Pern falls into the category of fantasy and science fiction settings I am unable to take entirely seriously, because I read Terry Pratchett’s parodies of them before I read the original (see also: Ringworld, H. I first came across Pern via the Legends collection of short stories from fantasy writers, which I previously mentioned in my article about Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. We can see a bitter parallel in our own society at present, in that we have gone almost exactly a century since the last major pandemic, and without such institutions ourselves to preserve its memory, lives have been lost because we had to relearn lessons that were already learned during the Spanish Flu.īefore going on, I should clarify my own position as a commenter on this series. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire features the recurring years-long winters and the Night’s Watch to guard against them, Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive features the Desolations and the Knights Radiant to rebuild society in between them, and so on.

This basic template, of a fantasy society whose institutions are driven by the need to maintain knowledge of a recurring threat once it has faded from living memory so that the people are not caught offguard when it returns, would become highly influential on the genre. This sets up the template for a fascinating society whose feudal rulers rule from protected ‘Holds’ into which people can retreat for safety, whose harpers and singers are devoted to keeping memory of the Thread and its dangers alive in the two centuries between falls, and which is protected by the Dragonriders, an aloof society apart in their high ‘weyr’ fortresses.

The dragon riders of pern