The Sword and Laser discussion

Decided to start this thread (hey, the pun is unavoidable) after several people have made comments/asked questions that can't really be answered in a book-specific thread.

To start off, the people of Pern, when they discover the southern continent, find a lush and healthy world. Turns out some of what the first landers knew got lost across the centuries; fighting thread with fire wasn't intended to be the long-term solution it became.

I strongly recommend that people who want to know more start with The White Dragon, which is the third in the trilogy we're reading the first book of.

I think people genuinely interested in the backstory of Pern should start with Dragonsdawn. It tells the whole story and answers pretty much all the questions about how/why/WTF without really spoiling anything for the rest of her series.

If you are one of those people who get caught up in wondering why, why, why...Dragonsdawn will tell you without the slow reveal of slogging through 13 books or whatever. But I hope many of you will go on to read more of her Pern stuff, especially the Harper Hall books, which were the first ones I read.

When I re-read the series (which I have done several times) I read them chronologically to the world, not the order written. I'm a big fan of her Pern world, but I must admit that the first trilogy is not my favorite. Lessa and F'lar are meh. But you do get to meet Robinton there and he is one of my favorite characters of all time in any book ever. So I mostly skim those and move on to the stuff I like better.

Some of her books are good, some aren't. She jumps around in the later books to focus on different aspects of the civilzation - dolphins, messengers, traveling tinkers and sometimes you get protagonists that aren't to your taste or a storyline that's boring. But I appreciate her strategy to show different things and not just dragons and politics or whatever over and over.

I think I just wandered way off topic so I'd better stop.

I like how each region has its own flavor but they have a genuinely global civilization. When you have a mode of transportation that can teleport you anywhere on the planet in a blink of an eye (or several blinks), it does help tie things together.

I also like how "watch the grubs" got twisted into "destroy them" rather than "protect them." Such a small thing that had large consequences.

Are all of McCaffrey's worlds set in the same universe? She has the psychics in the Pegasus series and Tower series, and the interplanetary settlements in the Dinosaur Planet series, and I think in Sassinak.

I never got into the Acorna series, or the Catteni series. I can't recall any crossover with the Ship Who series.

kvon wrote: "Are all of McCaffrey's worlds set in the same universe? She has the psychics in the Pegasus series and Tower series, and the interplanetary settlements in the Dinosaur Planet series, and I think in..."

I never really got the sense they shared a universe, but apparently they do. Although later in life even Isaac Asimov tied a whole bunch of his disparate series together into a shared universe. Which seemed kind of pointless to me, but hey, his work.

From Wikipedia:

Federated Sentient Planets universe

Several of McCaffrey's series (and more than half her books) are set in a universe governed by the "Federated Sentient Planets" ("Federation" or "FSP"). Although Pern's history is connected to the Federation, McCaffrey only used it as a backdrop for storytelling and did not consider her different "worlds" to be part of the same universe.

It's been a while, but as I recall, almost all of her books are in the FSP universe: Pern, Planet Pirates, Crystal Singers, Shell Ships, The Powers That Be, and others. The Tower series takes place in another setting, and the Catteni series is in yet another (both of these series start in the current time period). I'd have to double check, but I'm pretty sure Acorna is FSP.

...I may have been a bit obsessed with this author when I was in high school.