Dragonsblood

Dragonsblood by Todd McCaffrey is a fine addition to the world of Pern as created by his mother. This story adds to how knowledge was passed from the first pass of the Red Star to the second pass.

Ah, the magic of Pern is in good hands. Todd McCaffrey, Anne's son, wrote this book and I enjoyed it as much as the originals. In this book the dragons and fire lizards have contracted a deadly respiratory disease. Lorana, daughter of an animal doctor, can "hear" all the dragons and is therefore aware of each one as it succumbs. Her own fire lizards go between and end up centuries in the past. Luckily they arrive at the one place that has people who can diagnose the illness and they manage to save one of the fire lizards. Wind Blossom is one of the Eridani adepts who genetically modified native Pernese life to fight thread. She is old but manages to pass on her knowledge to her daughter and one of her students. She knows that they must preserve some knowledge and equipment to help out the dragons in the future. Since the equipment is gradually failing and very few people even then possess the requisite knowledge that is a huge task. In the future Lorana grieves each time a dragon dies but she and the Harper, Kindan, search for clues that will help them discover what the former generations knew. A great book and every fan of McCaffrey's Pern series should read it.

This book weaves two stories and two time periods together. In 507, Thread is just beginning to fall but the dragons are getting sick. Lorana is the daughter of a herder and one of the population that survived a plague. She is a talented artist, a skilled healer, has impressed two fire lizards, and can speak to all dragons. Lorana has set herself a goal of traveling around Pern and drawing pictures of all the life forms. To do this she boards a ship but has to escape it because the Captain wants more from her that her skills as a healer. After nearing death in a small boat in a storm, she sends her fire lizards away in hopes that they will survive. She is rescued by dragon riders and taken to Benden Weyr. Her skills let her impress a new queen at the latest hatching. But dragons are dying of some kind of disease. Lorana and Kindan are set to search the records that the Weyrs keep in hope of finding some information about this illness and some cure for it. The other time period that is woven into this story is the year 57 at the end of the first Threadfall. Wind Blossom is one of the original settlers of Pern and is a noted geneticist. However, she is seeing that the technology is breaking down and the settlers are focusing on growing their population and expanding their territories. It won't take much time for most of the information not needed for immediate survival is lost. When a sick fire lizard - one of Lorana's - falls from the sky, Wind Blossom knows that the future of these genetically engineered dragons is in jeopardy. She has to come up with a cure and find some way to hide the knowledge so that it will be available in Lorana's time. This is only the basics of the story. There is a jealous weyrwoman who resents Lorana's ability to talk to dragons and fears losing her power in the weyr. There are dragon riders in both time periods who are more focused on fighting thread now than in thinking ahead for the future. There is a romance. All in all, this was a great story set in the world of Pern that shows a time that hadn't been explored before.

The overall story is a good one, and feels particularly au courant because it focuses on an epidemic. Overall, I liked it.It is a difficult book to read, however. There are two parallel stories, generally told in alternate chapters, and there are A Lot of characters, many with similar names: M'tal and M'hall were particularly confusing for me.The A story takes place in the Third Pass, with Thread falling while an epidemic rages among fire lizards and dragons causing many of them to get sick and die. This is the immediate problem that the book seeks to solve.I recognized Kindan the Harper from the previous books I'd read set in this time. I liked the main protagonist Lorana. I even figured out what burr was under Weyrwoman Tullea's saddle before that was revealed. The main characters are fine. The intermediate characters, well, I was never sure who they were relative to the main characters.The B story takes place about 400 years earlier, before all technology from the spacefarers was lost. It is clearly a distinct culture from the more familiar A story, but one can see how it could move to the later culture.Despite the difficulty in keeping everyone straight, the book felt like it was a seamless part of the Pern world.

Oh gosh, another plague.... Does he realise that he doesn't have to write about plagues? There is some shit about Wind Blossom and how the Watchwhers were created and Boy Wonder (a.k.a. Kindan) makes is usual appearances.

DO NOT BOTHER!!!!!!!

