| Previous | Contents | Next |
We were sitting having a quiet beer and desperately trying to remember the name of an award-winning novel about dragons written by Jack Vance.
“Dragonflight?”
“No, that was her. You know. Thing.”
“Oh yes.” A long pause. “Dragonsong?”
“No. That’s her again.”
“Oh yes.” We drank some more beer. “Damn the
woman. She’s taken over completely!”
And she has. Eventually we remembered that the Jack Vance novel was called The Dragon Masters, but it took a lot of beer and a lot of thought to banish the spectre of Anne McCaffrey.
It wasn’t always thus. My first exposure to Pern was in an anthology of Hugo award winners. In 1968, the novella Weyr Search won a well-deserved Hugo. The story was well structured and tense and the dragons were sufficiently archetypal that they loomed over the tale satisfyingly. Weyr Search later formed the first section of the fix-up novel Dragonflight.
As a novel it wasn’t bad at all. It still reads well today even though the plot no longer surprises because she has done it to death so many times that just about every detail has entered the folklore. It was quickly followed by a sequel—Dragonquest—and already the rot was setting in. The British edition was abridged and cut out much of the saccharine. The novel ended with a cliff hanger; the birth of the white dragon. It seemed obvious what the next book would be called and what its subject matter would be.
It wasn’t, of course. The next book was Dragonsong, the start of a whole new series. The years passed and McCaffrey gave us Dragonsinger and Dragondrums. People began turning up at conventions with fire lizards on their wrists. I heard a fan ask Anne McCaffrey when she would be writing more about Pern. “Never!” she thundered. “Aren’t five books enough for you?”
Well, she didn’t keep her word (I wish she had). The White Dragon eventually appeared and shot to the top of the best seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, heaven knows why. The earlier books had been at least tolerable, The White Dragon was so sickly sweet and sentimental that I couldn’t finish it. It positively oozed treacle. Michael Moorcock coined a lovely descriptive phrase for books like these—he called them Epic Pooh—and it sums them up perfectly. The books are as cosy and sheltered and protected as the nursery world of Winnie the Pooh, but they attempt to deal with great epic issues and fail miserably because of the swaddling they are wrapped in. No book as twee as this can succeed on any but the most infantile level.
I lost track after The White Dragon. There were several more books in the series. An Atlas of Pern was published—dragons were now sufficiently firmly established that a whole subindustry could grow up and wrap itself around the concept. Every convention had jewellery stalls selling sterling silver dragons at ever more ridiculous prices.
Over the years, Anne McCaffrey has written many good books. I am particularly fond of The Ship Who Sang and The Crystal Singer (if you ever get the opportunity to hear her read from The Ship Who Sang don’t let it go to waste. She reads it magnificently). However McCaffrey will be remembered by posterity as the dragon lady and I suspect that her other books will largely be forgotten. The dragons that she created have a momentum all their own now and I doubt she could stop them even if she wanted to.
Because of all this, if you want to talk about dragons you have to divide SF into two periods. Before Anne McCaffrey and After Anne McCaffrey. Because of the McCaffrey phenomenon, dragons have suffered a sea change. I don’t think we can ever go back to what they were before; and that’s a great shame.
Traditionally the dragon was a fabulous monster; a fire-breathing, scaly lizard or snake, a collector and guardian of treasure hoards who was often placated by sacrifice. The dragon was so monstrous and evil that the slaying of a dragon was often the crowning achievement of great heroes. Beowulf slew a dragon, and so did Siegfried (much to the delight of Wagner).
Uther Pendragon, the father of King Arthur, took his name from the dream of a flaming dragon in the sky and the dragon ensign was borne proudly by many a British King. Richard the Lionheart took it on his crusades and it formed the battle standard of Henry III when he fought the Welsh in 1245. Even today, the dragon is incorporated in the armorial bearings of the Prince of Wales…
The Christian tradition held the dragon to be symbolic of sin and paganism. Christian art often shows the dragon prostrate beneath the swords of saints and martyrs. The legend of Saint George encapsulates such thinking quite neatly.
It was against this background that the traditional science fictional (or, more properly, fantastical) dragon emerged.
