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Since almost exactly a year ago, apparently. Whaaat!

And it's a Ninth Pass book! About Piemur, spying down in the south! Whaaaaaat!!!

And it's not by Todd! It'll be interesting to see what a new family member does with the world. ^_^

From the synopsis, it sounds like it might be set about the time the Southern riders steal Ramoth's egg? I think Piemur was down south by then, and that's the closest we ever came to dragons fighting dragons, IIRC. I have no idea what Piemur could have to do with averting disaster at that time, though, since we already know what (and who) really saved the situation.

Maybe there will be some other setup, and the synopsis is sliiightly exaggerating the chances of battle erupting? I hope so? Much as filling in the spaces of established events is fun, and something I'll probably enjoy, and much as trying to wedge in a new disaster might be really awkward, I don't want Piemur's actions overshadowed by Jaxom's right out of the gate!

Well, we shall see.

~Neshomeh

It's actually Marcel Delaware. I'll definitely remember that in future.

The new TV series isn't the only His Dark Materials-related release this autumn - The Secret Commonwealth came out a few days ago, and I've literally just finished reading it.

Spoiler warning! This post will contain spoilers for The Secret Commonwealth and also La Belle Sauvage! Spoiler warning! This post will contain spoilers for The Secret Commonwealth and also La Belle Sauvage!Spoiler warning! This post will contain spoilers for The Secret Commonwealth and also La Belle Sauvage!
Spoiler warning! This post will contain spoilers for The Secret Commonwealth and also La Belle Sauvage! Spoiler warning! This post will contain spoilers for The Secret Commonwealth and also La Belle Sauvage!Spoiler warning! This post will contain spoilers for The Secret Commonwealth and also La Belle Sauvage!


(hoping that's a large enough spoiler block)
So I was very intrigued to see what was going to happen here, and what's happened to Lyra, Malcom, Alice and everyone else in that world in the last eight years.

I certainly wasn't disappointed! There were several things which surprised me, and a few "that's not what I expected" moments, but nothing which really made me hate it. The only thing that disappoints me is that I have to wait over a year for the third book in the trilogy!

More specific thoughts:

Mrs Lonsdale is Alice? I did not see that coming, but in hindsight it makes a lot of sense...

The whole thing about rationalism and imagination is interesting... I feel like I'm kind of on both sides of the argument at once. The disagreements with daemons part was very interesting - it's nice to see these things explored a lot more, although I'm not entirely convinced by Pan's leaving Lyra.

And Malcolm is in love with Lyra? I'd thought about that before reading this and decided it probably wouldn't happen, since there was a lot of Malcolm/Alice ship-teasing in La Belle Sauvage. Although the relationship between Malcolm and Alice was something I quite liked - for me there isn't really enough of "man-and-woman-are-very-close-without-being-in-love" in most books I read.

I guess I never really considered that there were a lot of people without daemons in Lyra's world - but it isn't the severing seen in Northern Lights… The darker side of all this, though, the trying to buy daemons, it seems pretty horrible but I could definitely see it happening.

I was definitely intrigued by the introduction of Marisa's brother and mother... I may or may not be slightly obsessed with Asriel and Marisa, so any information I can get on them is precious, particularly with the fanfiction I'm writing about them at the moment. I would definitely like to see more of (what's-his-name...) Marcus Delaware, and find out more about his backstory with Marisa.

The politics of the Magisterium worked well for me, as well. I could definitely see that level of ruthlessness...

To get back to the thread's actual topic, I also thought the trailer looked really good. I'm not really a massive TV fan but will definitely be watching this - and hopefully it will keep me going until the third book comes out!

Sidenote: By no means, by the way, do I think that this is the most important element of Dragonseye. But because I read it at a very specific time and place it's what impacted me. Silly? Yes. It's rather unfair to all the other parts of Dragonseye, which I hazily recall being very good. I also can't do a thing about it.

But anyways, more on the subject... yeah. Pern has... a lot of problems with the way dragons work. Although, up to now, I didn't really think of commitment (to the concept) as one of them.

Maybe this is because I didn't quite get the same read you did. See, I never felt like polyamory was really on the cards. Dragonriders slept around a lot, sure, but it didn't seem like the series ever had any pretentions of setting up a real poly relationship. There was always going to be one primary romantic partner per character.

Which... is fine, I guess. The real problem comes in with McCaffrey's weird male/female double standards. The men sleep around. The women don't. Not usually. There are a few exceptions who aren't portrayed as evil, a bit further down the line... But not many..

So yes. Sooner or later if you have issues with something in Pern, it probably comes down to having issues with McCaffrey's worldview. Which most people do...

SINCE WHEN IS THERE A NEW PERN BOOK?!?!

"Dragon's Code is a book in the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. It was written by her daughter, Gigi McCaffrey. Dragon's Code was first published by Ballantine Books in October 2018.

"In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Dragonriders of Pern series, Gigi does her mother proud, adding to the family tradition of spinning unputdownable tales that recount the adventures of the brave inhabitants of a distant planet who battle the pitiless adversary known as Thread."

!!!!!

Okay, so that's my news for the day... back to actually replying. ^_^

I remember the couple in Red Star Rising (I see the title was changed because the American publishers 'felt the book would sell better with Dragon in it', which makes sense, though RSR was kind of pitched as a followup to First Fall); they were... cute, I think? It's been a while. I remember primarily liking the book because of how well it portrays a society in decline, but not decay. They're losing stuff, but also forging new traditions.

Also, it does a great job of showing Bitra Being Bitra, which was mostly just told to us in other books.

... hmm, the wiki asserts that 'unconfirmed information' has RSR being ghostwritten by Todd, which makes a certain sense; it does have a different feel even to Dragonsdawn.

