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In the beginning, before Thread, before the Dragons, before the Holds and the Weyrs and the elite Dragonriders of Pern, was just the great ships gliding through space with nearly six thousand colonists prepared to tackle the mighty task of beginning a new world on a strange planet.
It was a jewel of a planet, with rivers and seas and mountains, and breathable air and growing things. Then came the terror. The strange, unidentifiable circles in the grass suddenly revealed a meaning, and every living thing was at risk. Many died -- a horrible and consuming death. All resources, every man, woman and child had to fight the terrible nightmare of Thread.
But a new creature was about to save the planet. From the delicate fire lizards a new life was born -- a new symbiosis between man and beast.
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Dragonsdawn has long been on my 'to read again' list and finally, as I settled comfortably and began to read it, I remembered why. The sheer scale of McCaffrey's creation really becomes apparent in this volume - in Dragonflight and the books telling of the later history of Pern, most of the action is concerned with the dragons and their riders. Not so in this. In fact, they only completely steal the limelight in the final half of the book! Fans of the dragons shouldn't be too disappointed though - having read a few of the others before this I was pleased to see where some of the place names originated from, and fascinated by the rich detail and scientific crediblity of Pern. And the build up to the dragons is very satisfying - makes it all worth the wait! :-)
In this book you get a much broader view of the beginnings of human life on Pern, how the culture was established, where certain elements found in other books originate from (examples including klah and agenothree) and - well, the detail and imagination just grabbed my attention!
The characters that emerge in the book - some prominent from the beginning, others coming into play later on - are well crafted and evoked a huge range of feelings in me, from sympathy and amusement to abject dislike. Also, although the recommended reading order places Dragonsdawn far along the list, I don't think a prior knowledge of the skills and purposes of the dragons and their riders, indeed even Pern, is essential. It paves the way for further reading, and stands alone as a classic in the series.
McCaffrey is a skilled and inspiring writer and this book is a pleasure to read, one that I would recommend to anyone who is a fan of the Dragon Series with the desire to broaden the view a bit and look at how human life on Pern began.
Three colony ships, known in later books as the 'Dawn Sisters' bring the colonists to the planet known as Pern, earmarked as eligible for colonisation some two centuries earlier. This story follows their landing and progress through the eyes of one of the children aboard, Sorka Hanrahan, as she makes friends with Sean Connell and explores her new home.
Together they discover the dragonets, beautiful winged lizards which have a modicum of empathy with humans, and are among the first to face and survive the phenomenon of Thread when it begins to descend on the planet eight years after the landing.
Thread eats alive almost anything it hits, and this spells disaster to the mainly agricultural colony. In desperation, the colonists turn to the dragonets as their last chance to save their world and their lives, and Sean and Sorka are once again in the forefront of the new initiative: but can seventeen genetically altered dragonets, no matter how loyal and dedicated, save a planet?
This is a great introduction to the rest of the series, and an ingenuous answer to the persistent question from later books of how humans and dragons came to be sharing a planet. I would recommend it, either as part of the series or even as a stand-alone.
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