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Title | Dragon's Code
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Author | Gigi McCaffrey
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Cover Art | Chris Koehler
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Publisher | Del Rey - 2018
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First Printing | Del Rey - 2018
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Category | Science Fiction
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Piemur, Sebell, N'ton, and brief appearances of many others |
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Main Elements | Dragons
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Website | ---
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 Dragon's Code
A new hero emerges in a divided world as one of sci-fi's most beloved series--Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern--relaunches with this original adventure from Anne's daughter, Gigi McCaffrey.
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.
The last time Thread attacked Pern, the world was unprepared for the fight--until the Oldtimers appeared. These courageous dragonriders arrived from the past, traveling four hundred years to help their descendants survive. But the collision of past and present took its toll. While most of the displaced rescuers adapted to their new reality, others could not abide the jarring change and found themselves in soul-crushing exile, where unhappiness and resentment seethed.
Piemur, a journeyman harper, also feels displaced, cast adrift by the loss of his spectacular boyhood voice and uncertain of his future. But when the Masterharper of Pern sees promise in the young man and sends him undercover among the exiled Oldtimers, Piemur senses the looming catastrophe that threatens the balance of power between the Weyrs and Holds of Pern.
When the unthinkable happens, Piemur must rise to the challenge to avert disaster and restore honor to the dragons and dragonriders of Pern. Because now, in a world already beset by Thread, another, more insidious danger looms: For the first time in living memory, dragons may be on the verge of fighting dragons.
I haven't read it yet, but I'll say I'm dubious. Todd did some weird stuff with Pern lore, but at least he had an entire Pass to call his own and muddle about in. Here, Gigi is coming in, not only using some of our most favorite characters such as Piemur and Masterharper Robinton, but is doing so in a timeline her mother has already covered in great detail. I don't see there is any story to add here, and so this is a what? A reboot? A rehash? So understandably I didn't run out to the store to buy it, I waited till I could borrow it from the library, since I see only two outcomes - a retelling of something already told, or a horrible mess where Gigi tries to invent a whole pile of stuff that won't even fit into the existing chronology, a glorified fanfic. But we'll see, perhaps I'll be proven wrong!
Now I've read it. You know what bothered me the most? The details, which should have been caught by an editor. Like Stupid having six legs (he's a runnerbeast which are decendants of Earth horses, not native to Pern, you don't evolve an extra set of limbs in a mere couple thousand years). Or the sudden use of new nicknames like Pie and Loll for Piemur and Menolly. While having nicknames is not unrealistic, Anne McCaffrey never used them so it just sounded wrong when characters you know and love started referring to each other in unfamiliary ways. There was also a paragraph where a dragon was blue, then he was brown, then blue again...in one paragraph! And later in the book I think he was settled to be brown after all.
As for the plot, I would need to actually reread a couple of Anne's books to see if it was feasible for Piemur, N'ton and others to have done the things they did in this storyline without running into conflicts with the original timeline, so I decided it was ok and wasn't bothered by what would have been big things, only the little things grated.
On the whole it was ok, and if you hadn't just read the entire Pern series last year (like I did) and were desperate to return to the world, then it might be a nice revisit. But it certainly didn't add much to the world, the time period covered here was covered by two or three of Anne's books, so unless you wanted to know what every character was doing at every moment, it's a bit too much coverage (to go over this period yet again you'd have to track people's bathroom breaks). I think Gigi would have done much better picking her own timeline, creating her own characters, getting a Pern fan to review some of the details and then forge her own little place in her mother's world. Or at the very least pick an unknown or near forgotten character and let us see their point of view of things, like have an Oldtimer be the protagonist.
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