Anyway. I feel like Anne locked herself in with her original idea, which was that dragonriders were all some kind of polypan setup. Their promiscuity is frequently referenced in the early parts of Flight, and she quite clearly imagined that none of them cared a whit who they were with during a mating flight.

Which can make perfect sense, given that telepathic dragons are involved not only in the Search process, but in Impression itself. You just have an un-explicated criterion that a dragon will only Impress someone who's very open in their sexual orientation. Heck, you can even justify it on the basis that they have to be able to unconditionally love a dragon, which is a gigantic carnivore that will irrevocably take over their life. You need people who don't get hung up on this stuff.

Only she very quickly realised that she didn't want to write that. What she wanted to write was heterosexual near-monogamy. Which is why she created a female Green rider right out of the gate; why she gave Brekke her hangups (and arguably why she then killed Winreth); why she decreed that Only Mnementh Flies Ramoth; why she spent so much time condeming Kylara for doing... exactly what she initially claimed dragonriders do. &c &c.

And she never really improved on that score, even when she tried; even if P'tero and M'leng aren't Todd's work, they're still emphatically monogamous, and Skies of Pern... well, there's a subplot which can be summed up as 'female riders being forced to have sex based on their dragon's needs is kind of icky... but I'm nice, so it's okay'.

Seriously.

(I've just been reminded that there's a fairly charming gay couple in Moreta; I have vague memories of that but can't give any details.)

Anyway yeah: dragons. :)

hS

You can watch it here and oh my god it looks fantastic!

I can't speak for the other periods but what you've just said makes me certain beyond doubt that the Victorian PPC's consoles are, in fact, the demonic lovechild of a Difference Engine and a linotype machine.

For those who don't have a relative in the print trade, a linotype machine is basically what they used to set type for printing back in the day, by which I mean up until the late 1980s. They squirted molten metal into moulds set by a typesetter that were selected by pressing down levers. The individual letters, called keys, were cast from harder metals and kept in a box, from which the typesetter selected them and built up a line of text. Metal spacers were used to put gaps between words, and upon completing a line, you pushed a big lever to enter the type into the machine, whereupon it was used to cast a mould and print the result.

If you wanted to use a different kind of letter, you could use a different set that came from a different type foundry. Capital letters were kept in a separate box. So basically:-

You pressed in keys and used a space bar to make words, you could choose between upper and lower case letters, and you could change your font.

Y'all done learned a thing! =]

I've only got the first two so far, thanks to my regular Goodwill book runs, and I'll probably wait until I have the entire series before I start. But you've certainly got me excited for when I do! I'm glad to hear they're more readable than Kingdom Keepers.

—doctorlit, stockpiling books until there's time enough at last

...This all leads my to a different subject:

Consoles.

Going by the grand tradition of taking one-off lines from TOS and taking them far too seriously, we know that by the mid-1990s consoles were comparable to the rapidly-advancing computers of the era. We know this because before the Fanfic Explosion, agents would play Quake on the consoles in the downtine between missions (as per Acacia's statements).

In the grand DoSAT tradition, it's safe to assume that PPC consoles in any era a) look like no other computer in the multiverse, and b) are built from a set of radically different technologies, held together with chewing gum and duct tape.

But while it's possible that consoles were so advanced to begin with that they weren't altered at all as the 90s rolled in, it's much more interesting to assume they didn't (and lets me think about designs more in line with the popular imagination of the 70s and 80s).

Being a computer nerd, my natural instinct is that in prior decades consoles were literally that: consoles, monochrome text monstrosities with extra weird gibbons and bobbins and bits, all wired wired up to some mainframe deep inside DoSAT (which is presumably part Difference Engine, part Supercomputer, part potato, two-thirds sentient, and literally eats punchcards for breakfast).

But it's just as likely that these old consoles were just printers that spit out ticker-take mission assignments. Or that agents would get paper mail...

(written in about fifteen minutes as I have other stuff to write and not that much time)

Something was on fire. Tiger wasn’t having much success in putting it out: the brute force method of simply using Water-Conjuring Spells would leave him magically exhausted in seconds and there was no river nearby which he could – wait. An idea struck him, and he grinned.

It only took him a second to open a portal to the River Amphis, a mile away, and then he had the suitable supply of water which he needed to be able to put out the burning building, given enough organisation and planning to efficiently transport the water.

Unfortunately, he was on his own. No-one to run back and forth, carrying buckets: he’d have to do all of the work himself. That meant using a lot of magical power, but if he could be certain that it would work it would be worth it to protect what this building contained.

Books. Immensely valuable books, any one of which contained spells with the power to shatter continents, rituals which could decimate the Island’s population in a fraction of a second, tales of creatures that could crack the toughest of rocks with one terrible blow.

And someone was trying to destroy them all. The fire had been started deliberately. There was only one explanation: to keep the knowledge they contained out of the hands of his father.

In that case, why was he on his own? Why wasn’t someone else helping him to save this library?

There was no time to dwell on it now, because he needed to control a raging river and use it to put out the flames before it was too late. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and summoned all his power for a spell which would control the water and let him move it as he wished without falling foul of the regular laws of physics.

The spell was at the edge of his power limit, but it was said that magical power could increase a little when you needed it most, and whether that was true or not, the spell caught and gave him control of about two hundred metres’ worth of river water.

Slowly, carefully, he gathered the water together into a collection of spheres about a metre in diameter. One by one, he manoeuvred the spheres through the portal and dropped them onto the burning library. The flames had yet to spread to the areas that held the most valuable books, so if he could control the water finely enough and quickly enough there was a chance that he could limit the worst of the damage.

I mean... they have to be in there, right? They just haven't been cast yet. Right?