In Dragonsblood, the story switches between past and present where Windblossom, one of the original Pern colonists is trying to create a legacy involving genetic engineering. In a time where dragons are dying from Thread, is capable of saving the dragons. In present time, Loranna is also dealing with dying dragons, and reaches back in time to Windblossom to save the dragons.There was very little that I actually liked about the book. The writing was subpar. The storyline is both confusing and not especially interesting. The dialogue is weak. I wasn't very impressed with Anne McCaffrey as a writer, and I don't think her son is any better. This is a weak novel. Unless you're tied into the Pern series, I would skip it.Carl Alves - author of Blood Street

Scarlett has been in hiding since the brutal attack that ended in the death of her fiancé, cousin, and two bodyguards seven years ago. She thinks she is safe until she sees one of the men who attacked her on the train. A stranger saves her, claiming that her life is in danger because she has Dragon blood running through her veins. She’s stuck in the middle of a war fought between Dragons, Djinnis, and Elves, and she has no hope of surviving without the stranger’s help.

Janos’ clan has been hit hard by the war. The Djinnis and Elves have found a way to find the Dragon mates before they can be protected, decimating the population even further. At first he doesn’t recognize Scarlett as his mate, just that she is a mate who is refusing to be rescued.

His Scarlett isn’t easily led away, even when another attack forces him to change shape in order to protect her. Rather than infuriate him, her refusal to toe the line attracts him to her even more. It will take a strong woman to be his mate and consort. Janos was a hardass from the very beginning, but Scarlett didn’t let him get away with it. She enjoyed the forced kiss, even reciprocated, but she did it on her own terms. There was never the whole “my body betrayed me” aspect that’s prevalent in romance novels.

Even when their sexual attraction reached a fevered temperature, Janos was patient and Scarlett covered all her bases. This wasn’t just about sex-it was about learning each other, the way of the dragons, and exactly what she was getting into. Once they consummated their relationship, Scarlett took control. She didn’t wait for him to do what she wanted; no, she told him what she needed and how. You gotta love a heroine who has her cake and eats it, too.

Unfortunately the story fell apart at the end. I’m not sure why, in romances, the hero and heroine have to have a mandatory period away from each other to reflect on some stupid thing one or the other did or is perceived to have done. It just doesn’t fit every situation. There was no reason for Janos and Scarlett to be separated, so when it happened it appeared forced, out of character, and rushed.

Blending dragon and vampire mythology into one super-supernatural was ingenious. The ending didn’t ruin the story for me; the relationship and dynamics built early on were strong enough to overshadow it and make me eager for the next installment.

Bitten by Books for AReCafe

I thought I had read all of the Pern books, but last month when I was reading Dragongirl I kept running across references to stuff I should know but didn't. I started my re-read to catch up and see what I had missed and ran across this book. This is interesting but a little confusing because it takes place in two different time periods separated by almost 500 years and keeps going back and forth. I thought that the editing could have been a little tighter.

Todd does an excellent job of continuing the Pern series. He is able to capture all of the Spirit of his mother's creation. If you enjoyed her books, you will not be disappointed.Possible Pern society spoiler -- In reading Anne's novels, the main focus of mating issues were with the Queen dragons and their riders. I knew the green (female dragons) riders were male as were the bronze and blue (male dragons)riders. I did not extrapolate from this that there might be homosexuality between riders when the greens rose to mate. Todd, however, alludes to this possibility in the early chapters. This does not make me want to stop reading his contribution to Pernese lore, but it appears that in some ways Pern is more and more showing similarities with Earth and humans.

My brother and I read all about Pern and it’s dragon riders in high school. This new book was written by Anne McCaffrey’s son and gave me a chance to go back to Pern. For the first time in Pernese history, the fire lizards and the dragons are sick. The question is whether a cure will be found before it is too late. Every dragon that succumbs to the illness is one less dragon able to help fight the thread that is falling. As long as you are ok with time travel and therefore jumping between two stories at once, you will be ok. We start in the present with Loranna on an island on her own where she is drawing the wildlife. She takes her first travel through time to make the departure of the ship that has already left as she is supposed to be the physician along for the journey. When there are problems on the ship she ends up on the lifeboat in a storm and sends her fire lizards away so they don’t have to watch her die. They end up going back in time about 400 years and since they are sick they teach the last of the founders of the Pernese colony, along with her daughter and the son of another founder about the illness when Loranna’s dragon queen also falls sick and goes back to the same location. While the one fire lizard lives, he is given the last of the antibiotics and the disease is not spread to the old generation. Now the key is how to teach those 400 years in the future how to stop the epidemic.

Todd does not have Anne's magic. This book is obviously written by someone who has read a lot of Pern stories. The publisher was a bit too optimistic when they wrote that Todd brought fresh ideas to the series because he obviously didn't. This book is a hodge-podge collection of bits and pieces from previously published Pern books that Todd put together and it didn't quite gel. Thereby, for the long-time Pern fans, this book is a disappointment.

