. It's so good. But Menolly is brilliant at all forms of music and has some engagement in the politics of the world based on that.
Dia: Yes. Okay, so we're looking at this through a Marxist lens. I'm assuming most of our listeners will be at least vaguely familiar with the concept of Marxism, as in…
Duck: I hope you’ve heard of Marx.
Dia: Yeah. So it's actually a lot less complicated than it may sound. You can do very specific Marxist analysis which is looking at in the context of the words Karl Marx said, like not well said with his mouth is what I was about to say, but wrote with his hands. And his very specific analysis of class and class based oppression, we're not doing that, because it's complicated, and I have no idea how to apply it to dragons. When people say Marxist analysis, they are usually using it as a shorthand for class analysis along the lines of the type of class Marx talks about. So, in that school of analysis, what we're looking at is what is the role of class in this world? How does that affect the protagonists and/or characters? How do they feel about it? And what is the tonal position of the work regarding that class system?
Duck: What is going on with people's engagement with both social status and economic status? And how it affects their choices.
Dia: Yeah. And for the purposes of this analysis, I have divided my thoughts into what I believe the professionals call an internet friendly numbered list.
Duck: We will get so many clicks on YouTube.
Dia: Yes, clickbait title: three things you didn't know about Dragonriders of Pern, but they are all essentially the same thing. The first one, which is the base level analysis, this is like, tip of the iceberg. Is: this is very static.
Duck: Yes, yes.
Dia: People move between positions, we don't see a lot of people move up and down in the class ladder. And we also don't see people moving between positions in a way that makes the previous position they held no longer needs to exist.
Duck: Yes, this is true of the society in general, nothing has happened in the last 400 years.
Dia: Like if you have a book where you can take people from 400 years ago and drop them in the present and not need an entire book about the way that they have to adjust to society. You have a book where class is quite static.
Duck: Yes. Along with technology being very static, along with society in general, like all the settlements are the same settlements in the same places. And the implication is, being ruled by the same ruling families.
Dia: Yeah. And there is, this is the thing. There are underclasses of servants, there are regular servants and there are drudges.
Duck: Yep.
Dia: There is no impression that any of them have any issue with this situation. I guess because subsistence farming on a hostile planet is great.
Duck: Yeah, no one is worried about an uprising from the drudges.
Dia: No, we actually, in what I have read, which I admit, it's not the whole series, we get very little about the drudges, except that they are a great disguise for Lessa in the opening chapters. Because nobody looks at them.
Duck: I have read most of the series, that doesn't change.
Dia: Yeah. And this is interesting, because if we're looking at this as a pastiche of a feudal fantasy world… feudalism was not devoid of people who didn't love feudalism.
Duck: Right, not everyone was contented with their lot.
Dia: I'm not sure if you've heard of political philosophy. It does actually predate Karl Marx.
Duck: I have heard. I have heard of a little event, you may also have heard of it, called the peasants revolt.
Dia: Yes. You know, how we have a king where we live?
Duck: Right. I'm aware.
Dia: We have a very famous great charter with that king.
Duck: Right, because we decided that untrammeled royal power, it upset people. I mean, it upset barons, who also had quite a lot of power but upset them enough to present the king of the time with well, you can sign this document that says we have rights or we can murder you right here.
Dia: And, yeah, the murder you right here option has also been exercised in England. It’s just that--
Duck: We just did execute a king for treason. That is, yes. It didn’t stick.
Dia: We just replaced him with someone worse. So we went back to kings.
Duck: Righ, it turned out that if you do not then also clean house, it doesn't help very much to just execute the CEO.
Dia: It turns out people would rather have like, a garbage king then no Christmas.
Duck: No Christmas is to be fair, terrible.
Dia: Yeah. I mean, please don't email us historians.
Duck: We are aware that we are simplifying.
Dia: I promise.
Duck: We don’t have time to analyze the civil war.
Dia: It took us long enough to explain Dragonriders of Pern, we don’t have time to do all of English monarchy history. But.
Duck: The point is.
Dia: My point is this is a very, very static society where everybody seems fine with the staticness in a way that is wholesale artificial.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: That's my point number one, we’re only going to touch that very briefly because it's a very baseline statement.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: There is a lot of tough, tough… There is a lot of fun flesh digging you can do on that. But it is purely for the purpose of our own amusement, which is the purpose of the podcast, but we have better things to get to. So. Two: this is very static, on purpose.
Duck: Meaning within the terms of the text.
Dia: Yeah. So this is the thing that's interesting about it. On page one, as mentioned, you are told that at some point in the history of Pern, humans settled this world. They came to it as colonists, they found that there was this raining plague of thread, which I assume, I believe is some kind of mycelium?
Duck: Yep.
Dia: And there were these native things that looked a bit like dragons in folklore that could be used to fight it because they are psychic flying fire breathing creatures that teleport.
Duck: Yes, and we cannot emphasize enough, enough that this is absolutely explicit. This is the introduction to book one, second paragraph. Ruqbat in the Sagittarian sector was a golden G type star. This is, its third planet was with plenty of air man could breathe, composed of water he could drink, and possessed of gravity that let man walk confidently erect. Man discovered it and promptly colonized it.
Dia: From what we read in this book,
Duck: Page one, this is colonialism.
Dia: Yeah, from what we are given in this book, we have very little in terms of what kind of society these colonists came from.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: We have that they are human ish. They are human
Duck: They're human, I think it's fair to say from McCaffrey's other work that she was always inclined to give humans psychic powers.