I think it's clear that they're not so much playing fast and loose with the timeline as ignoring it altogether - kind of like the MCU does with Marvel Comics, or new Star Wars does with the old EU. That isn't necessarily a bad thing in this specific case: it lets them do their CSI: Ankh-Morpork thing but still have actual character change. The only ways to show Cheery's 'coming-out', or Angua and Carrot getting together, are either to directly adapt the books they happen in - or ignore the book timeline altogether. Pterry's characters mostly stayed pretty static between books, Carrot's meteoric promotions aside.

I think the reason I'm more forgiving of this than, say, monkeying with Tolkien's timeline is that the Discworld was never about history. Vimes' resurrection of the Watch doesn't spring out of the entire story of Ankh-Morpork: it arises from the right-here-and-now need for Vetinari to check the power of the Guilds. The history is there, but it's just there to flesh things out, not to provide essential motivation.

Put another way: you can have Vimes without Old Stoneface, but you can't have Aragorn without Isildur.

(Is Carcer not supposed to be pretty, btw? It's been a bit, but I figured on him having a kind of disarming face until you get close enough to see the madness in his eyes. Kind of like Teatime.)

hS

I agree with S.M.F. - this sort of thread is great fun. ^_^

Thoth - I was alive but not around. I know we got a computer before we moved house in 1997, but I only really got online around 2000. I have run into some of the Google Group Usenet archives before - they're fascinating stuff!

So! It looks like (allowing for the vagaries of timelines), our PPC sprang up at the same time as the first online fanfic, through the BBSes. The Mysterious Somebody took over about the time Usenet came in, and left when things transitioned to websites.

One overlooked fact about the Reorganisation is that it coincides with the launch of Fanfiction.net, which the various histories peg as the end of the Great Schism and the first giant archive. Does this mean the MS and his League of Mary-Sue Factories had a hand in the massive growth of FFn? I couldn't possibly comment. ;) But I can imagine it led to some changes around HQ.

In fact... I'm wondering if the BBS/Usenet/Schism era had low enough fanfic throughput that the old three agent teams were usually the only team in their division. So Anya, Josie, and Suzie were the DBS: Star Wars team. The fact that there were three of them meant that they didn't all have to go out together - one could be ill, or on holiday, or pinched for addressing a crossover.

They would have had their own dedicated Intelligence support, who would have trawled the 'net (in whatever form it took at the time) for stories to send them. Everything would have been contained, so that different teams barely had to talk to each other.

Then FFn arose, and the Fanfic Explosion hit, and there was no time for that personal touch. Intel created the Sorting Room purely to sift through FFn, the divisions expanded, agents started working outside their single canons... it was an exciting and infuriating time.

The last vestige of the Personal Touch would have been the DCPS, founded by ex-Tolkien agent Tween to try and get back to the ultra-specialised feel. Since its full absorption by the PPC, the Board have been doing their level best to tone that element down, usually by giving Caseworkers other jobs as well.

---

So! On further consideration, I don't think the TCDA, PPA, &c&c can be just a time machine away. They all reference modern fandoms (suitably modified), and make use of stuff which they really shouldn't - fandom in the late Victorian era was not Steampunk.

So, new idea: they form alternate timelines where the 'PPC' never changed, just adopted new ideas as they came through. The Steampunk PPC started in the Victorian era, and picked up technology from the 30s-50s era (suitably modified to fit its theme). The Noir PPC started with Sherlock Holmes - so detective fiction - and changed the style of the detective stuff when Noir came around. The Volatile 'Multiverse' is actually the Fanzine PPC, extended down to the Internet age and fractured by the variety.

The Mirror Multiverse remains separate, and would have its own equivalents of all these things. The Lovecraftian 'verse is an obvious candidate, being a mirror of the Steampunk PPC - it just took off in a different direction. This gives us a map that looks something like this:



Each 'alternate multiverse' is thus revealed as simply an old PPC running past its time. I've put Solarpunk and the Shipverse on the same branch because I'm not sure which of them it should be: does Solarpunk arise from the Scifi PPC adopting Star Trek utopianism, or does the Shipverse arise from it adopting Hippy Free Love? There's obviously a certain amount of shuffling available.

One interesting claim I've made is that the pre-Reorganisation PPC is actually a separate organisation entirely. If it hadn't been reorganised as above, the Fanfic Explosion (and specifically the Anime Explosion) could have reshaped it into the Magical Girl 'verse. So these 'breakpoints' don't necessarily mean one organisation vanishing and another independently forming; they could just be a change in the one that was already there.

(My guess is that the 1890s was such a change, as was the 1960s, but that the shift from fanfic of Victorian material to the scifi magazines was a full on switch to a new organisation, just like the 1980s and the launch of our PPC with the Internet).

One thing I like about this is that it reestablishes the Mirror Multiverse as something special - it's the only true Other Multiverse.

hS

From what's on show here, they only kept the pretty coppers.

Where the hell are Fred and Nobby? What about the inevitably mocapped Detritus? It just feels to me like the show's idea of doing its own thing is to do five things that Pterry already did at completely different times with no regard for that timeline, and they only care about using the pretty characters mashed together. And even the ones that aren't pretty are now in the cases where they couldn't omit them, eg. Sybil and Carcer.

IDK maybe I'm just being overly protective.

((I have nothing to contribute, but I highly appreciate this thread. Discussions of historical fandoms and their complexities FTW!))

About McCaffrey peaking before the end, I mean. I haven't read Skies, but Dolphins clearly ends up in the... well, sort of in the B material, as it were. It's not like I dislike it, but it's not the best that's been done.

On the otherhand, Dolphins was published before Eye and Masterharper, which I loooove. So... well, maybe not.

As for Dragonflight... okay, I... the thing is... I... do like it. Sort of. My relationship with that book is complicated. There's a lot there that'd great, but it also just feels flawed, and just... not quite done yet. For a lot of reasons. I dunno. That's really just me.

But then there's Dragonseye. Which I really definitely have to re-read. The thing is, I remember reaally liking Dragonseye, but I'm worried that's just a result of the difference between expectations and reality.