This addition to the Pern series by the grandson of the original author is... interesting, in that it provides the dependable sort of potato-chip reading I'm used to. It also has a lot of Deus Ex Machina in the form of technology. As time goes on, either Anne was trying to retrofit technology into the world she designed, or someone else was, so one shouldn't be surprised to find biotechnology and genetics cropping up in her grandson's work in the same area.The read was fast-paced and had some of the excitement that I remember from reading the earliest Pern books for the first time, though it took me a while to catch some time sleight of hand -- if you are not the kind who reads the chapter headings, you may be confused at first too.I would say that Tim McCaffrey's previous collaborations with Anne (Dragon's Kin, and even the less sturdy Dragon's Fire) had more attention to personality and less to technology-- there's a lot of SF going on here. The characters here are still appealling, and this is a much better take on the subject that the wooden "Moreta's Ride" which I did not care for.

The people of Pern thought the plague would not affect the dragons but it did. Now that the people of Pern needed the dragons and their riders, sickness invades the Weyrs and levels Pern's fighting force.It's up to Lorana and her Weyr friends to work together and find the cure. 400 years previous, Emora, Wind Blossom's daughter and her friends must create the steps to the cure and make sure Lorana gets it two Passes later.It's quite sad that Lorana looses so much. She looses her friend to the plauge, her fire-lizards and finally her baby gold dragon. Kindan is really a big help to her. He is nt only a harper but now a scientist as well.

This is Todd McCaffrey's first stand alone novel written in his mother's world. He does an excellent job of keeping within established canon while adding previously unknown details and tying up loose ends.The characters, however, don't quite stand alone. Unless you have read their previous joint effort about the whers, some of the characters appear as cardboard add-ins. The main character is one with which readers can easily empathize but she is the only one whose psyche gets probed with any sort of depth. The other characters range from barely noticed to downright unlikeable.I could have done without the rehashing of how genetic coding works and the twist at the end explaining one rider's sour attitude seemed more like an afterthought. It came too suddenly and without enough elements earlier in the plot to be plausible.In spite of these faults, the plot remains engaging and original. It moves at a fast pace and provides much needed detail for incidents in the Pern world which have previously been left unexplained. Todd obviously has a good grasp of his mother's creation as well as the vision and talent to continue the legacy. Well worth reading, though darker and more serious than any previous Pern story line.

Although the Pern formula is a bit well-worn at this point, Dragonsblood made for a perfect companion on a recent plane flight. Todd McCaffrey is doing a fine job of carrying on the family business. [2007-6-6]

First standalone by Todd, continues the world well. Much more depressing than Anne's novels though, many deaths and not much joy.

I enjoyed this. I like the Pern books. I acknowledge they're not going to be classed as literary masterpieces, but I like the world, I like the people - and the dragons of course - and I like getting the chance to go back and visit on a regular basis.Todd McCaffrey has done a good job in his mother's world, and it's also good to know that the new things he introduces (mostly more history about the original colonists and their next generation) have most likely been given the go-ahead by Anne McCaffrey.Dragonsdawn is probably my favourite Pern book so I was delighted to know we were going to have more story in that time frame and it was well done. Series that start out as fantasy (or fantasy-like SF as McCaffrey considers Pern) have lately taken to rapidly discovering - or more often rediscovering - technology, so it was a nice change to see the last remaining few who knew the tech (mostly Wind Blossom) being forced to make the hard decisions about the priorities for saving the technology, machines and knowledge.I liked the link across time, especially when it became clear there wasn't going to be any actual time travel involved, but lots of guessing about the future and the past. It was nicely done.Lots of hints were dropped about Wind Blossom, the Eridani and the keeping of secrets, so I hope something more is done with that in the future. I don't mind tantalising hints if I know I'm going to get the payoff at some point. Hints that don't go futher than hints just annoy me. At this point I'm willing to offer the benefit of the doubt.I thought the characters were engaging, although needing a set of main characters in two different times meant no-one got as much character development as they might have done. All the same, I certainly liked Lorana and the others.I did think that having the two main bronze riders being called M'hall and M'tall could get a litte confusing, but since both had been created before this book, I guess there wasn't anything to do about it.I've got a bit rambling now, but basically a most enjoyable read without being too much strain on the brain. A nice visit to a familiar setting.However, I must say that I find it amazing how quickly these people managed to pick up advanced genetics (and with a three strand helix as well) so quickly and then apply it. It wasn't that easy when I did biochemisty and I did science right through school and university.