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Jun. 20th, 2026 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOkay, this is my last McCaffrey post for the foreseeable future for real, but I do want to talk about the weirdness of reading Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern in 2026.
I find it hard to imagine I did not read this one when I was a child and reading Every Pern, but I also didn't remember anything about it except that it was the Plague Book, and it surprised me in several ways!
1. the most plot-important relationship in the book is Moreta's friendship with her mentor, the previous Weyrwoman, which takes increasing prominence once Moreta's dragon lays her eggs and has to hang out by the Hatching Grounds and Moreta keeps needing to borrow Leri's dragon to fly around in a weird sort-of-taboo blurring of the bond between the two of them and their dragons that eventually results in both Moreta's Heroism and MOreta's Doom. This could have been really interesting in the hands of a writer who was more interested in this sort of thing, which McCaffrey is not, but nonetheless is probably the strongest and most central relationship between two women I've yet seen McCaffrey write
2. [direct corollary I think] the main romance in the book is completely plot unimportant. I had somehow been under the impression that Moreta died delivering vaccine specifically to or from this guy's place-- not true! He's not involved! It would change almost nothing about the novel if the romance did not happen except that Moreta would be having a slightly worse time because she didn't get to have a nice date in the middle of it. To be clear I think this is great; the fact that this relationship is in no way load-bearing takes all the pressure off it in a way that is remarkable for a McCaffrey novel. It's nice to see two adults click over a shared hobby!
(Moreta also has a Weyrleader. They have dragon-mandated sex when necessary and otherwise he's a kind of annoying coworker who does some parts of his job very well and has to be aggressively managed through the other parts, though Anne McCaffrey and I do not always agree on which elements of his behavior are annoying.)
3. there are more explicit m/m dragonrider pairings in this book than in any other before or (I think?) since.sovay and I were chatting a bit over this and I do think it's impossible to completely disentangle this from the fact that this is the Pern Plague Book, written in 1983 -- the same year that Samuel Delaney dedicated a Neveryon book to Anne McCaffrey, the sequel to which would be his own take on the AIDS crisis. She had to have been thinking at least a little bit about it, consciously or subconsciously. For which reason, I was sort of extra pleasantly surprised that all of these named gay dragonriders do actually make it out alive and are well in recovery by the end of the book!
4. [kind of a corollary] despite the massive and terrible death tolls reported as a general statistic throughout, very very few named characters actually die of the plague; everyone we actually spend any time with makes it through completely fine. There is a sort of a sense that Anne McCaffrey secretly believes it's a bit embarrassing to die of the plague and anyone who really bucks themselves up and commits to it should be able to make it through on sheer willpower ... like she knows, in her head, that this is not true, and nobody should actually be blamed for dying of plague. But I don't know that she's been able to make herself believe it in her heart. For this reason perhaps I did not actually find it very creepy or horrifying as a plague book -- I was braced for it to be kind of a difficult read, for the Obvious Reasons, but McCaffrey is really much less interested in creeping inevitable horror and more in Heroically Practical People Find Solutions.
5. You know what I did have a big reaction to? You know what I did have big emotions about? THE WHOLE PLAGUE SITUATION AND FULL VACCINATION PROGRAM IS RESOLVED IN TEN DAYS. Ten days! TEN DAYS. Ten days and then nobody has to think about it ever again?? What I wouldn't give -- no. Sorry. It's a very bad and serious plague situation and so many people on Pern died and also they have to deal with Thread, and also feudalism. It's rough to be on Pern. (TEN! DAYS!!!)
I find it hard to imagine I did not read this one when I was a child and reading Every Pern, but I also didn't remember anything about it except that it was the Plague Book, and it surprised me in several ways!
1. the most plot-important relationship in the book is Moreta's friendship with her mentor, the previous Weyrwoman, which takes increasing prominence once Moreta's dragon lays her eggs and has to hang out by the Hatching Grounds and Moreta keeps needing to borrow Leri's dragon to fly around in a weird sort-of-taboo blurring of the bond between the two of them and their dragons that eventually results in both Moreta's Heroism and MOreta's Doom. This could have been really interesting in the hands of a writer who was more interested in this sort of thing, which McCaffrey is not, but nonetheless is probably the strongest and most central relationship between two women I've yet seen McCaffrey write
2. [direct corollary I think] the main romance in the book is completely plot unimportant. I had somehow been under the impression that Moreta died delivering vaccine specifically to or from this guy's place-- not true! He's not involved! It would change almost nothing about the novel if the romance did not happen except that Moreta would be having a slightly worse time because she didn't get to have a nice date in the middle of it. To be clear I think this is great; the fact that this relationship is in no way load-bearing takes all the pressure off it in a way that is remarkable for a McCaffrey novel. It's nice to see two adults click over a shared hobby!