Because I had been dreading reading Dragonseye. I thought it would be really painful for me to finish it. Why? Because one notable thing about Dragonseye is that it spends some time being written from the perspective of a Green Rider.

Pop quiz: You can only bring up one subject in fandom. Which do you pick to get a rise out of Thoth the fastest?

Answer: Green Riders in Pern.

The full implications are insane. And stupid. And McCaffrey didn't know what she was doing, definitely didn't think it through, and had some mental models regarding the subject that science has since shown to be flat wrong (And I suspect science had shown them flat wrong then too, but I don't want to judge). Any actual explanation for how Green Riders work (and, in addition, how there were so many of them in the several eras when girls weren't Searched) is an exercise in contortion and I can't think of one that isn't riddled with plotholes, scientifically inaccurate and implausible, just flat-out offensive, or all three.

Pern fans probably know most of what I'm obliquely referring to here but I'm not getting into it in depth because we'll be here all day if I do. Nobody needs another Rage Against The Green Dragons And McCaffrey from me, and the Pern fandom has collectively done a lot to try and patch over the many, many problems with what McCaffrey did when they write fan works. Well, the worst of them anyways.

But for the rest of you, suffice to say that this was my issue: Dragonseye was really the first time McCaffrey tried to write a gay character in Pern (they'd existed prior to this, we just hadn't seen much of them).

Why was I dreading this? because I emphatically didn't trust McCaffrey to do it!. Not well. Not as anything other than another stereotype... eurrgh.

But, as it turns out, I was wrong. P'tero and M'leng are more or less well-written, have a sense of personality, and just generally seem to be pretty solid characters.

And despite this being so minor and insignificant as to be essentially meaningless in the grand scheme of things, that kind of overshadowed the rest of Dragonseye for me. Sure, it didn't matter, but it was a big deal to me personally. Especially when I read that book—just as I was still coming to grips with my own sexuality.

Once again, I seem to have rather lost where I was going. Best to stop here, then...

I think I might actually agree with this.

I really like 'Dragonflight', but have never been able to remember what actually happens in 'Dragonquest'. I have, however, always loved the Harper Hall (who doesn't?). So I agree on the general, if not the specifics.

I... think I've only read 'Masterharper' once, so I don't remember it well; but accepting the premise that it's good, I'd agree that it would be a great point of entry. It introduces Pern through the people, and gives the dragons a sense of awe before we get to know them so closely. That way, when you get into the Menolly books, or 'Renegades', that awe - and even terror - makes sense to you, rather than being a 'why would you be scared of them, they're cool' situation.

Definitelt don't go in via the other prequels. 'Moreta' is a beautiful book that spoils every later Timing story. 'Red Star Rising' (aka 'Eye') is maybe my favourite book, but totally disconnected from everything else. 'Dawn' and 'First Flight' should be read once you meet Aivas, and introduce the Todd prequels.

That said, I do feel that Anne's creative output peaked before the end. 'Dolphins' always bored me, and 'Skies' is... I dunno, it just feels disjointed. Maybe it's just too separate from the North for me.

(As for Dresden Files: my entry point was a random book in the middle, after which I went back to the start. I'd recommemd that approach: pick something like 'Summer Knight' to see what it will be, then drop back to the start in the knowledge that better is on its way.)

hS

That is a good point. And you're right: Those old SF scenes didn't really have so much fanfic as Trek did. Probably because there was less on a pure lore level to be invested in in a lot of those settings. If I'm writing, it's trivial to borrow from Asimov without dragging the US Robotics Corporation along for the ride. So... people didn't. At least, not often, as far as I can tell.

Trek, Tolkien, the Sci-fi/Fantasy wave of that era changed that. There were a lot more settings that you could get invested in as places, and a lot more characters you might want to write about. And yeah, that was definitely around the time it tends to be widespread. Before that, it tended to have smaller circulation, sometimes only between authors (like, real, published authors, writing fanfic of each other's works. This happend. I think. I forget the source).

>Usenet fanfic communities in the... well, it doesn't actually specify, probably the early '90s?

Aaah, and now we arrive firmly in my wheelhouse. And you're probably dead on, actually (well, you would be... you probably lived a little of it). The mid-90s was when the Usenet hit its peak (although it was still well active into the 2000s—which we shouldn't forget, seeing as we were founded in the 2000s by self-acknowleged alt.fan.pratchett readers). Specifically, Usenet hit it big after September of 1993, when AOL and CompuServe users (and all the rest of the Common People who didn't work for large computing companies or inhabit universities) were given network access—or as the old-timers call it, "The September that Never Ended," which some may cite as the dawn of users complaining about a bunch newbies ruining everything, but that discounts all the TENEX/TWENEX/ITS/et al. users who were probably complaining about all the usenet users when they were the newbies.

Sorry, pointless digression. Anyways...

What's really fascinating is the state of "online" fandom pre-1993. Because it wasn't a uniform thing. If you were a Mere Mortal in the 80s, what you had (if you were lucky) was an IBM PC or an Apple II or a Commodore 64 and a slow modem. That was your lot. And what you could do was call other (often beefier) microcomputers sitting on people's desks somewhere in your vicinity (long distance? Oof, that'd be expensive...). These are BBSes, or Bulletin Board Systems. And they played host to their own strange cultures and quirky characters. Some of them even wrote fanfiction, although zines were probably more popular. Jason Scott's textfiles.com is a repository of files from these systems and this period.

But if you were one of the Chosen Few, and could dial into a university (or maybe even went to one...), you might have Usenet access, with all the powers (the ability to talk to people across the nation) and responsibilities (if you didn't toe the line local or remote administrators would disable your ability to post...) thereof. If you want to find out about the fan scene of the era here... oh man do you have a goldmine of text. Henry Spencer and others recorded over a decade of usenet posts back in the day and Google grabbed the lot of it. A simple search of Google Groups can grab you usenet content going back decades. Of course, these archives are messy and incomplete... so it's faaar from perfect. But it's better than some have.