Dia: Yeah, they are human but for the psychic powers, we aren't sure when in human history, this is happening. We aren't sure what kind of human society. You can go from character descriptions and say, ethnically whitish?
Duck: Yes, there is, there is a book that deals heavily with, there's a book called Dragonstorm, which is literally the initial colonization of Pern. But I decided not to ask you to read it, because one it’s quite long. And two, it's quite separate from everything else in these books. So I didn't think it was a fair representation. So…
Dia: We are doing class analysis rather than colonial, post colonial analysis,
Duck: Yes.
Dia: Which would be very interesting
Duck: I will summarise the relevant bit, which is that back on the ships, there was also the rich people and the not rich people. Yeah. And they became the rich people and the not rich people of the new world. Nothing changed.
Dia: Which tracks. This is, this is the thing. So we are told that people came here to set up a society. And we are given to assume that these people come from a relatively futuristic society to our standards.
Duck: Yes. At least enough to have like spaceships.
Dia: Yeah, like they had space travel. And yet, when they colonize this world, they do not choose to recreate blindly their own social dynamics, as far as we can tell.
Duck: Yes, they end up with something. That is feudalism, but the top tier of the feudalism is dragons.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Probably not what they set, well, if it was what they set out for, that's also an interesting choice, but it's probably not where they came from.
Dia: Exactly. And that's the part I find really, really interesting about this series, which is okay. Let's say that the settlers are, as I feel like you are given to assume, from a society that would be vaguely recognizable to us modern humans or modern humans at the time the book came out.
Duck: Yeah, I think that's fair.
Dia: We've landed on a new planet. We've discovered that there are dragons that we have psychic powers with which, okay, that's a bit of a shock.
Duck: I would be startled.
Dia: This is unexpected. We've also discovered that we can work with those dragons to make this planet arable.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: That's point A, and it's already a lot for point A. Point B is. Feudalism.
Duck: Feudalism.
Dia: With dragons.
Duck: Feudalism, but dragons.
Dia: I am fascinated by the fact that that is the process we have here, and I understand to a degree, on a Doylist level, it doesn't matter how they got there. I understand that there is a book about it, but on a like pure reading the books level, it's feudalism, because this is epic space fantasy, and that's how it works.
Duck: Yes, yes, for all it sort of set the terms of how dragons were going to work. It was also accepting previously set terms of medieval pastiche.
Dia: Yeah, and like this is the thing I kept comparing it mentally to Dune, because one of the-- not the only main worldbuilding element of Dune, but one of the major ones is that they have personal shields, which are a technology that stops fast moving things from hitting you, so
Duck: Which means you can't shoot each other, you have to use swords because they are a more elegant form something something.
Dia: And amongst other things, because the main cause of the social change is actually religious zealotry, but I've always loved that every version of Dune assumes that when we discovered we needed pointy objects to kill each other again, we immediately went for like, a classical Grecian aesthetic.
Duck: Right, with swords come some styles of dress.
Dia: Like I need to have swords and armor, therefore, I must have fashion.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: And it's like it's one of my favorite elements of Dune. I'm not criticizing it in the least, I think it's fantastic. But it is also quite funny to me. And it's the same kind of vibe I get from this, except I have no-- I can make the logical connection between I need a sword, therefore, I need to be in classical armor. I cannot make the connection between I need a dragon, therefore, I must have bards sing of my glory. I mean, I agree wholeheartedly. It's great. You've come up with a very good aesthetic for your world here. But have you as a settler not heard about what happens when there is a peasantry to revolt against you? Or have you just gone, hey, we could have peasantry here, and they can't revolt against us because we have dragons now.
Duck: Right.
Dia: And that's where I'm going all Marxist on you.
Duck: Proceed.
Dia: I would argue that an unstated but self evident point of the Pern setting is if the aristocracy as a collective had access to this nigh unlimited power. What they would do with it is stasis.
Duck: The one that applies with dragons, yes.
Dia: They want nothing to change. They would love it if things got better for them. But also, the main driving force that people are aiming for, is to keep things fixed, where it's good for them.
Duck: Right. That, the purpose of dragons ostensibly is planetary defense, but there are even under normal circumstances 200 year gaps between the need for planetary defense and sometimes 400. What they're doing in the meantime, is the reason you can't have a peasant's revolt is that a dragon will come and set fire to you from the sky.
Dia: And this does happen in the White Dragon. Not that specifically. But the holds all, say actually we're not going to pay taxes to the dragons because they haven't done anything for us for 400 years.
Duck: Right. Tithing to them is bad, and we could be richer if we didn't.
Dia: And the dragon riders say okay, well, we have dragons. So I think you will continue tithing to us.
Duck: It's a beautiful demonstration of primitive accumulation.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: You will give us stuff because we have dragons.
Dia: It's very open.
Duck: We have overwhelming force and we are demanding a tithe, and then a tithe is eventually delivered.
Dia: And I think it is telling that the solutions to problems in the books that I have read thus far. Well actually mostly in the first two books I have read but I think not not in Dragonsinger. Are, well I have a bigger dragon than you or I can go back to a former time when things were as they should be.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: The two main solutions to the problems Lessa encounters.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: I do not know how Lessa would handle being confronted with being in the position of having to solve a problem that could not be fixed--
Duck: Oh, badly.