(Moreta also has a Weyrleader. They have dragon-mandated sex when necessary and otherwise he's a kind of annoying coworker who does some parts of his job very well and has to be aggressively managed through the other parts, though Anne McCaffrey and I do not always agree on which elements of his behavior are annoying.)
3. there are more explicit m/m dragonrider pairings in this book than in any other before or (I think?) since.
sovay and I were chatting a bit over this and I do think it's impossible to completely disentangle this from the fact that this is the Pern Plague Book, written in 1983 -- the same year that Samuel Delaney dedicated a Neveryon book to Anne McCaffrey, the sequel to which would be his own take on the AIDS crisis. She had to have been thinking at least a little bit about it, consciously or subconsciously. For which reason, I was sort of extra pleasantly surprised that all of these named gay dragonriders do actually make it out alive and are well in recovery by the end of the book! 4. [kind of a corollary] despite the massive and terrible death tolls reported as a general statistic throughout, very very few named characters actually die of the plague; everyone we actually spend any time with makes it through completely fine. There is a sort of a sense that Anne McCaffrey secretly believes it's a bit embarrassing to die of the plague and anyone who really bucks themselves up and commits to it should be able to make it through on sheer willpower ... like she knows, in her head, that this is not true, and nobody should actually be blamed for dying of plague. But I don't know that she's been able to make herself believe it in her heart. For this reason perhaps I did not actually find it very creepy or horrifying as a plague book -- I was braced for it to be kind of a difficult read, for the Obvious Reasons, but McCaffrey is really much less interested in creeping inevitable horror and more in Heroically Practical People Find Solutions.
5. You know what I did have a big reaction to? You know what I did have big emotions about? THE WHOLE PLAGUE SITUATION AND FULL VACCINATION PROGRAM IS RESOLVED IN TEN DAYS. Ten days! TEN DAYS. Ten days and then nobody has to think about it ever again?? What I wouldn't give -- no. Sorry. It's a very bad and serious plague situation and so many people on Pern died and also they have to deal with Thread, and also feudalism. It's rough to be on Pern. (TEN! DAYS!!!)
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Date: 2026-06-20 04:41 pm (UTC)(And then I went to college and two friends about my age lost their respective slightly-older-but-only-slightly partners to AIDS, and in my first job out of college a good friend-colleague was HIV positive and had lost his partner a few years prior, and I apparently dropped Moreta into a memory hole until your post sequence because positive thinking and being careful were just not enough in rl.)
I did like Moreta and Leri. It's only that that arc felt like a whooshing massive displacement of the grief that should've gone with the plague, like, the book lets the named gay dragonriders live (which is great, I do agree there) in order to send grief out with Moreta's doom (which is just not how grief works, Ms. McCaffrey).
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Date: 2026-06-30 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-30 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-20 04:48 pm (UTC)I'm actually most of the way through a Dragonsdawn reread at the moment. Disconcertingly, I have a favourite character this time around, in spite of having remembered absolutely none of the characters from reading it as a kid. Even more disconcertingly, my favourite character is Ted Tubberman.
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Date: 2026-06-30 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-30 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-07-02 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-20 06:37 pm (UTC)The surprise for me on the reread is the use of "homeopathic medicine" to describe vaccines. If I squint, I can see how you can get there, but not how I've ever heard vaccines described.
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Date: 2026-06-30 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-20 06:38 pm (UTC)The first named character to die of the plague is one of the canon gays: Fort Weyr's Masterhealer Berchar, weyrmate of green rider S'gor. His death combined with the patient zero status of blue rider K'lon was what made the odds of AIDS suddenly pop out at me forty years after the fact, because the otherwise 1918-like flu pandemic does in fact spread initially through the finally-textually m/m population of the Weyrs. I appreciate the overall survival of her gay characters! K'lon spends more time as a leading figure in the mass vaccination effort than as a carrier of the flu and spontaneously reinvents dragon-mediated time travel as a side effect of needing to check in on his recovering boyfriend! But the linkage seriously is there.
(I am appreciative of McCaffrey establishing with these characters that queer relationships exist on Pern outside of the mandatory dragonsex. K'lon and A'murry belong to different Weyrs, which means that even if the long-distance element is ameliorated by teleportation, they don't participate in the same mating flights, and Berchar doesn't have a dragon at all. Still side-eye the nebulous no-homo around the sexual activity of brown riders and still can't tell if she knew that lesbians exist.)
(TEN! DAYS!!!)
I have similar feelings about the coordinated rapid response of New York City to the smallpox outbreak of 1947, which successfully vaccinated more than six million people within three weeks and limited the number of cases to a dozen and FUCK.
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Date: 2026-06-30 01:47 am (UTC)The other thing that made AIDS really undeniable for me was when they come to the conclusion that it's not so much the virus killing people as the secondary infections.
(Both K'lon/A'murry and Berchar/S'gor are long-term relationships that exist as stable and significant outside of the obligatory orgies and I appreciate them very much! But yes I do not think she has ever heard of a lesbian.)
