'Skies of Pern' released
If you're a fan of Anne McCaffrey's "Pern" series you'll be pleased to know that her latest Pern saga, Skies of Pern, has been released by Ballantine Books. If you have cable and get the Sci-Fi network you may have seen some of the commercials airing for it.
This review is from Amazon.com:
Anne McCaffrey's Pern series has been running successfully for so long that most of the Dragonriders' original problems have been solved. In The Skies of Pern, she confronts her standard cast of characters with the consequences of those solutions, consequences that are a whole new set of problems. Now that the Red Star has been pushed to another orbit, there will only be a few more ravenous Threads descending from it for them and their dragons to fight--and what role will that leave for them? They have successfully reclaimed Earth's lost technology--and suddenly everyone with a craft that might be outmoded, or who is phobic about surgery, is on the rampage, sabotaging and smashing and making up rumors. These fundamentalist Abominators are sure that something terrible will happen if the old ways are not gone back to--and sure enough, fire descends, on cue, from the skies.
The novel is also available in abridged and unabridged form in audio cassette, as well as an e-book, which is something I applaud.
Is it a work as notable as The Masterharper of Pern, or is Anne just dusting off some of her best-known characters and dragging out the series a little more? I haven't read it yet, so I can't begin to guess. Maybe some of our faithful readers have read it and can review it here.
About the author
Feren (Jason Olsen) — read stories — contact (login required)a network engineer and Black panther from Chicago, Illinois, interested in furry literature, art, and camaros
Sometimes network engineer. Sometimes coder. Sometimes ranting editorial writer.
Comments
I've finally worked through the majority of the Pern series. Everything including and after 'Renegades of Pern' struck me as somewhat hackneyed, especially the rather rapid adoption of technology by the Pernese.
'Masterharper' was a good tale, even if it did piss off a lot of fans by rewriting a lot of Pern canon. I probably will pick up 'Skies of Pern', but certainly not until the paperback release.
I find it interesting that the books now rate a mainstream-like cover, rather than the more obviously illustrative covers typical to bestselling genre fiction.
I find it interesting that you brought that up, Micah, because I had the same thought. The commercial on Sci-Fi shows the cover from the book and the first thought I had was "Enh, it's no Michael Whelan."
Interesting that it's symbolic, to me. As time has gone on, it seems, the Pern series has gotten pretty dry. I gave up around The Chronicles of Pern. It was an interesting read, but not what I thought the world was capable of.
Remember how the DragonLance series was dragged out for something like forever? This seems to be the same case. One, it's lucrative for Anne and, two, Pern still has quite a following demanding more stories.
-Feren
"We use them for divine retribution."
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