Dia: Through reversion or force. I assume it happens at some point in the books.
Duck: Honestly, this is one of the things I enjoy about Lessa as a character is she basically never develops any diplomacy. Any handle of like, her temper just gets worse as she gets used to being the most powerful dragon rider in the world. And she never really develops any solutions that are not threaten you with my dragon or with my weyr full of dragons. Or just shout at you. She, she, she doesn't have any problem solving skills that are not dragon and I love that about her.
Dia: I do love that. Like I enjoyed her all the way through these books. But I did also spend a lot of time going, mm, I don't know if I'd want to put you in charge of things.
Duck: Oh no, I would not I would not want-- she be a terrible manager.
Dia: I would not trust her to run a bath.
Duck: I would not want to work for Lessa or with Lessa.
Dia: No.
Duck: I enjoy her. I enjoy watching her antics.
Dia: Yeah. But this thing, Lessa is in many ways emblematic of the riders of Pern’s culture, which is we do the thing we have always done because it is what we are to do. It's our purpose. But when they hit snags, their innovations, are traveling back in time to bring people to the future who knew how it was supposed to be done.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: And they are treated as entirely correct in this, it works perfectly, there is no ultimate possibility that they could have fixed things another way, it was go back and put things as they once were, or all starve to death of failed colonialism.
Duck: Right. This was an extinction level threat to which the solution was go and get the old guard.
Dia: And don't get me wrong. I don't think that this is sort of a mask off moment for McCaffrey in terms of blind conservatism. But I think it's interesting from this perspective of this very regressive notion of class, which is, well, if there is power at the top, we can use that power to put things the way that they should have been, which is nothing changed.
Duck: Yes. This is one of the issues in the White Dragon, is that it's a threat to power structures, because there is this clear divide between the lords of the holds as in the aristocracy, and the dragon riders, and when you become a dragon rider, you cease to have any, well, let's face it temporal power, you have the spiritual power of the dragon riders and the temporal power of the lords. And if you, when you become one, you cease to be the other. So the problem of Jaxom is, he shouldn't still be the Lord of Ruatha if he's going to have a dragon. And that's just very much a, a power separation. It's trying to have a tension between the secular, moneyed leadership and the army.
Dia: It wants a power struggle, but it has no interest in characters who have no power.
Duck: Yes, or it's not even that it wants a power struggle is that the society has been set up to divide military force from government.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And Jaxom is a place where those two things cross, which is a problem for both sides.
Dia: Yes. This is where we get to part three, which is this is very static, on purpose on purpose, which is there is something going on in the meta narrative around this that I just find very interesting. And as you mentioned, these are award winning stories. They're not haphazardly thrown together.
Duck: No, they're very care-- part of the reason that the, the little cameos happen is that McCaffrey is showing off that she has, in fact, plotted this quite meticulously, knows where everyone is, where all the moving parts are. The time travel is not bothering her, they can just pop up in the right place in other timelines.
Dia: Yeah, like it's written with a lot of, I've got this flare, yes.
Duck: Yes. Don't worry, like we gotta resolve this paradox with style.
Dia: Like, this is meticulous writing, which is kind of why these elements of the worldbuilding stick out so much to me. Because I don't buy that McCaffrey in the vein of a lot of, I would say, second tier fantasy writers simply had no interest in anything that wasn't the cool ideas she'd had. Because there are a lot of sci fi and fantasy authors who kind of come up with a concept and spin that one concept into an entire book. And those aren't necessarily bad books, but they aren't great worldbuilding.
Duck: Yes, I think that's fair.
Dia: And I think that's completely valid, if that's just not the kind of book you're writing. Like, I think there are a lot of very good sci fi and fantasy novels, which are just about wouldn't it be cool if you could turn into a cat?
Duck: Sure, when you…
Dia: And there is no real need in those books to construct an elaborate like, political organization for the cat people.
Duck: But when you do the amount of worldbuilding that has clearly been done for Pern, you then have to answer the question of: so why did you build it like this?
Dia: Yeah, why did you build it like this? And why has it worked?
Duck: Yes.
Dia: Even just within the span of time, which these books cover because the Pern books cover a ridiculous amount of in universe time. Yes. There is a 400 year gap, right?
Duck: That's right. Lessa goes back in time 400 years.
Dia: In which nothing has changed. She is completely comprehensible.
Duck: She’s using the same language!
Dia: They understand her. They understand the problems she is facing. They understand her rank. They understand all of the places she references and the points she makes to them. There's no cultural translation, let alone lexical translation.
Duck: She jumps 400 years back in the past and says, I am Lessa. I am the queenrider from Benden weyr. And my bloodline is Ruatha. And they go oh yes, we understand who you are, and why we should listen to you.
Dia: In a time travel story where something like that happened, I would normally as a languages nerd, just roll my eyes and accept it. But this is a story that has prompted me not to do that.
Duck: But it is a little bit like jumping 400 years back in time and saying hello, I am Priti Patel. I am the Home Secretary and have everyone go oh yes, we know who that is.
Dia: It's just a little bit wild, because this is something so-- very brief diversion, because I'm going to explain myself a little bit. This is something I've talked to you individually about, but not the listeners, I'm a very brain turned off reader, by which I mean, I enter books on the assumption that the author will tell me what is important.
Duck: Right? You read a story, rather than do an analysis the first time through.
