Recommends: Dragon Riders

I don't read blogs as much as I'd like to because I seem to be so dang busy all the time lately, but this piece by Chris over at Stealing Commas blew me away: A thousand generations of Dragon Riders.

One of the funnest and yet hardest parts (for me) of fantasy writing is the world-building. Fun, because you can do pretty much whatever you like and have a jolly time doing it; hard, because it all has to weave together into a coherent narrative and heaven help you if someone comes along and, say, asks why Harry Potter can't 'participate' in the Tri-Wizard Championship by walking onto the field and getting zero points each time. (Because SHUT UP, THAT'S WHY, I'm guessing. Fantasy is hard, ya'll.)

So here is a dragon rider story that takes into account the evolution of weaponry, agriculture, and mathematics as a function of a fantasy world with dragon riders. And it is awesome.

RECOMMENDS! What have you been reading/writing/thinking about this week?

22 comments:

DavidCheatham said...

There's a fanfic where Harry does almost exactly that. He does 'try', just in case he's required to do that, but his 'tries' consist of him casting, in each respective task: 'Accio Golden Egg', 'Accio Ron Weasley', and finally he walks ten feet into the maze and 'Accio Triwizard Cup'. Then he just sits down and waits after that trivial attempt fails.

Bificommander said...

Sounds interesting, though scary by association. A female friend of mine recently borrowed the three main books from her favorite fantasy series, Dragonriders of Pern which purposed to do kind of the same thing: Building a whole fantasy world and society around the use of Dragon riding. And I did not like it at all. I didn't bother with the third book after the other two completely failed to get me invested. The books either completely fumble their three-act structure, or never tried but failed to put anything in return. There is a share of world building, but since I couldn't care less about anyone in that world it doesn't matter so much to me. And oh my, the gender roles... Female author, female friend that recommended it, so I feel I might be speaking out of turn here, but man was this uncomfortable at times. Out of curiosity, are there any female posters here that know that series and could tell me if I am overreacting, or if it is as bad as I think it is?

Anyway, I did like the concept of a fantasy world with riding a dragon (who wouldn't), so perhaps I'll be giving this a read sometime.

Mime_Paradox said...

Wrote a post about one of my favorite videogames, and how it's totally worth emulating despite the fact that it's not particularly good at actually being a videogame. My thoughts on Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and why it's one of my videogaming sacred cows can be seen
here.

Marie Brennan said...

Content note: Dubious Consent of the Telepathically-Bonded Animal Companion-Mediated Variety

Did your friend start you with Dragonflight, or somewhere else in the series?

Because yeah, the gender roles in that first trilogy are not exactly great. Lessa's relationship with F'lar is, if not the source of "if it happened because your telepathically-bonded animal companions were getting it on, then it isn't rape, it's awesome" trope, then certainly the example a lot of later stories look back to. Also, see "tiny girl-woman who gets Very Angry until her man shakes sense into her." Kylara gets slut-shamed, Brekke is a problematic contrast with her, and the Weyrwoman who precedes Lessa is a pretty terrible stereotype.

(And we won't get into the way McCaffrey, whose views on homosexuality were pretty terrible, glossed over the apparent gang-banging of green riders. But if you want a book which addresses that topic more directly, check out Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monett's A Companion to Wolves.)

I chalk a lot of it up to the author's age and when she wrote the early novels, but just because there are reasons doesn't mean you're going to like the result any better.

It's been a long time since I read any of those books, but I recall other parts of the series being better. The Harper Hall trilogy gets away (somewhat) from the Weyrs and follows a girl who wants to be a musician -- fairly standard-issue rebellion against societal expectations, but I enjoyed them -- and Dragondawn, which covers the settlement of Pern, had better female characters, so far as I remember.

Makabit said...

I loved the Harper Hall books as a kid--hell, I still love them. And yes, the gender roles are better in that, although Menolly is well in the bounds of the 'good because not girly' character I was complaining about a few threads back.

Bificommander said...

I read Dragonflight and Dragonquest. The one I still have but didn't bother with is The White Dragon. Is that one any good? I guess it's gonna focus on the little kid from book 2, and the thread is gone so that waste of time is out of the way. If you say that other books are better, that one might have some potential.

