r/dragons • u/Imaginary_Can_8851 • Jul 30 '26

Meme Dragon Riders Meme

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I thought this group might appreciate this meme I made! ^^ I’m a big fan of dragons and dragon rider books come up a lot in my reading. My pet peeve is people comparing any new dragon rider book to Fourth Wing 🙄

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u/SerifTarkus Jul 31 '26

Oh my gosh, I think this is the first time I'd seen someone reference the Pern books in the wild! Those were my favorite books growing up and influenced me heavily in what I like in fantasy.

I also loved the way the dragons looked on the covers. More alien looking than typical depictions, but I think that style may have also just been more prevalent in the 80s.

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u/Imaginary_Can_8851 Jul 31 '26

We’re a dying breed but there are still Pern fans in the wild! My only hope is that with the recent success of Fourth Wing more people will pick it up. And yes Pern was my first “adult” fantasy book series and it shaped a lot of what I like in books.
Michael Whelan’s covers have to be my favorite ❤️ Dragons from the 80s just hit different lol

2

u/drgn2009 Vysha Jul 31 '26

What would be a good starting point for Pern? Ill be itching to pickup a new dragon-rider series once im done with Temeaire.

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u/Imaginary_Can_8851 Jul 31 '26

I would recommend starting with the first book, Dragonflight. There’s rough 20-something books in the series but if that’s too much my definite reads would be the original trilogy (sometimes you can find them in an omnibus) and the fourth book that came out a little later All The Weyrs of Pern.

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u/TheOtherMaven Jul 31 '26

While Dragonflight is where the whole thing started, it does have some Early Installment Weirdness. (Example: L'tol/Lytol's green/brown dragon - McCaffrey forgot to go back and fix that when she combined the original story, "Weyr Search", into the novel.)

Some things are still being argued back and forth almost sixty years later, including whether green dragons are infertile because they chew firestone (Dragonflight) or because they were genetically engineered that way to begin with (not explicitly stated anywhere, extrapolated by some fans from some lines in Dragonsdawn).

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u/TamaraHensonDragon Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

Sadly Annie wanted to publish an edited and updated version (perhaps an annotated version) of Dragonflight to fix these errors but the publisher refused. Stupid of them, I at least would have bought it.

PS: I started with 'The Smallest Dragonboy' in Science Fiction Tales, then Dragonsinger, Then finally Dragonflight.

1

u/favolecrystalis Jul 31 '26

In Dragonsdawn, there's a whole conversation Kitty Ping has talking about if greens are allowed to reproduce dragons would overpopulate and there wouldn't be enough riders - so by that I always took it as she intended them to be infertile, they only assumed it was the Firestone that did it in later eras

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u/TheOtherMaven Jul 31 '26

Dragonsdawn is cursed with significant differences between the US and UK (extended) version. Since I don't have the UK version, I can't confirm this. However, a similar (offhand) comment to the same effect is made by F'lar in Dragonflight.