Monday, November 28, 2011

The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey

I can't find the Harper Hall books. No doubt they are in a box in the storage locker or the shed. They are not available for Kindle and I'm not going to buy another paper set. They are around somewhere.

It is hard for me to imagine having read this one without the background that is filled in by the Harper Hall stories. I don't think I have read another batch of books which actually overlap the way these do. You can't set Dragonsong between Dragonquest and The White Dragon because events in one take place during the timeframe of the other. Complicated.

The many story lines seem to be resolved here - but there are plenty of spaces left for fill in or back story - of which there are legion. There are McCaffrey's own books, a batch of what I call "ands" (as in Anne McCaffrey and Joe Schmoe), and quite possibly "friends of" books, as in Friends of Darkover. I have never found any of the books outside the main series of six particularly satisfying - although I admit that I haven't read many of them.

The White Dragon seems to wrap things up pretty well. Jaxom and Ruth are a rather charming pair and are definitely central to this story. A large part of the surrounding story is about the discovery of the ships that brought humans to Pern in the distant past.

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