McCaffery's Dragonseye, returning to the early days of Pern

I've been hunting for treasures in my basement, among the boxes of books I've brought to my new home. One of them was Anne McCaffery's continuing cycle of stories about the Dragonriders of Pern. This volume picks up the story between Dragonsdawn, of when the colony was first founded, and Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern.

The novel starts with hints of a coming Pass from the Red Star, a rogue planet in the system where Pern is located. The various groups of settlers -- holders -- and the dragonriders in the Weyrs are struggling to prepare, trying to keep what technology has managed to survive the last few centuries since the Landing, and several factors come together to make what was a difficult time into a crisis.

One of the lord holders, Chalkin of Bitra, stubbornly maintains that not only is Thread not going to happen, there isn't a shred of truth to the old tales and it's all a scam-act. Iantine, a young artist, is severely abused by him and manages to make it the local Weyr to report on the holder's ways, and later on his talents prove to play a pivotal role. But the main characters are the young Weyrleaders of Telgar Weyr, K'vin and Zulaya.

We watch them prepare for Threadfall, in a mixture of apprehension and sometimes outright worry and fretting. How they deal with stubborn holders, the failure of technology as the last computers go down and the information in them is irretrivable, a tragedy that borders on genocide, and finally the solution to solve the riddle of timing oncoming Threadfall for the future generations will strike a chord with anyone.

That's McCaffery's strength, her ability to not only make her characters talk to us through the pages, but we can recognize a lot of their speech and characteristics in ourselves.

Now for the weakness of this novel. If you've never read a Pern novel, or only Dragonsdawn, you'll find this enjoyable, and exciting. But if you're a longtime reader, or familiar with the series, it turns out to be one long anticlimax. We know what will happen in the future. And the insertion of modern technological speech and slang completely threw the novel off-kilter for me, and just made me sigh with annoyance.

So, only average, there's much better novels in the series, especially the earlier ones that were published, or Dragonsdawn. Otherwise, I'd say skip this one. It was originally published in the UK as Red Star Rising.