Dia: I quite often I encountered this as a conflict with other people most often when it comes to plot twists, where I'll say, I thought that was a good twist. And they'll be like, I saw it coming miles off, and I was like, you were looking for things coming?
Duck: Like, this is why I don't why I don't read murder mysteries, because they're not… they're puzzles to solve. And I don't, my brain doesn't try to solve them.
Dia: The thing, I actually quite like murder mysteries. But I do need to be clued in that it's the kind of murder mystery where I should be assembling the pieces.
Duck: Right, rather than one where at some point, a murderer will be revealed. And this is just a thing that is happening.
Dia: Yeah, like, I don't, I don't dislike stories that want to play a game with you. It's just not my natural mode of reading all stories.
Duck: Yes, you just have to be told that this is a soluble one.
Dia: Yeah, like there are a couple of things actually on the list for this podcast, which I have read in both of these modes and had very different experiences reading them. So how this, why this is relevant is I feel like when I entered the first book, when I entered Dragonflight,
Duck: Flight.
Dia: Why have they all got such similar names, Anne, why are you doing this to me?
Duck: Once you've done it for the first two, you cannot stop.
Dia: I've got four Wikipedia tabs open in front of me to keep track of all of the people and names and places. But my point being when I entered Dragonflight, I was very much along for the ride. I'm going okay, space! Settlement! Dragons! Great. At a certain point I couldn't pinpoint when, but over the course you go, Okay, this is a meticulously put together story that expects you to ask questions about the setting, because Lessa as a character is constantly asking, Why is this this way? Why can it not be different? Why must I abide by these restrictions, which don't seem to have a logical cause? And it’s in a,
Duck: Yeah, and sometimes they do turn out to have a cause. And sometimes it's just patriarchy.
Dia: It's in a very realistic way where sometimes these rules exist, because they have to exist. And sometimes they exist, because they've always existed and we can do without them.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: This all makes sense. This is fine. And it's also a clue that McCaffrey is writing a book about gender.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: In a way that she is not writing a book about some other social issues such as class.
Duck: Yes. And I have seen various analyses that that I think, really do a disservice in that way, by noting that there are gender issues in the book and assuming that that is some kind of mistake on Anne McCaffrey’s part, rather than something she was deliberately putting in because she had something to say about it.
Dia: Yeah, it is a book that has cued you in that way, when we get to the fu-- sorry, rewind back to when we were talking about time travel, when we get to the time travel, and she goes into the past. And absolutely nothing is notably different, except for the things that we have already been told have gone wrong since then. It just sets up some little red flags in my brain going, ooh, ooh, this isn't? Ooh.
Duck: Right. The book has sort of set up a this is how society should be. The problem is that we have deviated from the old ways.
Dia: Like there's just a little flashing light somewhere in my mind going degeneracy alert, degeneracy alert.
Duck: We are spelling return with a v.
Dia: But this is, ooh, I don't know how I feel about this. Because if I were told it’s okay, we've got a fix to the cost of living crisis. We're going to send Rishi Sunak back 400 years to bring the government forward to fix everything. I would have concerns.
Duck: I would have a, right, quite apart from the technological. I'm sorry, what's that this would provoke? I do feel like the the government that 400 years ago is not is also not someone I want running the country.
Dia: I mean, I don't know offhand what the economy was like 400 years ago, but I assume it was better for many people, because we were stealing more wealth from other countries. It was not specifically better for people in my position in society,
Duck: Right, on account of the whole class.
Dia: Do you see how I get here? From the door labeled Marxist analysis, I have reached the exit sign labeled oof.
Duck: I mean oof is right. Because it is, as you say, static by design both diegetically and on the part of the author.
Dia: Because when you have this situation where there's a question you have about the book, and you can answer it on a Watsonian or a Doylist level, right? So like, if you're watching Shazam. And you go, Well, why? Why does he have to say Shazam? Why does he have to say a magic word to transform? It seems silly.
Duck: It does.
Dia: It does. And it also nearly gets him killed in the movie when he's being waterboarded. On a Doylist level, you can say, well, because it's a comic book for small children.
Duck: Right!
Dia: They have magic words.
Duck: It’s a cue, you shout, Shazam, and you, you shout the magic words, and you know that the powers are coming into play. So it's a funny thing to say. And it's, as you say, a comic for children and children like to shout magic words.
Dia: Also because it would be weird if he didn't have any limitations on his ability to turn into Superman.
Duck: Right.
Dia: It would be a very disinteresting not uninteresting actively disinteresting movie?
Duck: And our Watsonian explanation is simply that's how the magic works.
Dia: Yeah, the Watsonian, um, the Watsonian explanation is because that's how being the champion of the gods works. Because the gods made it so because the gods exist.
Duck: Because that's, that's yeah, that's the rule of the universe as it pertains to being Shazam.
Dia: Yeah. And what's interesting, right is usually when you approach any question about text along these lens, it's the same question as let's just stick with DC for simplicity. Why does Superman's disguise work? There's a Watsonian explanation, which is nobody expects Superman to be wandering around having a day job.
Duck: Sure. It's quite a good explanation.
Dia: Like, if you have a coworker who looks a little bit like Robbie Williams, you do not assume that he is Robbie Williams moonlighting as a temp.
Duck: Because that will be weird.
Dia: Yeah, no one thinks that. And the Doylist explanation is because that's the story. Like. This is a genre. Secret identities are a cornerstone of that genre. And this is the comic that invented that cornerstone.