OKAY THAT IS INDEED EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE. I immediately went to check to see if that's the one Eleanor Roosevelt DJ'd for but it looks like that recording is from ten years later and about polio vaccinations, unsurprisingly I suppose given the givens.
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Date: 2026-06-30 02:55 am (UTC)A slight impediment to building a successful mental index! It also goes by very quickly in the text as Moreta comes out of her own illness and takes stock of everything she was just about conscious enough to be kept abreast of, including the loss of Berchar. The pneumonia kills him. You were saying about secondary infections.
But yes I do not think she has ever heard of a lesbian.
FELLAS IS SHARING A QUEEN DRAGON—
(I still don't understand the mental calisthenics that produced McCaffrey's gendered dragon system, but an awareness of lesbians would indeed have filled out some of the unevenness where golds and bronzes are heteronormatively reserved and greens are the marked queer, bisexually impressible dragons and in between them is kind of an unexplored emoji shrug that should really contain at least one fabulous butch.)
OKAY THAT IS INDEED EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE.
I don't blame the New York City Commissioner of Health for publishing a paper about it!
I immediately went to check to see if that's the one Eleanor Roosevelt DJ'd for but it looks like that recording is from ten years later and about polio vaccinations, unsurprisingly I suppose given the givens.
That's still awesome and FUCK.
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Date: 2026-07-02 12:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-20 07:26 pm (UTC)One of the things that stuck with me about Moreta was that Moreta's dragon, being a queen with a clutch, waits until her eggs hatch to go between after Moreta's death—not unique, I think Ramoth's mom did the same—but when she does go between, Leri chooses to die with her. Which was an emotionally effective finish to the Moreta-Leri-dragons relationship, at least to me at fourteen.
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Date: 2026-06-20 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2026-06-20 11:26 pm (UTC)But as someone who's also fallen asleep at the wheel, there's definitely a point of exhaustion where it's impossible to think straight.
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Date: 2026-06-21 12:55 pm (UTC)I reread it over new yearish for the first time in decades, and what struck me was that more use wasn't made of the blue rider K'lon at that stage. Moreta can speak to dragons! As soon as Hoth was obviously struggling, she should have been calling in the healthy younger rider with a fit and healthy dragon who had independently discovered time-travel and they do the flying while she provided the dragon with the coordinates. Which admittledly would not have provided a tragic climax to the stpy, but would have been the sensible thing for the sensible characters to do rather than risk failure before the final jump. That said, since it seemed to me that not calling K'lon for this w as basically about Weyr hierarchy snobbery, perhaps "tragedy hallens because even basic decent and sensible people can be blinded by their own prejudice and fail to see a solution when it involves a bit more sideways thinking than they can manage in the circumstances."
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Date: 2026-06-30 02:11 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2026-06-24 01:08 am (UTC)probably the strongest and most central relationship between two women I've yet seen McCaffrey write
I never thought about it but that's quite true. I wonder if the cross-generational aspect made it easier for her somehow?
(My favorite romance in Moreta is the Masterhealer and his irritable assistant, which is mostly subtext; they are fun.)
This is the book I always think of when people complain about how badly McCaffrey deals with m/m; God knows it's not perfect, but it has a number of explicitly gay men who are characterized in various ways, their relationships are taken seriously, and as you say most of them survive. So she _could_ do it when she felt like it! (Which makes it even odder that she didn't do better elsewhere...)
very very few named characters actually die of the plague
I can kind of justify this to myself on the grounds that most of the named characters we spend time with are, well, in the privileged classes most likely to be in good health to start with, have decent care and early access to the vaccines, etc. But you have a point.
I honestly never noticed that it's ten days, and now, phew. On the other hand, I think (especially given Moreta's actual death, but even without it) the book does do a good job of evoking how incredibly traumatizing and society-shaking the whole pandemic is for them--the timeline isn't that long but it feels that way.
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Date: 2026-06-30 02:25 am (UTC)You are right about the Masterhealer and his assistant, too! They're extremely cute.
Yeah, it's interesting -- she kind of lampshades it in a way, because in the early chapters Moreta is running around thinking to herself 'well, obviously many poor people will die in the Holds where it's crowded and unhygienic, but dragonriders and protagonists won't die!' and then a couple days later she wakes up from her own bout of the plague and it's like 'oh shit, it turns out we were completely wrong about this and many dragonriders did die .... I mean not any of the ones we've been hanging out with. Not any named ones. But the numbers are staggering!'
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Date: 2026-07-01 02:02 pm (UTC)I love this description of Moreta's Weyrleader (whose name I can't even remember right now). I love how this era has Weyrwomen like Moreta and Leri getting things done with confidence and being respected for it.
I reread this book last year, and it definitely felt weirdly resonant to watch the plague unfolding bit by bit - the things that were similar to our pandemic, and the things that were different. (But yeah, that ten day timeline...)
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Date: 2026-07-02 12:14 pm (UTC)