 Published in 1968, this was Anne McCaffrey's second novel. It starts off very powerful and exciting. It introduces a strong young female lead who can talk to dragons, and she's going to change the world. But after that thrilling introduction, it becomes a tedious slog. Lots of people standing around talking, having meetings. The characters remain thin. I didn't believe any of them or their relationships. And by the end it was completely incoherent. I didn't accept anything that was happening. And just laughably bad. Sloppy and unprofessional, one of my worst modern reading experiences. I am very sorry to say that I cannot recommend this book. I want to take a little time to talk about what went wrong with this book. A lot went wrong. And I'm going to explain it all. And there will be spoilers in case you're ever wanting to get into Anne McCaffrey's Dragon Riders. This is where you would start. This is the first book. Anyway, I've complained before about authors dropping their style or changing their style partway through their book. And this is a prime example of that. The first part is quite good. In fact, I talked about that in my October Reads video a couple of weeks ago that I was really impressed with the first part of it. And I was very excited about reading the rest of it. And I was. See, the book is divided into four parts. The first part introduces this character, Lessa, right here. I don't like the drawings, by the way. I think the drawings in this book do not represent what's described in the book. I think it does these characters some serious injustice. I'm very unhappy with the art. But she's a very strong, very likable, very sympathetic and very powerful young girl. She can talk to dragons. She can talk to every dragon in the world and nobody else can do that. And she's going to become the dragon queen. And in fact, by the end of the first part of this book, she dramatically changes the leadership structure in her world. See, here's an example of the artwork I'm talking about. This looks like some kind of steampunk thing. She's wearing flight goggles. She has flight goggles around her neck. Like she's flying an airplane in 1914. Yeah, I think it's all wrong. Anyway, here's an example of the kind of problem I'm talking about when an author's style changes or just drops away partway through a book. This is a perfect example of it. I end part one, I turn the page to start part two, and immediately all of the great style, all of the strong interest, all of the maturity and professionalism that characterizes part one, with the turn of a single page, it's gone. It's gone completely, immediately starting to read the second part. I was saying to myself, wait a minute, what happened? Is this the same writer? Did someone else take over? Did she just stop writing? I can't stand that sort of thing. And it gets worse and worse as the book goes on. The characters just were just unsympathetic and unbelievable. They weren't sketches of characters. They weren't complete characters. They didn't have any depth. There's a lot of characters, too. Every human has a name and every dragon has a name. And you have to be able to keep track of that. And I did not have trouble with that, by the way. There have been instances where I have had trouble keeping track of large numbers of characters. This is not one of them. I'll show you an example of the kind of thing you'll run into here. With all of these humans and all of these dragons having names, you'll run into sentences like this here. Philar told Nimminth to have Kant tell Fanor to proceed. And see, that's clumsy, to say the least. One of the problems I had, and again, this was starting with the first page of part two, I could not tell how much time had gone by. One of the first things I was asking myself was, wait a minute, how much time has gone by? At first, I assumed that several years had gone by. But then after reading a few pages or a few chapters, I said to myself, wait a minute, no time has gone by. This is the very next day. And then again, I had to say to myself, wait a minute, no, I was wrong again. I couldn't tell how much time had gone by. And then later in part two, near the end of part two, she said explicitly that two years had gone by. That was not what I had guessed. It was either no time had gone by or a number of years had gone by. There should not be that much confusion. It's not necessary for an author to tell us everything. But there shouldn't be confusion. And Lessa and this Philar character, he was the dragon leader, I couldn't tell if they were supposed to be having a relationship. Sometimes she would say things that implied that they were having a relationship, that since she was the dragon queen and he was the dragon leader, that they were expected to have a relationship. But she didn't say that they were expected to but weren't, which would be defying custom or going against custom. And then sometimes they would do and say things that made me think, okay, wait a minute, are they having a relationship? I couldn't tell. I felt like it was jarring, it was inconsistent and it caused confusion. Now it was established right at the beginning of the book that dragons can teleport. They can teleport instantaneously from one place to another. As long as their rider can picture in their mind the place that they need to go, they can just boom, they can just teleport there. They call it going between. And then about halfway through the book, the author does something that I think is unforgivable. It's unacceptable to me and I consider it downright unforgivable. She introduces time travel. Lessa accidentally discovers that dragons cannot only teleport from one place to another, they can teleport