Duck: Right, it's right, it is literally just this is the story that we are have always been telling.
Dia: Yeah. And like I am, I have very limited patience for the kind of, I feel like it's trendy to blame CinemaSins for this, I actually feel like that's quite unfair. I think it's always existed, just people who want to tear logical holes in a story more than they want to enjoy it.
Duck: Yes. And to say this is a plot hole where it is in fact, the plot.
Dia: Yeah, like, occasionally you see ones where you're like, where people go, Well, why did the character make this stupid mistake that instigated the plot? And you're like, because we wanted the story!
Duck: Right. Why is, why is this fictional society set up in this imperfect way? Well, where did we come up with the rule that it had to be, like, a perfect and logical society?
Dia: I once got genuinely quite angry at a post talking about arthuriana where they said they loved arthuriana, but they didn't like all of the stupid medieval honour and romance stuff. And I was like,
Duck: What’s left?
Dia: Bestie that’s the plot.
Duck: What, what about the arthuriana do you like, then?
Dia: Is it just the costumes? Because that's valid, but I don't think you can say you like arthuriana. I think you just like historical fashion.
Duck: Yes. Personally, I'm very fond of Austen, and Pride and Prejudice and things, but I hate all of the social manners stuff.
Dia: Like. Again, I say bestie. That's the plot.
Duck: Exactly. That, that's, that's,
Dia: My point being,
Duck: That’s what’s happening.
Dia: That was a little tangent, just talk about things that annoy me. But my point being that I don't think you can do that with these books. I think they're very resistant to that, because the author is asking questions about the society, they're just not the same questions I'm asking you can't go? Well, it's just like this, because that's what the setting is. Because it is about why the setting is that way, in a lot of ways, just not this one.
Duck: Yes, and I think the, the Watsonian explanation tends to be insufficient, when it comes to how static this society is. There are various structures sort of in place within the society to keep it static. There's like this built-in by design, not power struggle, checks and balances thing, let's say, between the dragon riders and the Lords holder, which is by design to spread that power out and stop either group from untrammeled tyranny. But none of that explains you know, there's, there's the Harper Hall, part of whose job is teaching and preservation of knowledge in such a way that it will tend to make language more static. But I don’t find it a sufficient explanation for why there's no new slang in the last 400 years.
Dia: I mean. Exactly, and this actually and this is what's very interesting is like, we see people who are learning these ballads, and you go, Oh, I know what this is. I've, I know something about medieval ballads myself. But there's no change in structure or metaphor understanding over time, and that is deliberate in universe, but it's also frustrating, out of universe because I-- if you want to argue with me whether or not you can preserve a language perfectly I would direct you towards the entire nation of France, which has been running an experiment on this for several years.
Duck: They’ve discovered that no you can't, yes it’s very much,
Dia: You cannot stop the kids from using verlan.
Duck: You have the Harper Hall, which has been passing down these teaching songs for centuries unchanged. This part, I can believe what I can't believe is that Harper English and regular day to day English haven't diverged. The harpers are not talking like Shakespeare.
Dia: Yeah, like I kept thinking of the harps as like the Icelandic sagas. And the thing with Icelandic sagas, is if you are an Icelandic speaker, you can understand them. You can read them the same way I can read Chaucer.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: What you cannot do is read them casually as if they were day to day speech. Because words change, you invent new items, and you need words for them.
Duck: And you drop old words. And yes,
Dia: Like I--
Duck: Accents develop into dialects develop into well, there's a Harper songs that we learned phonetically. Because until you're like 12, or 14, you're not good enough for reading and writing to actually understand what the words are, because I'm going to teach you that separately.
Dia: Yeah, and I have on multiple occasions, spoken to native speakers of languages to which I speak the medieval version of the language. And we can get by in their native language, we can get by, but not if I need to discuss my plane travel arrangements.
Duck: Because there aren't any words for these things. Yes.
Dia: Unless I want to start going, the big metal bird that thunders through the sky will depart at one and 10 hours of the morning,
Duck: Which is, frankly, less helpful than…
Dia: That's not what we're seeing in the treating ballads?
Duck: No, we have a very, very static society. In this this, that we have we have out there. This is an implausible level of language continuity. It's an implausible level of social continuity. It is the scandal of the century, that Ruatha had a coup.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Now, I'm not saying that all stories have to be focused on the political maneuverings of the aristocracy. But I feel the political maneuverings of aristocracy is something you just get when you have large land holdings and aristocrats holding them.
Dia: And I think this is the interesting thing about it to me is we don't have jockeying amongst the aristocracy, except in individual interpersonal ways.
Duck: Right, noone ever goes after anyone for land with the array of holds and their geographic borders are the same as they were when the society was founded.
Dia: Like, we know the honor duels exist, and a lot of characters have opinions about them. But there's no explanation of what happens when someone just invaded your fields and said, these are mine now.
Duck: Right, it seems like there's never been any conquest. And these are people who have fully forgotten where they came from. So we know as readers that we are on a planet in space, that this was a place that was colonized as a society that was set up like this. The characters do not know this. That knowledge has been lost for some reason that didn't end up in the harper ballads as something everyone got taught. As far as they know, this is just how society has always been, which means that they cannot be personally committed on a philosophical level to maintaining society in this way.
Dia: Exactly.
