Still one of the best fantasy books I have ever read. And to think it was written waaaay back in 1968! It shows a smart, flawed heroine, political maneuverings, and a world-building that came from thinking and postulating about what might have happened when the spaceships grew tired of their mission.

Lessa is the last survivor of the ruling family of Ruatha Hold, one of the oldest fortresses answering to the oldest Weyr, Fort Weyr. How these got the names and designations they did is not part of this book. Instead, we are picking up with Lessa's life, her past told in bits, and the visit of two dragonriders to her hold. And what results.

What I did not grasp as a smart 16-year-old when I first read this is the need to tell the story of why the adults in charge have brought dragonriders into such disrepute. And why the dragonriders F'lar and his half brother, F'nor, are working so hard to help Lessa succeed once she has impressed the new queen dragon, Ramoth. It's all about complacency and a forgetting of the reasons for the old ways and old ballads.

Lessa learns about the civilization on Pern, the ballads, the teachings, what it means to be Weyrwoman, over the couple of years it takes for her queen to mature. When Ramoth has her first mating flight, Lessa is partnered with the rider of the bronze dragon who mates with her, F'lar, and the two quickly work to bring in better ways of running the Weyr.

Part of the fall of dragons into disrepute is the lack of a reason for their existence. Dragons of Pern chew firestone and flame away Threads, which fall on Pern from a neighboring planet every 200 years for about 50 years. In this story, the Threads have not fallen for 400 years so the Holds are wondering why they need to sustain the population of the last remaining Weyr, Bendan Weyr. And for some strange reason, the other Weyrs have been abandoned for many hundreds of years with no record of their inhabitants' whereabouts.

Then Thread begins to fall, otherwise complacent Holds watch their crops and greenspaces burned away, and the existing dragonriders realize that they do not have the numbers to effectively guard against the destruction of Thread. How Lessa puts together the bits and pieces of dragons and their riders, what they are capable of as a duo, leads to a rejuvenation of the reason for dragonriders and is the latter part of this book. ( )

I really like the premise here: a planet called Pern that was colonized and forgotten by the rest of humanity, its technology mostly vanishing with time. Every 250 years a neighboring planet passes nearby and is the source of spores that "attack" Pern, voraciously consuming all organic material unless they are destroyed first. The Pernese use intelligent firebreathing dragons to fight the threads. A human rider has a telepathic bond with their dragon, formed by Impression at the dragon's hatching. The bonding instantly creates a very close, lifelong relationship. These dragonriders live in separate communities (called Weyrs) whose function is being ready to defend Pern against the threads, in the next pass of the "red star". The rest of Pern depend on the Weyrs to protect them when the threads come, but in the long intervals between passes the reason for the Weyrs' existance can be forgiotten, and there are tensions between the dragonriders and the communities that are supposed to maintain them.

So far so good, but the execution was not so great. The dragons can not only teleport in space, but also in time, and the possibility of time travel removes a lot of tension to the plot, because you can always fix something by traveling back in time. Also, the description of the community of the Weyr is rather superficial, focusing on the "weyrwoman" and the "weyrleader", who is chosen depending on which dragon mates with the queen dragon. Everything the characters do turns out well, and as a romance it's rather superficial also.

Quite readable, but a bit frustrating because you sense that something more could be done with these ideas. The best part is the glimpses of fascinating worldbuilding. ( )

Awakening to a sense of impending danger, Lessa flees to the filthy lair of the Ruath Hold’s watch-weyr. Thus begins Dragonflight, the first book in the legendary Dragon Riders series by Anne McCaffrey.

F’lar and F’nor, his half-brother, are searching for young women who possess empathic qualities that might enable them to imprint the son-to-be-born queen dragon of Brenden Weyr. F’lar is convinced that deadly threads will soon fall on Pern despite 400 years in which no threads have fallen. Threads burrow into the earth and kill all animal and vegetable life. Pern will become a dead planet devoid of life if threads reach the surface in sufficient numbers.

The recent publication of Fourth Wing, modeled after the Dragon Rider series in many respects, prompted me to reread Dragonflight, which I first read in the late 1960s. Dragonflight and the following books in the Dragon Rider series are well worth reading or rereading. ( )

This book was fun. Its got people-who-strongly-dislike-each-other-to-lovers, its got dragons, its got time travel, its got a strange mashup of science and fantasy. The only thing that really irritated me was the names, and the book did begin with a lot of jargon, but it was smooth sailing after the first chapter. ( )

This was disappointing. First off, it's not fantasy at all, it's definitely science fiction. "Dragons" is extremely misleading in this sense (not that I like dragons, but just to clarify).

Ultimately, this is a story about time travel, a force organized to protect the world from a recurring threat that, in the intervals, people forget about. Unfortunately the characters are all completely flat or one-dimensional, the author is extremely cavalier about time travel and it's effects, and the story becomes predictable as soon as you are given enough information to make any guesses about what will happen next. It was a chore to read this, even though it was so short.

I will not be continuing this series, and don't regret it. 2 stars only because the book had promise, but I thought about 1 star as well. ( )