Marie Brennan said...

Honestly, it's been nigh unto twenty years since I read that book, so I don't really know. I seem to recall there's a problematic incident with Jaxom and a girl somewhere early on, but beyond that, I remember almost nothing.

Really, if you're going to read more Pern, you should probably try a different part of the series entirely.

bificommander said...

TW: Dubious Consent of the Telepathically-Bonded Animal Companion-Mediated Variety or DCTBACMV for short

When an author includes in his characterization or world building sex as being a necessary consequence of any unrelated action or any unrelated action being a consequence of sex, other than procreation or mutual pleasure, you've written yourself into a minefield already. It's pretty hard to get your story and your characters out of that intact, without triggering an explosion of Unfortunate Implications that make you and/or your characters look like bad people. But the first Dragonrider novel really bugged me, since they didn't even seem to try.

We're given a situation where dragons needed to be bonded by humans, and that two bonded humans would have an uncontrollable desire for sex if their dragons mate, and it is vital for the safety of the world that these dragons breed. Okay, problematic, you probably shouldn't have made your fantasy world work like that, but not FUBAR yet. So how do the characters we're supposed to sympathize with handle the fact this situation? By picking the political leader of their organization based on which man's dragon last mated with the queen. Oh dear. If several men (always men, but one problem at the time) have conflicting ideas about what policies to follow, they all send their dragons up to mate with the queen, and the 'winner' gets to be the leader, after the no-denying-possible sex with the queen's rider.

That's just... about the worst way to deal with the situation, such as it is. Instead of, y'know, giving the queen's rider a choice of which man she likes and sending his dragon up they allow free-for-alls. The former still has its share of problems (what if she is in love with a man without a dragon? Or with no man? Or a woman?), but it would at least make it possible to sympathize with the characters who live in a world where the queen-mating is necessary, if not with the writer who designed that world. But this is just terrible. Most of all for the queen's rider, but kinda for the men too. If you want to become the boss because you feel you could do well, or because the current leader is bad, or just because you don't want the whole Weyr to fall apart, you're not given a choice either. Have sex with the queen's rider or get out.

But of course, the first book goes the extra mile by never telling the girl any of this. The current leader in that book is an old guy who for months is busy instructing her in her 'duties' as queen's rider, but as far as I can tell never brings up the 'Oh yeah, a year from now your queen wants to mate, and I'm planning to send my dragon to mate with her so I can stay boss, and you'll have wild sex with me even though we can't stand each other and I could be your grandfather.' And the supposed hero of the story's only improvements over this guy is that she doesn't hate him quiet as much and that his political plans are better. But he too doesn't seem to think the uncontrollable sex urge is something he needs to mention until after it has happened.

Laocorn said...

Wrote a post about one of my favorite videogames [...] despite the fact that it's not particularly good at actually being a videogame.

Heh, funny you should mention that! I was just about to bring up the originally-8-bit JRPG _Final Fantasy II_, a game which was filled with bold moves (especially with its grim storyline, given the era of its release) and with big mistakes (many of the mechanics, though not all of them). It and its spiritual successor, the first _SaGa_ game, are close to my heart, and I would be happy to champion them.

[piano renditions from the first _SaGa_ game, along with a summary of its kinda-Gnostic story]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmZuSEYVtDc

My own first choice, however, for game to champion for the rest of my life if I had to choose only one? That would probably be Konami's platformer _Castlevania Bloodlines_, which is sorely underrated and overlooked in my opinion.
potential TW: animated gore, dismemberment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDvtg-DNpXs

Originally I was going to bring up _Final Fantasy II_ in this thread just because it had (to a greater extent in its backstory than in its story-story) dragon-riding, -psychically-bound knights who may have been inspired by Anne McCaffrey's work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG1IhKSuKfE&feature=BFa&list=PL31D24C1307A71BD4
"May have been" would be the operative phrase above, though. I don't know if the first book let alone its series was ever translated into Japanese, and the left-hand side of the Wikipedia page shows there to be articles only in European languages.

Ana, most of what's been on my mind since the end of Golden Week has been work, so reading about fantasy novels and geeking out with old video game clips has been a good way to unwind this evening.

