Dragon (Dragonriders of Pern)

The Dragons of Pern are a fictional race created by Anne McCaffrey as an integral part of the science fiction world depicted in her Dragonriders of Pern novels.

In creating the Pern setting, McCaffrey set out to subvert the cliches associated with dragons in European mythology and in modern fantasy fiction. Pernese dragons are similar to traditional Western dragons in physical appearance and in the fact that they can breathe fire, but the resemblance ends there. Unlike most dragons in previous Western literature, Pernese dragons are entirely friendly to humanity. Furthermore, they are not magical at all. Instead, they are a heavily genetically modified species based on one of Pern's native life-forms, the fire-lizard.

History

The race was intentionally designed to fight Thread after it first caught the human colonists on Pern unawares, with devastating results. Geneticist Kitti Ping Yung designed the dragons by manipulating the genetic code of the indigenous fire-lizards that had been pets of the colonists. The dragons were named after their resemblance to Western dragons from the legends of old Earth. Later genetic manipulation by Ping's daughter, Wind Blossom Ping, also resulted in the watch-whers, ungainly creatures who bore a slight resemblance to dragons, in an attempt to "perfect" the dragons' design. The watch-whers are, however, much more useful than they appear.

Physiology

Dragons are carnivorous, oviparous, warm-blooded creatures. Like all of Pern's native large fauna, they have six limbs - four feet and two wings. Their blood is copper-based and green in color. They have multifaceted eyes that change color depending on the dragon's mood. Unlike the dragons of Terran legend, they have smooth, soft skin rather than scales.

Kitti Ping designed the dragons to gradually increase in size with each generation. The dragons of the first Hatching were not much bigger than horses. The largest Pernese dragon on record, Ramoth, hatched twenty-five centuries later and (according to the novel All the Weyrs of Pern) was roughly three times the size of the largest first-generation dragons. (The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, written by Jody Lynn Nye with input from Anne McCaffrey, lists Ramoth's total length as forty-five meters; however, this contradicts a number of references in the novels, and the book contains several other obvious errors. It is likely that "forty-five meters" is a mistake for "forty-five feet.") Newly hatched dragons are the size of very large dogs or very small ponies, and reach their full size after eighteen months. Because young dragons grow so fast, their riders must regularly apply oil to their hides to prevent the skin from cracking or drying out.

Like their fire-lizard ancestors, dragons can breathe fire by chewing a phosphine-bearing rock called "firestone," which reacts with an acid in a special stomach-like organ. This forms a volatile gas that can be exhaled at will and ignites upon contact with air. The flame is used to burn Thread from the sky before it reaches the ground.

Psychic abilities

Despite their relatively low intelligence, fire-lizards communicate through a form of weak telepathy. They also imprint on the first individual who feeds them after they hatch, creating a telepathic bond with them; the Pernese call this phenomenon "Impression". In creating dragons, Kitti Ping intensified the creatures' telepathy and gave them a strong instinctive drive to Impress to a human. Upon hatching, each dragonet chooses one of the humans present and Impresses to that person; from that moment on, the pair are in a constant state of telepathic contact for as long as they both live. Dragons also use telepathy to communicate with each other and with fire-lizards. They are capable of speaking telepathically to humans besides their own riders, but most are disinclined to do so except under unusual circumstances.

Dragons and fire-lizards can also teleport. They do this by briefly entering a hyperspace dimension known as between. Humans experience between as an extremely cold, airless, black void. After spending no more than eight seconds in between, the dragon or fire-lizard can re-emerge anywhere on Pern, along with any passengers or cargo they carried. This ability evolved in fire-lizards as a defense against Thread; not only does it allow them to quickly escape from Threadfall, but the intense cold of between kills any Thread that has already burrowed into them. If a dragon attempts to teleport without a clear mental image of the place where they intend to reappear, they can simply fail to emerge from between.

Going between allows dragons to travel through time as well as space, as long as they have a clear picture of what a particular place looked like (or will look like) at the desired time. However, the practice is highly dangerous to both dragon and rider and is severely restricted. Existing in two places at once for extended periods of time, or in close proximity, causes severe weakness and psychological disturbance for humans. In addition, while teleporting through space always takes the same amount of time, when a dragon travels through time, the amount of time they spend in between increases depending on how long ago or how far in the future the destination is. Thus, travelling to remote times poses severe dangers from hypothermia and oxygen deprivation.

The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern states that dragons defecate while between. This idea originated with a statement by Anne McCaffrey herself, in answer to a fan's question about the subject at a con. However, McCaffrey may have been joking when she first said this. As the idea has never appeared in any of the Pern novels, it cannot be considered definitively canonical. If true, it would eventually cause serious environmental problems for the planet, as large amounts of Pern's organic matter would be regularly disappearing into an alternate dimension.