But the reeeaally lucky ones were they ones who had internet access. Or... well, ARPAnet, probably. Either because they were at a university or similar... or because they could dial into MIT or similar (MIT's AI Laboratory would let literally anybody log into their computers and use them for free... which would lead to a lot of people spinning up MUD servers that MIT people would have to kill before they did Real Work). These users not only could probably access usenet, they had access to real-time communication–Real-time chat with other users (and by the end of the 80s, IRC, essentially as it is today), and other interesting distractions.

And by "other interesting distractions," I mean MUDs. Multi-User-Dungeons. Effectively, text-based MMOs, frequently with user-generated content. By the mid-80s, some of these had trickled down to the compute-poor BBS users, they'd really take off in the early-to-mid 90s (well, inasmuch as something like this could ever take off, even in those days), with several offered by services like AOL in addition to those hosted on the broader internet (usually on University computers, without the administration's knowledge or consent).

MUDs live on to this day, with several dedicated to roleplaying in prominent or not-so-prominent fandoms, such as RedwallMUCK. Indeed, fandom-based-roleplaying servers (or fandom-inspired sections of larger MUDs) were prominent from the start. As were MUDs dedicated to the furry fandom. Those are still popular as well.

And of course, having just finished talking about Masterharper of Pern sort of kind of, I can't leave Pern out when talking about MUDs. Because Pern is actually kind of a big deal in MUDs. Why? Because Pern fans couldn't write fanfic. But they could roleplay. Which they took full advantage of. PernMUSH was founded in 1991 and (after several careful negotiations with McCaffrey) only closed down more than 20 years later—unfortunately, I don't think they left any database dumps behind, so we can't even see the empty weyrs.

What is the relevance of any of this? Oh, there isn't any. I just wanted an excuse to ramble about internet history for a bit and the fandom connection was too good to pass up.

Well, long, long, long after I intended to read this book, I've finally done it.

Man, why did I wait?

Masterharper of Pern might just be in contention for the best book in the Pern series. It's a strong book, anchored by a strong character, full of action and excitement and diplomacy and good humor and love and loss and all that good stuff.

But that's not what I came here to talk to you about. I came here to talk about the draft problem with series.

The problem with a series, or any large work, really, is getting into it. They're by definition long, so... it can be rough. Various series have different approaches to this, like "start wherever you like! I have some recommendations, but really, you can't go wrong!" (Discworld), "Suffer through the first 50000 chapters, I swear it gets good eventually" (Homestuck), and "If I tell you how to get started, another fan will immediately attack me and provide you with contradictory advice" (Fate).

Pern belongs in the second category, which is fairly common. Most series have installments that to some degree depend on what came before. So you have to be familiar with what did come before in order. This can still be overwhelming to newcomers, but Pern isn't that dense in its canon. It's... really not that bad. It's far from the crushing weight of the Homestuck canon.

But of course, there's another problem. That is that long-running series rarely put their best foots forward. It usually takes a few installments for the author to find their footing, and before that, the books tend to suffer from various issues, and generally be Weird in the context in future series. This is why Sir Pterry himself will tell you not to start with the first Discworld novel. Which, to be fair, isn't a bad book. But it's certainly not representative of the later novels, nor is it of quite the same quality. It's Not Quite There Yet. The same with The Dresden Files, but you have to read the first books first in that series. I mean, they're entertaining, but new readers are sometimes a little bit disappointed. Ah well. At least they probably enjoyed it.

The unique thing about Pern is that it probably has a worse start that any of the above. Part of that is just that Pern is Really Really Weird and new readers will have to come to understand that weirdness and get used to it. The whole series really does feel like it's a product of its time, but not in the same way that, say, Asimov does. It's utterly unique, which is part of what gives it its charm.

But... well, here was my first exposure to Pern: I opened to the first page of the first book, was choked on a barrage of overwrought description, and closed it again. This isn't reflective of later books in the series. This is Ann McCaffrey having not yet found her footing.

Dragonflight is not good. Okay, that's an oversimplification. The first third of Dragonflight is bad. The last third of Dragonflight is great. The middle is... in between. This is because Dragonflight is actually three novellas, and the first one was among McCaffrey's very first works. The jump in quality from the start to the end is so massive, but getting new readers over that initial hump is... rough, to say the least. I only did it because I had to, because I had to read Pern so I could write for the rest of you.

And even that great third isn't exactly representative. Pern still hasn't found its footing. It finally does... two books later, with the start of the Harper Hall trilogy. Which is a massive jump in quality from the very start as we go headlong into a run of books that are all-but-certainly the absolute best of Pern.

So in order to get into Pern, readers have to stomach a book that's half-bad and a second book that's only solid, before they can get into the really good stuff. Or they can just skip straight to the good stuff, and ruin the genuinely great parts of the those first two books that are really worthwhile.

This, to put it bluntly, sucks. And while the prequel books (which can't spoil anything, essentially) go a long way to help provide other entry points, they're still not exactly great entrypoints. Dragonsdawn kind of ruins a later book, and is radically different from pretty much all of the rest of Pern, and Dragonseye is a better introduction but still to weird, too early, and too different to quite feel right as a way of bringing in newcomers. Moreta's Ride might be better, but... my library didn't have that one. So I've never read it.

If only there was a way to bring people into Pern in a way that puts its best foot forward... If you're a Pern fan, I'm sure you see where I'm going with this, but let me explain.