Mime_Paradox, is that Kusanagi Kyo you have set as your icon? If so, *SNK siblingfist*!

Makabit said...

To try to cast the Weyrmen in a slightly better light, I think they're people from an incredibly insular culture who have lived by this demented politico-sexual code for so many generations that it simply doesn't occur to them that it might be weird, upsetting, stupid-sounding or unacceptable to anyone from inside or outside.

"But it is the way. You will balance this spoon on your nose with the others. The one who keeps the spoon on his nose longest will become our leader, and also get a lifetime supply of Heinz baked beans. Surely this is the only way to run a tribe?"

But this, of course, simply shifts the blame back to poor Anne McCaffrey, who I love so much--in large part because she wrote rave reviews for young fantasy authors with so much verve. Every novel I saw for years, it seemed, had "One of the most powerful new voices in fantasy! I LOVED IT!" from Anne McCaffrey on the cover.

The color-coding of the dragons, and the necessary-but-not-exactly gender linking is what always struck me as super-not-needed. What kind of a species has five distinct coloration schemes within a single population which are not only gender- but status- linked? And the whole situation with the green riders, which I missed the first six times or so I read the first trilogy--give me a break, I was eleven--is just nonsensical.

I guess I'm not entirely opposed to the idea that telepathically bonding with critters that go into heat and have distinct mating cycles would cause you to respond in a parallel manner, although I do wonder why it doesn't go both ways. If the rush of dragon sex can send you running off to mate with people you wouldn't normally get near with a sharp stick, is the dragon then learning to block out your constant, all the time, sexual thoughts, and weird habit of mating a couple of times a week whether you're fertile or not? What is this like on the other end?

depizan said...

I guess I'm not entirely opposed to the idea that telepathically bonding with critters that go into heat and have distinct mating cycles would cause you to respond in a parallel manner, although I do wonder why it doesn't go both ways.

It would make far more sense to have it go both ways. It would also be less squicky if your telepathically bonded critter going into heat simply made you horny. There's something very bizarre about the one-way only, must mate with the bonded partner of the critter your critter is mating with set up. It seems less logical and more a cheap way to get tension or angst.

Though I suddenly want a scene in some telepathic bonding book where the critter is squicked by how much humans think about sex. "What is wrong with your species!? Can't you go five minutes without wanting to hump something?"

Marie Brennan said...

Some of that can be explained (not the same thing as "excused") by the fact that Dragonflight was first published in 1968 -- the era of the romance-novel trope where the hero forces the heroine to have sex with him, and she ends up enjoying it. Which is, yes, extremely rapey . . . but is also a narrative work-around for the fact that women still weren't supposed to want or initiate sex. This allowed female characters to experience pleasure without being "guilty" of slutty behavior. McCaffrey took that the extra fantasy step: you can't be blamed if your dragon made you do it. (See also: alien mind control, sex pollen, and a bunch of other tropes still very popular in fanfiction.)

I don't remember whether it's in Dragonflight or somewhere later that the characters start hinting that it isn't as simple as you describe -- that the queen often decides which dragon she wants to permit to "catch" her, and that this may be based on such considerations as whether she likes that dragon, whether her rider likes the other rider, what will be good for the Weyr, etc. It's also true that the riders are supposed to be much more sexually permissive than the rest of Pern, so the Weyrwoman might be able to to keep a lover of her own that isn't the Weyrleader. But none of that changes the fact that she is required, by dint of having telepathically bonded to a creature she loves more than anything in the world, to have out-of-control sex with a guy she didn't choose.

And yes, that's a pretty crappy situation to live in -- for the men as well as the women, as you point out. (F'lar REALLY REALLY wants to fix everything that's wrong with the Weyr . . . but he has no power to do so until he's nailed Lessa to the wall.) It's disturbing on the level of sexual morality, and an abysmal way to run your politics. Which I can be fine with, honestly, if the story acknowledges the fact that these are problems -- but McCaffrey never seemed much interested in doing that. It's been later authors who addressed the issue, in their own works.

Marie Brennan said...

The color-coding of the dragons, and the necessary-but-not-exactly gender linking is what always struck me as super-not-needed.