between times. This is one of my most infuriating pet peeves, is an author who introduces this trope of time travel in a story that's not about time travel. If you establish that a book or a movie or any story is about time travel and you're going to explore how it works and the problems that it causes and what kind of amazing things someone can do when they have control of time travel, fine. Let's establish that up front. If you introduce time travel partway through or near the end of a story that's not about time travel, you ruin it because everything becomes meaningless. Seriously, everything becomes pointless after the characters can suddenly time travel. And every character can time travel here. Every dragon can time travel. When dragons are born, they are immediately paired off with young people, with young kids. So basically Anne McCaffrey has created a world here where every teenager in the world has their own personal time machine. Can you imagine what kind of mess? There's no reason for anything to make any sense after that. I didn't believe anything that was happening. Once time travel was introduced, every time something would happen, I would say to myself, well, why did that happen? Why is it a problem? They can time travel. She did try to be a little bit more mature about it. Lessa and Fallor, for example, realized that all of the important points in their lives, when they had epiphanies, when they had important changes and revelations in their lives, what was actually happening was that their future selves had been traveling back in time and sending them mental boosts, like mental psychological. It was ridiculous. It was insanely stupid. I didn't accept any of it. I'll tell you what else I did not accept. The reason they have these dragons is because there's another planet or another star, called the Red Star, which every few hundred years passes close to Pern and these spores from the Red Star travel across empty space and rain down on Pern and the dragons fly through the air blowing fire and burning out the spores. I did not accept that. I mean, you have a platoon of 20 dragons who are going to fly through the air and basically stop every drop of rain from hitting the ground. I do not accept that. I will accept dragons. I will accept dragons that can teleport. I don't like accepting dragons that can time travel, but I will reluctantly accept it. I will not accept that any number or any amount of flying dragons of individual creatures can stop the rain. I don't accept it and I don't believe it. And here's another thing. I mentioned that the Red Star came by every few hundred years. The author did something that created even more confusion for me. At the beginning of the book, she would refer to, she used the word turns to describe years. At least I thought that's what she was doing. She described Lessa as being 11 turns at a certain point in the book and then later she said that Lessa was 10 turns older, so she was 20 or 21 at that point and all throughout the first half of the book I was accepting turns as being years. But then suddenly, about three quarters of the way through the book, she used the word years. She specifically used the word years instead of turns. And then a short while later she used the word turns again. So that made me think, okay, turns are not years. Are they? But then she was using the word years to describe the movements of the Red Star or the number of years that the spores or the threads they called them would fall. But then she kept using turns to describe other things. So I'm thinking, okay, if turns are not years, then I don't understand the passage of time at all here. I don't understand what's been happening. I don't understand who's who or who's older than who. But then it didn't make any difference because they were... When they didn't have enough dragons, they would send a group of them 10 years back in time to go some other place and grow more dragons. And then when it was time for them all to get together and fight the threads, suddenly there would be a thousand of them instead of the 20 that they had. It was insane. It was so stupid. By the end of this book it was so crazy and so outlandish and so laughably bad. It was like the end of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Really, for a book that started out so strong and so professional and so interesting, it turned into just a stupid, unprofessional slop job. And I'm completely serious when I use those terms. It was slop. I'm not going to be reading another Dragon Flight book. Now I reviewed Crystal Singer by Anne McCaffrey before and I don't remember having problems like this with Crystal Singer. And I read another one of her books, one of the... one of the Brainship books. It was either the ship who sang or the city who fought. I don't remember which. But I remembered them being good. So this was just a disappointment. Here's another example of these drawings being a problem. This guy looks ridiculous. He's wearing an overcoat. And look at the size of that dragon. It's the size of like an entire football field. Nowhere in the book do they describe the dragons being this big. In fact, this is Philar. And they describe Les's Golden Queen Dragon as being much bigger than Philar's Dragon. So how the hell big is that dragon? But seriously, this is a big disappointment. I was pulling my hair out finishing this book. If you want to read it and see what I'm talking about, go ahead. It should be an easy read. I would actually be interested to see if other people have the same feeling I did that the first part of this book was tremendous and exciting. And then after that, all of that is gone and it's just stupid insanity. Let me know. Bye.