In short, Masterharper of Pern might just be the best entrypoint into Pern for new readers. I can't say for sure, because I'm not a new reader, and it does implicitly expect some understanding of the setting. But I still strongly suspect that it's a better introduction than any other one I can think of. It's a prequel, but not a distant one: it ends just as the first novel in the city begins. And it's very, very good. It shows the central appeal of Pern, even if there aren't quite so many dragons in it (which, if you've read Pern, you may find aren't really the central focus or primary appeal--at least, I don't think they are. YMMV). In fact, it centers on what may just be one of the key elements of what makes Pern so great.

Robinton.

Masterharper Robinton is not in every Pern novel. He's in a lot of them. And he is an important, well-loved character (there are enough blatant-self-insert-romances-Robinton fanfics to keep both DMS and Despatch busy for a few weeks, and given the relative dearth of Pern fic, that's saying something). But in my opinion it goes further than that.

As I see it, Robinton is... well, he's the embodyment of what Pern aspires to. He's Pern's finest son by Pern's own admission (is there really a soul who doesn't like him?). His ideals are the ideals of the setting, those that are imbued into the very fabric of the world.

And so, to my mind, to love Robinton is to understand why you might love Pern.

So, despite having to suffer through maybe a few things that are inadequately explained, I think that if you want to get into Pern, you should probably give Masterharper a shot before jumping into Dragonflight. You might really like it. And it will definitely help show you what more there is to Pern than dragons.

((Hawkelf references are awesome. Don't deny me this.))

Ummm, and I think your point has brought me back to the point I'd wandered away from: the PPC isn't concerned with what people are watching(/reading/listening to); it's concerned with what people are writing fanfic of.

So: what is the history of fanfic? Wikipedia tells me that it really took off with Star Trek in the '60s, starting as early as 1967 (with the delightfully-named Spockanalia). But it also tells me that there's a citation as far back as 1939, and that it referred to amateur scifi.

So yes, there's actually more likely to be a Scifi PPC than a Noir PPC. But you know me - I need more information.

Vice provides an article about fanfic in the early days of the Web. It talks about Usenet fanfic communities in the... well, it doesn't actually specify, probably the early '90s? So it looks like that would have been the context of our current PPC. A previous incarnation, from the '60s to the '90s, would have been the Fanzine PPC. It would have focussed strongly on Star Trek, and I assume on the rest of the TV/Movie Scifi worlds. This appears to be when slash took on a major role.

Before that? Tech Times expands on the Wikipedia entry slightly; it suggests that fan science fiction meant any old story in a fan magazine, some of which were 'bringing in some famous characters'. It also talks about injecting fiction into purportedly factual accounts of fan activities, which I certainly know nothing about.

Before that? The Guardian ran an article a few years back which mentions Jane Austen fanfic from 1913, and Sherlock Holmes self-inserts from the 1920s. Fanlore described J.M. Barrie writing Holmes pastiches in 1891. So I think we've got those incarnations locked in.

Fanlore also points out that Louisa May Alcott's Little Women has its protagonists set up a fanfic club of Dickens, which is a hilarious fact. That was written in 1868 and set in the early 1860s, with the subject of the fanfic dating some 30 years earlier. It does seem that fanfic of 19th century fiction was prevalent throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, though whether we can divide that up any further I'm really not sure.

Going back further? Apparently Daniel Defoe sometimes complained that his work was being 'kidnapped', which suggests an early 18th century iteration. Beyond that... well, one of those links told me that someone wrote an unauthorised sequel to Don Quixote before the original was even finished. ^_^ Shakespeare was obviously a fanficcer. And of course the Romans delighted in making new spins on old tales.

hS

I'm honestly not sure. I know there was definitely a subculture there, and I feel like Trek may have actually ended up appealing to that group (although I have no actual evidence for that). The subculture part is provable: Someone had to pay for all those copies of Astounding, didn't they? ^^

Used to actually play for a monthly issue of Analog... but enough about me!

What is worth remembering is that Star Trek was not an immediate smash hit. It certainly wasn't mainstream. It barely even made it to a third season. Nobody was watching until the reruns started to air.

Okay, Martin Luther King was watching. But most of the country was not.

Anyways, the bit about Babbage Engines did make me think about the PPC as a nexus for a moment.

See, when usually spend time thinking of a PPC as a nexus, it's as a nexus between worlds of fiction -- a place where a dragonrider and a Space Marine can be on even terms (is shameless self-promotion that bad if you're at least honest about it? ^^). The thing is, especially in the pre-internet era, the PPC would also be a nexus for World 1 nerd-dom. There would be (and still are) World 1 agents who were recruited out of radically different cultures from each other, from opposite corners of fandom. Which is interesting in and of itself, especially from the international perspective -- I mean, if you think Japan's cultural scene is an isolated ecosystem now, it's waaay more open than it used to be. This was a band of fans who were not only being introduced to strange, novel, imported western works but also Japanese works, many of which are still obscure here in the west today. Just go cameo-hunting in Daicon IV if you don't believe me. And Japan isn't the international country with its own fandom scene by a long shot...

But all of this is hampered by the fact that I know nothing about international communities. It's still interesting...

Where was I going with this? Ah, nevermind, it probably wasn't important...

The idea of a Golden Age Scifi, slide-rules & vacuum-tubes powered PPC is definitely appealing, particularly having recently read Mary Robinette Kowal's 'punchpunk' Calculating Stars. But I'm not sure how well it fits with my theme here.

The premise I'm working from is that the PPC equivalent is modelled on the dominant form of pop culture. Was scifi a dominant cultural force at that time, or was it kind of niche and weird? Not having been around I can't say for sure, but my instinct is that reading Heinlein or Asimov was a pretty nerdy thing to do, whereas nowaways, watching Star Wars or Lord of the Rings is pretty much expected.

If that era did occur, then my guess is that it folded in 1966 with the launch of Star Trek. Their old-fashioned technology wouldn't be able to keep up with the sleek, shiny Enterprise, and the fanfic explosion would have taken them completely off-guard.