It's sexual dimorphism taken to a weird extreme -- but whatever; it's hardly the weirdest reproductive setup I've seen in science fiction. (That honor probably belongs to the ecosystem produced by the descolada virus in Orson Scott Card's later Ender books.) I could have done without the part where she mapped that onto the riders, though, with women only bonding to golds -- even though greens are also female! -- and so on.

If the rush of dragon sex can send you running off to mate with people you wouldn't normally get near with a sharp stick, is the dragon then learning to block out your constant, all the time, sexual thoughts, and weird habit of mating a couple of times a week whether you're fertile or not? What is this like on the other end?

We don't really know what's going on inside the heads of animals that have distinct mating seasons, but I think the assumption here is that they just can't get interested if it's not time for them, regardless of what their telepathically-bonded partner is doing. Conversely, think of how single-minded animals tend to become when they go into heat/sense a female in heat. There's very little room left over for other kinds of thought.

(I seem to recall the dragons reacting in some fashion when their riders were getting it on, but not to the extent of seeking out a mate themselves.)

Mercedes Lackey toned this down a lot for the Companions in the Valdemar books. Heralds feel what their Companions are up to, and vice-versa, but how strongly they feel it depends on the strength of their bond, and they can often block it out; or if they can't, the partner not busy having sex is mostly just really distracted. Nobody gets compelled into sex.

Me, I've got a setting in which I haven't yet written anything publishable where the protagonists belong to a humanoid fantasy race that goes into heat themselves. No animal companions involved. If I ever do something with this, it'll be interesting to work through just how that will change the way they think about sex.

Mime_Paradox said...

Mime_Paradox, is that Kusanagi Kyo you have set as your icon? If so, *SNK siblingfist*!

Shingo, actually, recolored to make him a sort-of-convincing sprite version of myself. Kyo would have been too long-haired and buff. But yeah, KoF represent *sibling fist*.

SaGa love! I never got to play the first game, but the sequel--a.k.a. Final Fantasy Legend II--is still one of my favorite games for the original Game Boy. I'm actually working on a series of posts about its 2009 remake, seen here.

I've never played Bloodlines although I've heard lots of good things about it. Its SNES counterpart, though, IV, is one of my favorite in the series.

Makabit said...

Mercedes Lackey toned this down a lot for the Companions in the Valdemar books. Heralds feel what their Companions are up to, and vice-versa, but how strongly they feel it depends on the strength of their bond, and they can often block it out; or if they can't, the partner not busy having sex is mostly just really distracted. Nobody gets compelled into sex.

I love Mercedes Lackey in so many ways, but my problem with almost everything she writes is that...it's toned down. Telepathic bonds that are lovely, and make you special, but don't actually make you more animal-like in any way sort of ties into that for me. She doesn't follow the challenging thought, she follows the wish-fulfillment one. As someone pointed out a bit back, that's one of the things fantasy is about--it's just one of the ones I tend to be very ambivalent about when it's all up on the surface.

As problematic as a thousand things about the Pern books are, I buy the essential set-up. Thread is a clear and horrifying danger to this society, and the social status and leeway accorded to the dragonriders is in direct proportion to the desperate need for them.

I never bought the Heralds in the same way. I keep muttering to myself, "What these people need is a well-organized army and diplomatic corps, neither of which has ever been improved on by magical horses."

But I should shut up, because the length of time I can spend on my love-hate relationship with the works of Mercedes Lackey is substantial, and interesting to no one but me.

Marie Brennan said...

Yeah, Mercedes Lackey is a bit like Star Trek for me -- too toned-down when it comes to all the internal problems. She has occasional actual Valdemaran villains, but mostly they're outsiders, because in Valdemar everything is Shiny! and Happy! And by divine fiat, no less. Heralds can basically never be bad guys because they're chosen by the Companions, and the Companions can see into their souls and so on.

(On the other hand, she does over-the-top aaaaaaaaaaaaaangst pretty well, and I ate that up with a spoon when I was thirteen.)

Like you, I don't mind Pern being screwed-up. What I mind is McCaffrey not noticing that certain things about it are screwed up.

JonathanPelikan said...