Dragons - and, very likely, fire-lizards as well - are also capable of psychokinesis. This helps to explain how such large creatures are capable of flight. However, even the dragons themselves were unaware of this ability until two and a half millennia after their species' creation.

Psychology

Unlike their fire-lizard ancestors, dragons are fully sapient. They communicate fluently in human language (although only telepathically), and have personalities and opinions distinct from those of their riders. However, their intelligence does seem to be somewhat lower than that of the average human. In particular, their long-term memory is severely limited.

As a safeguard against the possible damage that could be caused by such powerful creatures, Ping engineered dragons to be profoundly psychologically dependent on their riders. Any dragonet that fails to Impress to a human shortly after hatching will die. If a dragon's rider dies, the dragon immediately suicides by going between without a destination. The only exception in the books is a queen dragon whose rider dies while the queen is gravid; the dragon waits just long enough to lay her eggs and see them hatch before disappearing between. (Humans who lose their dragons typically commit suicide as well. However, some do survive, although the experience leaves profound psychological trauma.)

Ping also designed the dragons to be fairly calm in temperament. They never fight one another, unless two queens come into estrus at the same time. They are also not dangerous to humans except shortly after hatching, when it is common for confused and frightened dragonets to maul or even kill humans hoping to Impress.

Dragons hatch knowing their own names, and announce their names to their new riders upon Impression. Pernese dragons' names always end in -th.

Colors

Barring rare mutations, female dragons and fire-lizards are always either green or gold in color, while males are blue, brown or bronze.

• Gold dragons, also called queens, are the largest dragons and the only fertile females. They are dominant over all other colors; any non-gold dragon will invariably obey a queen's orders, even against the wishes of its own rider. Queens do not produce flame due to the sterilizing affects of firestone; however, they do fight Thread - they fly in a special wing, with their riders armed with specially designed flamethrowers. Gold dragons Impress only to women. The queen egg from which a queen dragon hatches is tended specially by the gold from which it's Hatched, often rolled lovingly onto a lump of sand, and is the largest egg in the clutch, tinted gold.
• Bronze dragons are the largest males, although they are significantly smaller than the queens. They are almost always the ones to mate with queens, as the smaller colors generally lack the stamina to chase and catch the gold dragons. More rarely, they may mate with greens, but their size puts them at a disadvantage in chasing the agile greens. Bronzeriders are always men.
• Brown dragons are the next largest color. They may occasionally mate with queens, although this is rare, and becomes even more rare as the dragons increase in size; by Ramoth's time in the 9th Pass it is unheard-of. All brownriders in the Pern novels are men, but Anne McCaffrey stated in her guidelines for Pern-based online roleplaying that it is theoretically possible for browns to Impress to women.
• Blue dragons are the smallest males. They are nearly as agile as greens, but unlike the greens, they have the stamina to last through an entire Threadfall. They mate only with greens, as they are simply too small to keep up with a massive queen over a long mating flight. There are few prominent blue dragons or blueriders in the books. The blueriders who do appear are always male, although McCaffrey's guidelines allow for the possibility of female blueriders.
• Green dragons are the smallest normal color, about half the size of the queens. They are female, but unlike the queens, they are infertile and can produce flame. They are extremely valuable in Threadfall because of their agility, but they lack the stamina to last an entire Fall. Originally, greens Impressed to women. However, after various natural disasters decimated Pern's population, women were needed to help repopulate the planet. Since going between during pregnancy can induce abortion, it became impractical to present large numbers of women as candidates for Impression. Thus, green dragons began Impressing to men; by the time the earliest-written novels take place, female greenriders are entirely forgotten, although greens gradually begin Impressing to women again.
• There is only one white dragon mentioned anywhere in the Pern novels - Ruth, whose rider is Lord Jaxom of Ruatha Hold. He is not an albino, as his hide contains very faint patches of all the normal dragon colors. Ruth's egg would not have hatched if Jaxom had not forced it open; thus, it seems likely that white coloration in dragons is normally a lethal mutation. Although his parents are the largest queen and largest bronze in the history of Pern, Ruth is much smaller than even a normal green dragon in his time; he is only slightly larger than the largest dragons of the first generation. He is male, but sterile, with no urge to mate. He also has the unusual ability to intuitively orient himself in time.

The larger a color is, the less common it is. For instance, any given clutch of eggs contains no more than one queen, whereas there are as many greens as there are blues, browns and bronzes put together. Riding a larger color of dragon also confers higher social status in Pern's extremely hierarchical society. Perhaps as a result of this, it is commonly believed that the larger colors are more intelligent - but the recent novel The Skies of Pern implies that this may not be true.

