SF/F Review - Dragonflight

[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho]

Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

Synopsis: A young noblewoman in hiding must reclaim her family’s hold, bond with a newly hatched dragon-queen, and lead her people to victory over invading alien spores.

Book Review: The main thing I knew about Dragonflight was that this is the book that all the nerd girls of my childhood loved with undying affection. It was the chick-book for SF nerds. So when one of the older lady-readers of our book club wanted to revisit it, I was excited to finally see what this was all about.

What it’s all about is relationships. The protagonist is a young woman who spends a lot of her resources on developing and deploying relationships. She bonds with and raises her dragon. She bonds with and often manipulates the male lead. She forges relationships between various lords and strengthens the kingdom doing so. Her tools are primarily cunning, insight, and inspiring others to act in ways beneficial to her (and often to the world at large).

This isn’t because she lacks agency, it’s because she’s a small, slender girl in a medieval world of burly men. Most of the power structures are controlled by men. She works with the tools she has.

It is interesting how different this book (written in ‘68) is from what could be written nowadays. The protagonist is described by her physical beauty and slightness enough times that it was notable. This would be hard to do nowadays. The good guys have some extremely unpleasant views that are never remarked upon as anything but normal (being given comfort women when visiting neighboring holds, or considering barter & trade so demeaning that they would rather raid neighboring lands than stooping to that, or shaking/manhandling their wives during arguments). The novel doesn’t flinch in its “Yeah man, this is medieval Europe, they weren’t very progressive ya know? And yet they were still basically good people” delivery. Even just the previous century is a different country.

As a fantasy story, it’s OK. It’s very basic and doesn’t do much outside the standard story structure. The tensions are resolved quickly and don’t build on each other. There’s a simplicity to it all that’s kinda unexciting.

As a romance story, I think it’s pretty darn good? I don’t read romance so I don’t have much to compare it to. But from my standing as a naive reader, I liked it. I was invested in the relationship, it stayed interesting, and it went through several changes/evolutions as the story progressed. Also the seduction scene was really freakin’ hot. I would not have expected for a dragon mating dance to be super hot like that, but damn…!

I have a whole load of things to say about Lessa, her kink, and the R-word, but that’s for the next post.

By far the most interesting part of this novel was seeing masculinity portrayed as a desirable thing by a female author. Which actually will also need to be rolled into the Kinky Dragon Sex post, so I’ll put it there.

The second-most-interesting part of this novel is that McCaffrey made me sympathetic to the view-point-character no matter who she was writing. As soon as she was in the head of someone that was riding against our protagonists, it immediately became apparent why they were doing what they were doing and the good reasons they had for it, and that they were decent people too. The ability to model everyone in a conflict as full humans, and make the reader empathize with them and want them to win, is a remarkable talent. It says good things about the author as a person when they can do this. I believe this is someone I’d like to meet.

In terms of just story, character-arc, etc, I would actually Not Recommend this novel. But as a study into the recent past, a perspective on what women enjoy, and an appreciation of the roots of SF, I think it has enough Other Merit to bring it to Recommended if you care about those things. I do, and since the conceit here is “would I recommend this novel to 2-weeks ago me that hasn’t read it yet?” I’m going with Recommended.

Book Club Review: This is significantly more fun in a book club. Since the primary focus of the novel is the relationships, and humans like to gossip about relationships, it added to my overall enjoyment of the book to be able to talk about it afterwards. The discussion in our book club also veered to the changes in culture over the years, and how SF has evolved, which was also very interesting! And finally, the book is a reasonable length, it’s almost short by today’s standards, and flowed quickly. All these factors together made it a good book club choice. Recommended.

Personal Note: I know it’s been quite a few months since I posted an SF/F book review. I’ve been doing a lot of travel and a fair bit of life-rearranging, and whenever a book didn’t really strike my fancy I would skip it rather than force my way through so I could attend book club. That’s a lot of them, due to Sturgeon’s Law. I have missed my book club peeps. :( I’ll hopefully be reading more again going forward, but it’s unlikely I’ll return to 2x month for quite a while.

Dragonflight on Amazon (sponsor link)