(This dating, incidentally, would coincide almost exactly with the Flowers of Origin opening their first interplanetary plothole. One might almost detect the hand of fate...)

One interesting trivium is that there may be vestiges of the old PPCs in our own. Lofty Skies Chapter 5 features the secretaries of DAVD, who for unspecified reasons prefer to run their files off Babbage Engines. That sounds like they might be a group who came over from the TCDA - except that one of them is named Frock, and is implied to be a Vulcan. So perhaps they're a collection of refugees from various old PPCs - one from the Steampunk era, one from Noir, Frock from the tail end of the Scifi period, and maybe even a couple from further back.

Of course, then the Mysterious Somebody drove them all insane and/or killed them. Could this even have been his plan? To cut off that continuity and reshape the PPC as the Sole Guardians of Canon for Ever More, under his sole guidance?

I mean... probably not. But it's a fun thought.

hS

Another All Write comes and goes, orchestrated by Tomash. This time around, the prompt was:

Something is on fire.

And our lovely entries:

Inn Business, by Calliope

Man on Fire, by Thoth

The Hazards of Teaching, by Granz

Burning Bushes, by Orange Fox

Dinner, by Tomash

I think you're correct about executive meddling.

Mind, I actually liked KK as a young'un, but... uh... yeah, you're 100% right, it isn't... great. It wasn't terrible, but it certainly isn't a paragon of anything. I wouldn't want to revisit it now.

So why do I suspect executive meddling having something to do with it? Well, maybe it's my own bias but I just want to think that Pearson's better than this. Before he started churning out Kingdom Keepers, he teamed up with Dave Barry and wrote a book series that I actually do remember fondly. And that series was Peter and the Starcatchers. Not to be confused with Peter and the Starcatcher, the truly abysmal stage adaptation that ruined everything that made the original great and threw in a random, terrible, vaguely transphobic gag right at the intermission that cheapened the whole experience even more than it had already been cheapened by the many, many, many horrible problems with it.

No, the books were actually good.

For those of you that are unaware, Peter and the Starcatchers begins as a retelling of the Peter Pan mythos, exploring the origin of Peter, the Lost Boys, and the various other inhabitants of Neverland. But it really does have a personality all its own. The first book is... well, it's good, but it's hardly the best. It introduces us to Peter, his friends and the broader cast, as they become the people they're going to be later on (at the start, they're just ordinary orphans...), as well as the magical Starstuff that grants people strange powers and does... other things.

But the books really get good later on, as with Peter and company well-established, the series gives itself license to go in all manner of outlandish directions, starting with taking the traditional Peter Pan element of shadow theft and making it truly, genuinely scary. We get a suitably cosmic villain, a sense of the wider universe, and a whole lot of lighthearted humor and wacky adventures to lighten the mood. The fourth book takes full advantage of Peter's eternal childhood to give us a (relatively) short timeskip, providing a real sense of just how hard it will be as everyone around him grows up and giving the series as a whole a perfect send-off.

The less said about the sequel series, the better...

Oh, hey, I fit two reviews on this post after all!

All right, I know I’ve reviewed a lot of kid-aimed novels in my reviews here, but I think this is the first time I’ve been 100% embarrassed to admit to what I’ve been reading. The Kingdom Keepers series is definitely not up to the same level of quality as, say, the Harry Potter series. The characterization is a lot more basic, the dialogue is poorer and largely indistinguishable between characters, the conflicts within each novel feel inorganic and arbitrarily formed, and it’s all held together by random nostalgic Disney references, which while nice for hardcore Disney fans, isn’t really enough to qualify as world-building. Unfortunately for me, I am a pathetic gluttonous reader and a Disney fanboy, and I will not be able to stop reading the series, unless it really takes a downturn at some point in the future.

Well, thanks for reading my review. See you all next time.

. . .

. . . Yeah, no. I’m going more in-depth than that. Spoilers follow for Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark, Kingdom Keepers II: Disney at Dawn, Kingdom Keepers III: Disney in Shadow, It and vague character arcs in the Animorphs series. And apparently also Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, for anyone not up on their centuries-old fairy tales.

. . . I barely know where to start. I should mention it’s been a very long time since I read the first two books, and only got back into the series recently because I saw the third in a Goodwill. I don’t feel like I actually remember the first two very well, so I may be flat-out wrong/unfair about certain things due to faulty memory.

Let’s look at the main cast. I, perhaps unfairly, can’t help but see the main five Disney Host Interactives as rip-offs of the five human Animorphs. Finn is the Jake, the reluctant leader who gets roped in to becoming the authority in the group despite questioning why the role had to land on him. They both know their teams thoroughly well, and assign different tasks on missions based on their specialties. But whereas Jake got saddled with his position as part of the Animorphs’s group dynamics, Finn was basically forced into the role arbitrarily because he was the first to meet Wayne (the Dumbledore in this now-tangled comparison). So it feels less natural and more engineered. (Although Wayne is an Imagineer, so maybe that’s intentional?) Charlene is the Rachel, an athletic blonde cheerleader-type who takes things more seriously as the series goes forward, but in Charlene’s case, she was useless and whiny for the first two books and suddenly began book three announcing that she was focusing on exercise to serve a more active role to the team. So that felt kind of engineered to me, too. Maybeck is basically Marco, a façade of self-confidence and snark that covers the fact that he’s just as fearful and unsure as the other preteens in the group. His characterization works the best out of the main characters, since he’s willing to criticize and question the group’s plans, and has the most easy-to-recognize dialogue that stands out from the other kids. The connections get a little trickier after this. Philby is superficially the Cassie, in the sense that they both have technical know-how that’s critical to support each team’s needs (animal care and traits for Cassie, electronics and computer usage for Philby). But while we got to know Cassie so well over the span of Animorphs, as the troubled pacifistic caregiver torn between her duty to protect the world and her loved ones and the violent tool she was given to achieve that end, Philby . . . “does machines.” At least up through this third book, I really have no idea what kind of person Philby is, only that he knows how to computer. And that leaves . . . Tobias and Willa. But even if I were to be unfair to Tobias and overlook his character arc of being the orphaned Animorph with the missing mom and the confusing empty holes in his family tree due to alien shenanigans, even if I delineated his entire character to “the one who got turned into a bird,” he still triumphs as a paragon of complex characterization over Willa, who . . . can I get back to you? Like, Willa is basically just another pair of arms present. She has the same lack of character focus as Philby, but at least Philby has a hobby that happens to be directly useful for breaking into theme parks at night. Three books in and I just haven’t gotten to know Willa yet.