Duck: This is not a dispossessed situation where everyone has been taught the ideology and that it is their job to uphold it.
Dia: Yeah. That's what's interesting, because there are lower classes, there are working and laboring classes there are menial drudges who are sort of nigh invisible underclass.
Duck: Literally dressed in grey rags all the time, yes.
Dia: Yeah. And yet, none of those people has ever looked at the world and gone, hey, this could be different.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Not in the last 400 years and not ever.
Duck: There's been a coup in Ruatha. Everyone hates the new guy. Everyone wants the old family back, there is a survivor of that old family, not one of his servants ever tries to poison him.
Dia: I was just looking at this thinking, Wait, so-- I remember reading the first couple paragraphs I was just expecting because I've read books before for there to be at least like a kindly old servant who was loyal to the family.
Duck: And it's not no one has…
Dia: There isn't because
Duck: A sense of personal agency to resist having a new overlord who they hate?
Dia: Yeah, and Lessa is psychically influencing them to do less than their best work because they were doing their best work for the guy who massacred their beloved ruling family.
Duck: Yes, the only reason that the laundry is not done promptly and well is that Lessa is putting psychic pressure on everyone.
Dia: And it's just a universe where the lower working classes simply do not have thoughts in their heads about anything except getting the master his breakfast.
Duck: Yes, and I mean that those first few chapters, it doesn't really recur because the level of sort of independence psychicness separate from what dragons do gets dialed down after book one. But in those first few chapters, Lessa is recognized as well, this person isn't one of the underclass drudges, this person is someone important, because her hands are too nicely shaped.
Dia: Yeah,
Duck: Literally she does, not even not calloused, just elegantly boned. Full on phrenology, this person isn't ugly enough to be the lower classes. So she must be in fact, an aristocrat in hiding because her hands are nice. I like her, the shape of her fingers. So she must be one of the protagonists of reality.
Dia: This is hand fetish erasure?
Duck: Well, I don't think it is…
Dia: I've seen people get extremely horny for any kind of hands.
Duck: Oh, no, no, no, I agree. But when it’s where, it's not just I like her hands, but her but
Dia: Her hands are the correct shape. Therefore she is an aristocrat, it is--
Duck: It’s hand phrenology.
Dia: It’s hand phrenology And it's just something that's not picked up again, in any of the books I read to my knowledge not picked up again, in major ways in any of the books.
Duck: No, of the Yeah, the phrenology does not become a major part of the narrative. But in those first few chapters, it's very Oh, okay.
Dia: And it's just, it's odd, because I think we've all got this sort of mental image of the Goose Girl archetype, right, the, the princess in hiding. They've been betrayed somehow. And even in the Goose Girl, which is a very reductive story, if you're looking at it on class levels, because it's simply not designed to hold up to that kind of analysis.
Duck: Right.
Dia: But like, even within the Goose Girl, there is a variety of people with wants and needs and desires and thoughts at every level of society. And yes, most of those evil people are the working classes and the good people are the upper classes, which isn't great, but at least the working classes are having evil thoughts in pPern, they are simply not having thoughts.
Duck: They’re not having thoughts.
Dia: All of the characters we meet of the laboring classes are simply there as machines.
Duck: And you know, something interesting that happens in the later books. I think this particular view of sort of feudal, staticness and class, as inherent, it's actually very American.
Dia: It’s so American.
Duck: Because what happens is they settle the southern continent, and everyone from the lower classes, who has spirit who has actual agency and desires and thoughts of their own, they go to settle the frontier.
Dia: So American.
Duck: And that's how you know that they are despite being lower classes, real people is they go to settle the frontier, which is the most American narrative you can imagine.
Dia: I will say this is not important, but it's important to me personally. Every single article I found when I was reading around, this refers to Anne McCaffrey as American Irish, which I know is true, but it's wild that it is exactly the same every single time.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Both her parents were Irish, it's not factually incorrect, or anything like she's a naturalized American citizen. It's just wild to me that every single Wikipedia page that I was looking at to like double check, I could remember which character was which all refer to, Dragonriders of Pern is series by American Irish author Anne McCaffrey. I’m just like, does her estate have a gun to your head to prevent you from referring to her as American. There's something happening there.
Duck: Right, I'm not gonna say she's not American Irish. It's just
Dia: It's factually correct. I just find it interesting that every single article uses the exact same phrasing to describe her.
Duck: Yeah, and Pern is quite American.
Dia: It is quite American. And I don't think there aren't ways in which it's quite Irish.
Duck: Oh, sure. I mean, the reason that Ruatha is the best place occupied by the best people as the Ruatha is the bit that the Irish colonists created.
Dia: And also what is more Irish then bickering about harps?
Duck: Right, it's not guitars, it's not banjos, it's harps.
Dia: The most important thing is that we listen to people who play the harp.
Duck: That is quite Irish, now you mentioned it.
Dia: If we don't listen to the people who play the harp society will collapse.
Duck: But it's okay. Because all of the people who deserve to be seen as real people will go and settle the new world where things can change. It's, yeah, it's interesting.
Dia: Yeah, we're not doing colonialist analysis, but we kind of are because the two are inextricably connected, both in reality and on Pern, because they're, the approach to colonialism, both in reality and on Pern, is actually quite unique when it is faced with an open expanse of space, right?
Duck: Right. This is the thing about space colonization of places that do not have extant, like intelligent life is that you actually get the fantasy of the, of the frontier of you are colonizing a place where no one lives where no one has ever lived.