Tolkien was completely traditional, of course. Smaug (in The Hobbit) was a proper fairy tale dragon, monstrous and evil with a hoard of ill-gotten treasure. However in Farmer Giles of Ham, Tolkien introduced the dragon Chrysophylax Dives and had a great time lampooning the more traditional Smaug-like dragons. (Very few Tolkien fans seem to have read Farmer Giles of Ham which is a great pity. It is much more fun than his solemn, more famous works.) Even the iconoclastic Michael Moorcock stuck fairly close to tradition with the dragons of Imrryr in the Elric books (though there is a prescient echo of Anne McCaffrey’s dragons—the dragons of Imrryr can be ridden!!)
In her Earthsea books, Ursula K. Le Guin also stayed close to the traditional model for her dragons and the beasts she created are probably the noblest and most memorable in the whole of fantasy.
Sometimes dragons were used for humorous effect. Gordon Dickson’s The Dragon and the George, for example, or Roger Zelazny’s short story The Monster and the Maiden. And Terry Pratchett has entered the arena with the delightfully Barbara Woodhousian Lady Sybil Ramkin, a dragon breeder from Ankh-Morpork.
More science-fictionally, dragons have been equated with aliens (or, more accurately, the aliens encountered on some planet or other have looked like dragons). For example two novels by Avram Davidson: The Kar-Chee Reign and Rogue Dragon. Another science fiction writer, L. Sprague de Camp, wrote a pseudohistorical novel called The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate wherein he argues plausibly that the eponymous Babylonian dragon (the sirrush) was derived from a combination of a large African lizard and a confidence trick played by the priests to make it appear other than what it was. Despite being published as a historical novel, the book owes more to sword and sorcery fantasy than it does to history. The rationalisations about the sirrush, though, tend to push it in the direction of science fiction. In many ways it is an uncomfortable book; very hard to categorise. I enjoyed it immensely. (De Camp wrote several fine historical novels. However one of them, An Elephant for Aristotle, I found to be unreadable because all the Greek soldiers—for inscrutable reasons—spoke with Scottish accents! It broke the spell.)
Jack Vance, in his Hugo winning book The Dragon Masters postulated a world where dragons were specially bred for various qualities in much the same manner that Anne McCaffrey bred her various dragons up from fire lizards. But whereas McCaffrey’s dragons are boringly named after their predominant colours, Vance’s dragons are called termagants, juggers, striding and long-horned murderers, fiends, blue horrors, basics and spider dragons. So much more evocative, don’t you think? Vance’s world of Aerlith could, superficially, be compared with Pern (though the publication date precedes that of Weyr Search by at least two years, so it might be fairer to say that Pern could be compared with Aerlith) but the resemblance is only skin deep. The story is a true epic and is anything but Pooh.
Lucius Shepard, in his 1984 story The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule uneasily straddles two worlds. The story was nominated for a Hugo which makes it science fiction. It was originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which tells us only that it is beautifully written and has nothing to say about categories). It reads like a fantasy (it has wizards and magic) but the events take place in 1853 in a parallel world. However, no matter how you classify it, it is a return, albeit briefly, to a pre-McCaffrey dragon. It is a welcome breath of fresh air.
It is obvious from the context that Anne McCaffrey would consider her own dragon books to be science fiction as opposed to fantasy. Indeed she has lately written about the original colonisation of Pern and the first attempts to breed from the fire lizards.
These are superficial trappings however. She is really writing Mills and Boon fantasy (often wish fulfilment fantasy) and her dragons owe more to the horses she herself breeds on her Irish farm than they do to the traditional dragons of fantasy and legend. Despite the scales, the fire breathing and the ability to fly between, I get an almost irresistible urge to call them all Dobbin.
The overwhelming popularity of McCaffrey’s dragons is not really surprising. Epic Pooh has always been more popular than grittier, more adult works. Somehow, somewhere, Anne McCaffrey has hit upon exactly the right emotions to evoke in order to make the people queue up in droves. They feel warm and snug and “nice” after reading a dragon book. I hate that. Good literature should be full of sharp edges, not stuffed with cotton wool. It should make you feel uncomfortable, damnit.
You simply cannot mention dragons any more without Anne McCaffrey’s name cropping up; and in the process of taking them over and making them her own she has cheapened them and stolen away their magic. She has made dragons soft and almost cuddly. In taming them she has turned them into pets. You couldn’t have done that to Smaug. You wouldn’t even think about doing it to Fafnir.
I don’t like dragons any more.
| Previous | Contents | Next |