All the Weyrs of Pern

I cried when Master Robinton died!! The individual story threads were woven deftly, and I very much enjoyed Dragons In Space!

On rereading, I found the previous books in the series stunningly mediocre, but this one was a dull morass of actively bad writing, lazy plotting and cardboard characters. It wasn't even internally consistent – one of the things I loved about Pern was the way the fantasy world turned out to be science fiction (meaning all the fantasy elements had a basically consistent, non-magical explanation), but in this book we discover odd things like that the dragons aren't affected by vacuum and can carry as much as they think they can carry (what?).

I mean, I'm all for the concept of dragons in space, but for McCaffrey to just throw all of the science fiction world-building out the window really destroys what's so unique about Pern.

There's a deus ex machina in the form of a literal machine, the computer AIVAS that spends the book telling everyone what to do. The characters spend the majority of the book either following the AI's instructions or arguing amongst themselves about whether they should trust the computer. It was kinda cute to see the harpers become programmers, but otherwise, meh. Similar to Discworld, I think it's hard to make it interesting to watch a fantasy world (re)discover the technology of our world.

There wasn't much in the way of real crisis or danger or even wondering what was going to happen, especially after AIVAS convinced Jaxom to agree to his plan by having him jump forward in time to verify that the plan worked. No dramatic tension there, then!

The only bits that were mildly interesting were the ones involving Robinton, and honestly McCaffrey has so successfully turned a character I once loved and admired into a dirty old man and a drunk that I was almost relieved to have him out of the picture.

Oh, and there was a thread about the dolphins that never got resolved, which annoys me because I've been wondering what happened with the freaking dolphins. They keep getting mentioned but it never leads to anything!

The Kindle edition had a bunch of places where it looked like things didn't get properly edited, too. Like sentence fragments and paragraphs that cut off in the middle. Not sure what was up with that.

The one nice thing I can say about this book is that it did lack the slut-shaming, rape and casual domestic violence that I've come to pretty much expect from Pern novels. I think a few people gave other people little shakes and that's about it.