Dia: And it's interesting that this is a very American dominated genre, even within the, quite, American dominated genre of fantasy and well, not fantasy, of sci fi is what I meant to say. And of fantasy space epics within sci fi, is, this is what we were pretending was happening. When we colonized America.
Duck: Right. This is the wide open the empty West.
Dia: That does not exist and never existed.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Oh, no, there are no people here, no human people here at all. Simply an expanse for the brave to stride into.
Duck: And in space, you can have that in your book, you can have that as simply and uncomplicatedly true. There are no people here. This has never previously been settled, there is no history here. We are the first people to set foot here and plant our flag, and make a new society on the moon. No, wait, that's the dispossessed again.
Dia: What that means is if you want to have your comforts of home, your structures of home, your social society of home, you have to bring it with you, underclass and all and they have to never object to this situation. And on Pern, they simply do not.
Duck: Would you like to know a fun little, fun little snippet from Dragonstorm, which is the settlement book.
Dia: Yes!
Duck: in Dragonstorm, we find out that Benden hold is named for Admiral Benden. As is the person who was in charge of the ships. Bowl is named after Governor bowl, the settlements, the holds like the major holds that have these names. Turns out they're all named after the aristocracy of the settlers.
Dia: Of course, they are.
Duck: It is equivalent to a state called Washington.
Dia: I feel like that would be the mic drop moment to end. But I do actually have more I want to say.
Duck: Please, continue!
Dia: And the more I want to say is actually more peripherally related is veering wildly off the course of Marxist analysis into things that jumped out at me. And I had to shoehorn into Marxism, because I wanted to talk about them.
Duck: Go for it.
Dia: So, we're going off piste. First things first, I mentioned this to you while I was reading, I looked at some academia and I kept finding Pern on academic articles about how to get children interested in literary analysis. I couldn't really not conceive of how this is a good idea.
Duck: I assume this is because teachers of a certain age, liked Pern?
Dia: They’re good books, give them to kids, they'll probably like them. But is this a choice for baby’s first analysis?
Duck: Yeah…
Dia: There’s so much happening here. Like imagine being sat down in like a GCSE level English class and asked like, what is the narrative significance of plant life on Pern? I’m just saying, it's a lot tougher to dissect than like The Lady of Shalott, there's so much happening here.
Duck: There's a lot happening. It's true.
Dia: It's not the point, but it just made me imagine that I was trying to do this Marxist analysis like in year 10, when we were first studying Marxist analysis and how completely lost I would be. Again, not important, but important to me that you know, I encountered that.
Duck: Understood.
Dia: Next up, this is much more class adjacent. I do not understand the system by which things come to exist in a world where it seems to all be very mechanically done by people who are not thinking about what they are doing.
Duck: As in, you don't understand..
Dia: I don't mean I literally don't understand. I mean, I find it frustrating. But the meaniality of the working classes clashes in a way I find frustrating with a plot in which a key factor is access to things that the Dragonriders cannot provide for themselves like foodstuffs.
Duck: Yes, there is this very unconvincing disconnect, because all skilled craft is done in craft holds, craft halls. So it's not just the Harper's, there's also like, yeah, crafters, leatherworkers…
Dia: We get a sort of combined school situation in the white dragon which is bringing together-- because basically, a major plot element of the early sections of the white dragon is there are just too many youngins running around.
Duck: Right, and they need something productive to do.
Dia: So we're going to normally we just send them to learn the thing that they're supposed to learn and nothing else but we're going to try cross pollinating them.
Duck: Yes, you have these craft halls that function a bit like guilds. But the implication is that really nobody outside of the halls knows how to do this stuff. And that includes things like tanning…
Dia: Like, are the lords of all the holds, like, individually ordering shoes for all of their drudges?
Duck: Right.
Dia: I mean, I don't know if drudges wear shoes, actually, it does seem to be all rags.
Duck: I think kind of, there is perhaps an implication that you go to the craft hall and you'd like, you know, study at the guild and get these skills and then go back and settle in with a community and then you are their smith or their leather worker. But that isn't how subsistence actually works.
Dia: It just doesn't feel like it can possibly fit together, in a way that clashes with how neatly everything else fits together. And like the weyrs, weyrs, however I’m pronouncing it, um, seem to me to be like, sorry, I'm gonna take a glass of water, I think I might have breathed in some cat hair.
Duck: There are no cats on Pern. Which is very sad.
Dia: The beastie is shedding it's making me unable to breathe. Also, to be fair, last night, I was clubbing and for some reason they started at one am playing All I Want For Christmas Is You and blasting foam onto the crowd.
Duck: It’s June!
Dia: And I inhaled a lot of it. As we record this, it is June.
Duck: It’s June.
Dia: And they did specifically say we don't care that it's July, which if anything raised more questions.
Duck: It's boogie season, apparently.
Dia: But yeah, it did mean I inhaled quite a lot of foam last night. However, my point being the weyrs, the weyrs, the point being the weyrs are very much the kind of archetype of this issue for me, where for 400 years, there has been only one where it has been bleeding prestige and success and resources.
Duck: It's a relic of the old times. Nobody really respects it. It's just tradition. Yeah.