The Pernese believe that chewing firestone makes female dragons sterile; they therefore refuse to allow queens to use it. Greens, on the other hand, are so common that if they produced offspring it would quickly lead to overpopulation, so they always chew firestone. However, Dragonsdawn suggests that Kitti Ping - possibly motivated by old-fashioned ideas about gender roles - deliberately engineered greens to be infertile and gold dragons to be unable to produce flame.

Mating and Reproduction

Mating

Both gold and green dragons experience a periodic mating urge, with greens coming into season significantly more often. When the female comes into estrus, the interested males compete to catch her in a mating flight. Usually, the female chooses the male who impresses her the most with his skill in the flight, although inexperienced females may be caught before making their choice. The pair actually mate in midair; thus, the higher they get during the flight, the longer their mating can last. The Pernese commonly believe that longer matings result in larger clutches. For this reason, queenriders are strongly encouraged to restrain their dragons from eating heavily just before a flight.

Effects on rider sexuality

Due to the intense psychic bond between rider and dragon, dragonriders are overcome by the powerful emotions and sensations associated with mating flights. The riders of the mating pair engage in sex themselves, unaware of what they are doing. This contributes to a much looser attitude toward sexuality in general among dragonriders than in the rest of Pernese society.

For much of Pern's history, all greenriders are male. During these periods, all green mating flights result in homosexual intercourse between the riders of the dragons involved. (If a rider has strong objections to sex with someone involved in a mating flight, they may sequester themselves with a partner of their preferred sex during the flight; due to dragonriders' cultural attitudes, however, the practice is fairly rare.)

Anne McCaffrey has stated in a number of documents and interviews that dragonets use pheromones to determine the sexual orientation of the humans to whom they Impress. According to these statements, greens Impress only to women or to "effeminate" homosexual men. Blues Impress primarily to homosexual men with "masculine" temperaments, or possibly to masculine women; browns similarly Impress primarily to heterosexual men, or - rarely - to very masculine women. Bronzes and golds Impress exclusively to heterosexual men and heterosexual women, respectively.

However, these ideas have never been made explicit in the books (although it is clear, at least, that most male green- and blueriders are homosexual). Many members of online Pern fandom find McCaffrey's ideas about sexuality highly questionable for a number of reasons. (Most infamously, she claimed in an interview that it is scientifically proven that being the receptive partner in anal sex triggers a hormonal change that will make a previously heterosexual man become homosexual and effeminate. Thus, she argues, even if a male greenrider were originally heterosexual, he would not stay that way.) Pern-based roleplaying games thus often ignore McCaffrey's restrictions on who can Impress to a given color of dragon. MU*s and fanzine-based clubs often ignore everything except the basic rule that only women Impress gold and only men Impress bronze; PBEM games are more likely to accept the restrictions on sexual orientation.

Significance

As the primary line of defense against the Thread, dragons are a requirement for the survival and prosperity of humans, not to mention other forms of land life, on Pern. However, the great beasts require a good deal of maintenance, to the degree of requiring a large part of Pernese infrastructure - especially cattle farming - to be centered around their upkeep. This has been known to cause resentment among those doing the supporting, especially at times when Thread is not falling.

Famous Pernese Dragons

-Mnementh, F'lar, Weyrleader of Benden Weyr's, bronze dragon

-Ramoth, Benden Weyrwoman Lessa's queen

-Orlith, Fort Weyrwoman Moreta's queen, during the 6th Pass

-Ruth, Lord Jaxom of Ruatha Hold's white dragon

-Golanth, F'lessan of Benden (F'lar and Lessa's son)'s bronze

-Faranth, the first queen to Rise and clutch, although she hatched last of the First Clutch. Weyrmate to Sorka Hanrahan.

-Carenath, the Fort Weyrleader Sean's bronze, and weyrmate of Faranth

-Tiroth, Oldtimer Ista Weyrleader D'ram's bronze

-Zaranth, Monaco Bay rider Tai's green

-Alaranth, gold weyrmate of Torene, the first Benden Weyrwoman

-Kadith, Fort Weyrleader Sh'gall's bronze dragon during the 6th Pass

-Simanith, Benden Weyrleader F'lon's bronze dragon, during the Second Long Interval

-Nemorth, Benden Weyrwoman Jora's gold during the Second Long Interval

-Hath, Benden Weyrleader R'gul's bronze; R'gul was the Weyrleader immediately preceding F'lar

External links

• Pernese Dragon - some information on the Pernese Dragon

• Pern's Renewable Airforce - one of McCaffrey's statements regarding dragon and rider sexuality.

• An Interview with Anne - among other topics, McCaffrey explains her beliefs about homosexuality.