Now, as I said, I know I’m being unfair. Animorphs is a literal miracle for being children’s literature as good as it is, and not many series made for the same audience can ever measure up to it. Maybe I’ve forgotten something about Philby and Willa from the first two novels (though if I forgot that easily, can it really be so central to their characters?). Also, the books are focused unerringly on Finn as the focus character, so we don’t get to drop inside the other characters’ points of view like we could in Animorphs—although the Potter main series stuck pretty closely to Harry, yet we certainly know a lot about most of the Hogwarts characters and their families, don’t we? But one thing I know I’m not being subjective about is the dialogue in KK. Aside from Maybeck, who’s regularly self-aggrandizing or snide, the Keepers pretty much all sound alike. This often leads to conversations like this from chapter eight:

“Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?” Philby asked.

“Do you see any other choice?” Finn asked him right back.

“Will some clue me?” said Charlene.

“Yeah, me too,” said Willa.

Painful. Generic. Interchangeable. And worst, it feels like an empty attempt to build up suspense for no reason. It’s almost half a page later that Finn and Philby finally reveal the plan they’ve just simultaneously cooked up to their teammates. But there was no reason to keep it from them that long.

The Maleficent in this series is weird. Just, off. Let’s do a quick run-down of the magic we see the Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty do:

-fire
-lightning
-oddly specific curses that take years to fruit
-thorns
-dragon

Now, how about KK!Maleficent:

-ice and cold—her body temperature literally chills the room
-lightning
-fire at the end of book three, finally
-dragon, but also
-vulture?

Actually, I liked the vulture transformation. It did feel like something the OF (original fairy) would do, and since she was standing on a raised stage at the time, it makes sense she would go for something smaller and lighter to fight with. But the cold and ice thing still weirds me out. In SB, she’s constantly got fiery particle affects around her, and even breathes fire at the end. Why the choice to focus her more on cold and even lightning than on fire in KK? All I can think of is that these are hints that she’s going to be revealed as a literal animatronic at same point (powered by electricity, and computers function at higher performance when kept cool), but that contradicts the idea that the characters who roam the parks at night are the literal characters, so I just don’t get where it’s coming from or going.

Now one thing that KK does handle better than most “child superhero” stories, even my bae Animorphs, is the involvement of the parent characters. Most such stories have the parents be so oblivious and unobservant of the literal war or whatever their kids are participating in that it starts to feel like neglect, even knowing that in some cases it really just is a necessary part of letting the setup work. But in KK, the weird goings-on in Disney parks of course start leaking out to the public as rumors, and the guardians of the Keepers themselves catch wind of it, immediately becoming suspicious of the physical signs of their children being outdoors at night, despite being in their beds all night. While it’s way too sidelined for the action to continue, I like the realistic mix across the parental figures of pure refusal to belief that Sci Fi Things Are Happening; to nearly full skepticism, but needing to take some precautions to prevent them from doing the maybe-thing because protecting the children is paramount; to starting to believe to the point that maybe I can help the kids a little if it’s for a greater good, but also they’re so incredibly grounded for putting themselves in harm’s way. It’s not focused on quite enough to be realistic, but it does seem to have ramped up quite a bit for book three, so I’m hoping to see more of it in the future. And like I said, it’s such a rarity to have realistic parents in a series like this, I like that I got any of it at all.

Buuuut typing that last paragraph also reminds me how arbitrary it is that the conflict against the Disney villains is being saddled on a bunch of preteens at all, when Wayne, his daughter, and a bunch of other Imagineers all know what’s going on. Like, I understand that they don’t want the world at large to find out that Walt set the parks up for his characters to secretly live in safely without the world knowing, but there’s no reason they can’t handle the situation on their own, internally. Especially since they should have all the Disney heroes on their side, who have a pretty decent track record of stopping villains. Most other stories that put a group of kids in danger have at least some internal reason for doing so in universe. The Animorphs couldn’t trust most of the adults in their lives, because anyone around them could have a Yeerk in their head. The adults in It were subconsciously being influenced to look the other way, and Pennywise’s imagination-fueled nature prompted child protagonists to be more effective anyway. Harry Potter was just purely the unhealthy obsession of Voldemort, and Voldy had enough power and influence that the adults in Harry’s life couldn’t keep him out of harm’s way with 100% success, forcing Harry and his friends to take actions of their own frequently, both for personal survival and moral responsibility to others. But here in KK . . . it’s child protagonists because it’s a child buyer demographic, I guess.

So like . . . has anyone else here even read these? I usually get proven wrong in this community when I feel like I'm treading undiscovered literary ground, but for once, I feel like I might be alone in the boat . . . Anyone?

—doctorlit supposes Pearson may be dealing with a huge amount of executive meddling from the Mouse, so not all of this is necessarily under his control?

“Finn opened his eyes to find himself lying beneath what looked like a giant spoiler. He flinched, flailing his arms, still half asleep.” “Finn opened his eyes to find himself lying beneath what looked like a giant spoiler. He flinched, flailing his arms, still half asleep.”

I'd be willing to beta for you, although I myself haven't yet gotten Permission.

My email is wqwritesstuff@gmail.com, if you're interested.