Dia: We've accepted, I'm accepting that they have not modernized because frankly, that's the most realistic thing about the entire situation. But they also haven't like, had any problems because of this? Like, okay, they've continued, continued getting their tithes at like, attritioning rates. Sure. But like, okay, is no, we meet the woman who's been doing the accounts in Dragonflight, and she was the person I wanted to know the most about in the entire book, because I really want to know what doing the accounts in this situation looks like?
Duck: Right.
Dia: Like, where are you getting clothes? Who is, who is doing the repair jobs? Because it seems to me like all of you are either drones or out flying dragons every minute of the day, or intricately involved in the politics of this novel specifically.
Duck: Right? So who is darning the socks?
Dia: Like, I don't normally ask these questions of fantasy universes that have not prompted me to ask them, because while I wish they were covered, I like more than like a good long diatribe on where we get our tanned hides from. But I'm-- I accept that that is simply a genre convention that we go, yeah, yeah, yeah, feudalism, they're getting their stuff, whatever. But in this situation, where we are like explicitly being told about their fading resources, their lack of people doing various jobs, et cetera, et cetera. Am I to believe that like the day to day cleaning, and mending is still getting done?
Duck: Yeah. And especially in a society where it's essentially, it's not just that nobody knows how to do these things outside of the craft halls, but you're not allowed to know how to do things that belong to a craft Hall.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: I think in Dragon song, there's something about how it's not, you know, Menolly is learning music off the Harper who lives at her hold, which, and that part is itself, scandalous because he shouldn't be teaching someone who isn't properly apprenticed is like, well, you know, Menolly knows how to harmonize. And that's forbidden knowledge.
Dia: It's like, it is it's interested. It's interested in some of these people and not others. And that's fine. Like that is just how books work.
Duck: All books are.
Dia: That's, that's how, like, not every book can tell you the intricate details. That's how you get Pottermore. Do you want Pottermore? Nobody wants Pottermore. This is how we get sued.
Duck: Your book turns into just a series of chapters, each introducing the same scene from the perspective of a different person in the scene. It's very literary, but it's very tedious.
Dia: Yeah, like that's, this is. That's, basically you're describing Ulysses.
Duck: I wasn't gonna say it because that's chapter but yes.
Dia: You've already been canceled over that, it’s fine. I-- I'm not asking you to tell me every detail of everybody's life. But I do come away from reading these books with the overwhelming feeling that a wizard must have cast a spell to make nobody question things for this society to continue to function.
Duck: The people don't act like people, which is always a problem in a book, or rather the people, the people who are important act like people and then there is also an underclass of farmers and cleaners and carters who make the stuff keep appearing for the aristocracy who we’re interested in. Just everything we learned about the actual lives makes it less believable that the stuff keeps appearing.
Dia: I think my official like Marxist analysis like mic drop, conclusion statement is, this just feels to me like a series desperately in need of its Unseen Academicals.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: It just needs the below stairs episode so much.
Duck: It does.
Dia: Because if that episode existed and was its own standalone book, I don't think these things would bother me half as much as they do.
Duck: I honestly, Pern would be deeply enriched by football.
Dia: It so would.
Duck: Tell me what the lower classes are doing amongst themselves. Tell me how they see their quote betters.
Dia: Okay, I think we're gonna leave that as our concluding statement, because you've actually managed to do a decent analysis in an hour for like the first time. We’re finally getting the hang of this, right. Let me pull up some Google Docs while you pull up some dice.
Duck: I'll pull up some dice.
Dia: No, why are you taking me to LinkedIn? I did not ask you to do this.
Duck: That's a different place.
Dia: My laptop has a touchscreen that I don't use very often. So I sometimes forget it's there.
Duck: Oh, we should actually before we roll the dice, we should decide whether Pern is going back in the hat.
Dia: Oh, I actually think Pern is going back in the hat. There's a lot going on with Pern. Okay, yes. I'm gonna say Poland goes back in the hat. And I have the, let me just quickly take Marxism off the list. I feel bad. It's okay. You can go back in next season.
Duck: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're gonna reset the schools of analysis because there are only so many in the world.
Dia: Yeah, I just feel bad taking Marxism down off his shelf. Freud looks all alone, he's the only name on the list now. Actually, that's not true. Jung is also on the list. I just forgot Jung existed because he's boring.
Duck: Nonetheless, he's gonna pop up. Now you wait and see.
Dia: Great. Okay. Do you want to roll me a 21 sided die?
Duck: I would love to do that. One.
Dia: Queer theory!
Duck: Queer theory. Okay. This will be interesting.
Dia: There are very few things that I imagine this won't work for. Okay, and can you roll me your 101 sided die?
Duck: 101 sided die. Nine.
Dia: Nine, Hamlet!
Duck: Oh, this should be fun!
Dia: Okay, this is quite exciting. Like that's.
Duck: Yeah, we can have fun with this.
Dia: We're gonna have a good time. Okay. I don't think either of us needs to be assigned any reading.
Duck: I mean, I will reread Hamlet. But.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: If you want to play a long list of the reading is Hamlet, you should be able to find a copy.
Dia: If you can't, please let us know. I'm fascinated to know where you live.
Duck: And how your internet works.
Dia: Okay. Brilliant. So that was a Marxist analysis of Dragonriders of Pern and join us in two weeks time for a queer reading of Hamlet.
Duck: Thank you listener and we'll see you next time.
Dia: Bye.
Duck: Bye!
Dia: Oh thank god, I can take this duvet off me! [rustling noise]