"When an author includes in his characterization or world building sex as being a necessary consequence of any unrelated action or any unrelated action being a consequence of sex, other than procreation or mutual pleasure, you've written yourself into a minefield already. It's pretty hard to get your story and your characters out of that intact, without triggering an explosion of Unfortunate Implications that make you and/or your characters look like bad people. "

I've actually done this, sort of. It's Complicated but the universe in question is basically an excuse for smut, so putting in a Thing It's Important For was something I did. I can certainly admit how it has the potential for, and is in fact, Problematic, even though I'm not going to change it.

(Humanoids with powers and abilities beyond human capability are created by Science, all are physically male, require to stay people. Otherwise, they lose their ability to think. Control mechanism to prevent them deciding to dispose of humans entirely. Doesn't work as planned, leads to Apocalypse War in the back-story that then leads to a Renewal of the World and now the world is a Wild Frontier to explore. With your male harem.]

This is what I have in mind when i think or say to da waifu "I could, and have, in fact, written Better Wish Fulfillment About Hot Guys."

Bificommander said...

Huh, I didn't realize the books were that old. Doesn't improve them, but hey if I could laugh at the Foundation novels for their 'OMG even Tim LaHaye wouldn't get away with this description of women today'-factor I guess I will let up some dislike for the author for writing it. But it still doesn't make it any more fun to read for me.

On the 'two way effect', wasn't it another 'look at what unreliable whore that Kylara is' plot points in the second book? I think she went of to have some more sex with her boyfriend while Brekke's dragon was trying to mate, so Kylara's dragon also went into heat and tried to muscle her way into the mating, causing them to fight.

Marie Brennan said...

@bificommander: you've read the books WAY more recently than I have, so you may be right about Kylara. I seemed to remember it had something to do with her not getting her dragon far enough away, and Prideth's? heat was triggered by being too near another queen's mating flight; Kylara was there because of her own nookie time, but that isn't what put Prideth over the edge. But as I said, it's been a LOOOOOOOOONG time since I read the series, so I could be misremembering.

Chalcedony_cat said...

Kylara's queen was near mating, so was Brekke's queen, Kylara was supposed to stay put so the queens wouldn't fight, because two queens trying to mate at the same time get violent. Instead she went out and had Sexy Fun Times and Tragedy resulted for both her and Brekke... and then later they tried to get Brekke a new dragon and she wouldn't play because losing your dragon is too tragic for that.

Pern was My Fandom when I was a teenager, and there were a whole bunch of Pern-themed online multi-player roleplaying games (this in the days before the web, and thus long before visual MMOs) where we had dragons and Weyrs and hatchings and all sorts of workarounds for the rapey bits, not to mention much drama as any game with 100+ players is likely to have.

Then I got older and tried to reread the books and oh, dear, yes. Even the better ones are still pretty bad, and after McCaffery's brief bout of attempting more direct feminism in the Harper books, she ends up writing super-duper-rapetastic stuff in some other ones, which caused me to give up on reading her work forever. I am sometimes still tempted to reread a few of my favourites (especially the one where they discover vaccination and Save The World from a plague), but I fear that my remaining good memories will be destroyed by any revisiting.

chris the cynic said...

You know, I've never read a single book with dragon riders in it.

One wonders how something I wrote would compare to the apparently well established genre. At the moment, though, all I've done is the short thing Ana linked to, which just contains history, not any actual plot.

depizan said...

This is awesome. Maybe it's just because I'm not much of a competitive person, but it always bugs me in fiction when a character is roped into some kind of contest - often one that nothing important hinges on (like the Triwizard Tournament) - and then tries very hard to win it. WHY!? If the character has been established as a deeply competitive person, okay, but often it's written as if anyone in that circumstance would naturally do their best to try and win. (Honestly, I sort of buy it from Harry. And sort of don't. I feel like his characterization waffles between really lazy and kind of competitive. So I'd buy the fan fic version, too.)

Of course, I come to these things having once been sort of roped into a competition myself. My eighth grade history teacher urged me to do the Geography Bee test thingy for our school. I went meh, whatever, and did it. And, unfortunately, won for our middle school. Convincing the school to let the first runner up go on to compete against the other schools in town took some doing. But if I'd been forced to? I'd have answered every damned thing as wrong as possible. What's the capital of the United States? Lima, Peru.

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