Dragon's Time Review
So, I've now finished reading 'Dragon's Time' by Todd McCaffrey, in record time as 400 pages of it were skim read. Yes, it's that bad...
So, following my previous rant on his last offering in this series, I decided to read the last one - mostly as it was billed as also being written by his Mum. Turns out she just tweaked occasionally and left it mostly to him. *sigh*
Also, the foreword made me go "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" as she talks about being possessive of her characters (namely F'lar and Lessa) and not wanting to let him write with them, but thinking maybe it's time she shared? Please, dear God, don't let her have given him permission to do that before she passed on.
Where to begin? If you recall I mentioned the characters were all the same, and emotions were on yo-yos and swung from extreme to extreme for no readily apparent reason? Well, in this one he seems to have caught on that this isn't a good way of portraying emotion. There were no themes that people could relate to in their own lives. So, given the number of female characters he was writing about (and how he seems to think his entire readership is female), what better way to connect than to make every single female get pregnant. Every one of them. And then, as if making out that from the second you conceive you have all manner of crippling handicaps wasn't bad enough, he starts a game of "how many ways of causing miscarriages can I come up with?" Seriously, one of them even runs off her Weyr ledge, randomly, with no provocation (unless the 7 year old sharing her weyr is somehow a psychotic murderer and pushed her). What's more, her Queen doesn't react to this in any way, an issue I'll get to later. Also, you can't tell at 8 weeks that you are pregnant with twins. Yet this magic midwife they have (who, by the way, is about 15 years old) can both tell she's pregnant, and that she's having a multiple birth, before the point that many women even know they are pregnant.
It's not a story about the Dragons of Pern dying out, it's all about the pregnancies. Everything else is secondary.
One of the characters, Lorana, goes Between times, knowing it will kill her 20week unborn child. Understandable, kinda, given the entire future of the planet is at stake. However, it makes no sense to go forwards in time to bring dragons back to help now, when without that help the dragons die out. I'm glad that attempt bore no fruit - other than, of course, to tell us in the first chapter that all the major characters will survive the book, leading to no tension in any other situations at all, and that Lorana herself would survive long enough to have another child. On her return, she went 10 years back into the past, and spent 2 days in the company of a Trader who could see the future and knew he was going to die. This chapter was supposed to be about Lorana being able to get to grips with her grief and learn that life carries on and live for the good times. Which would have been fine, if I was at all convinced she was actually grieving, rather than just on occasion putting a hand on her tummy and sighing.
All of this of course, was on a Queen dragon that she 'borrowed' from another Rider, who didn't seem at all phased to be away from her Rider for over a month. She just got a bit wistful near the end, in the few sentences she was allowed to utter.
Speaking of the Dragons...
I mentioned before that we simply didn't care that the dragons were dying. It gets even worse in this book. The whole issue of how the species is dying is reduced to "We lost x this Fall". None of the Dragons have any character, even the lead characters' ones, so we simply don't care about them. The Dragons are pretty much treated as talking horses, and they don't get to talk that much. Ex-Riders happily get on and off other Dragons, and recover from losing their own within a page of them dying. They get injured, but unlike their riders who can complain (never scream or cry) they just lie there and get treated, like livestock being treated by a vet.
The mating flights - they happen across the space of a page, and you never get an impression that there's any hardship involved in controlling your Queen on her first flight. Or that the Bronzes get tired (in the last book, one did 3 flights in one day), or are in any way frustrated afterwards. Or in fact, that there's any sexual tension beforehand, during or after at all. In a book about humans, you'd think that kind of situation would be good for writing about - but no. It's just a convenient way to get the female characters pregnant.
And the Impressions - they made me want to cry, and not in a good way. The one part of the book that is supposed to be about a magical moment, where two people are bonded together for life in a complete and irrevocable way, mind and soul, and it's reduced to:
Weyrwoman: "What's his/her name?"
New Rider: "x"
Weyrwoman: repeat for each new pair
The rubbish with the pointless skipping back and forwards in Time continues. Apart from the necessary ones to get the Weyrlings to grow up, there's a number of times they go to, for no more reason than to bring in a host of characters whose names begin with 'J'. There's no need for any of it, save to pad.
One incident of multiple Timings, is when Lorana comes back and takes a young guy called F'jian away several nights in a row. This makes his girlfriend (a queen rider) believe he is being unfaithful and leave him, getting very upset. Then he dies, timing it to save his Weyrleader from getting eaten by Thread. He then turns up at points in the future when his ex-girlfriend 'needs him most'. Some would say this is a touching and nice sub-story. Unfortunately it comes across as Lorana caused his last few days to be a misery, and makes him so very tired that he dies in a threadfall as a result. Poorly handled and ultimately pointless.
And the Traders - oh god, just leave them out of it! There's no need for it! Yes, you need to Trade to feed the Dragons. You did all that in the first of the three books about Fiona. Why do you feel the need to do it again, in an identical way, this time?
So, having waded through about 600 pages of set-up, we get to the last 50 pages of the book. At which point, 7 months is crammed in, and a situation that - if handled better - would have been a beautiful set piece, full of genuine emotion and concern, danger and poignant Impressions, rather than 2 pages of hurried bollocks. Todd seems to forget that these books are about Dragons as well as humans. If over 300 hundred eggs are being attacked by Tunnel Snakes and giant cats at the same time, and the baby dragons are dying, don't you think the golds and greens would actually be a little upset by this? Instead, the only indication of caring is that one gold picks up a cat and throws it into some rocks. The rest is Fiona and her women running around and flapping. There are over a thousand candidates there too, and yet the description we get makes it seem like there's a dozen people on the entire hatching ground.
Seriously, Todd McCaffrey has utterly missed the point with his books. And that is, that the Dragons are as much characters as the people. They are not just riding beasts, there to enable the humans to Time Travel.
The whole three books (Dragon's Heart, Girl and Time) could have been done in 1 book, and might then have been an interesting read. As it is I shall not touch another of his books, and shall settle for re-reading his Mum's work instead to erase the travesty that is his version of Pern...
So, following my previous rant on his last offering in this series, I decided to read the last one - mostly as it was billed as also being written by his Mum. Turns out she just tweaked occasionally and left it mostly to him. *sigh*
Also, the foreword made me go "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" as she talks about being possessive of her characters (namely F'lar and Lessa) and not wanting to let him write with them, but thinking maybe it's time she shared? Please, dear God, don't let her have given him permission to do that before she passed on.
Where to begin? If you recall I mentioned the characters were all the same, and emotions were on yo-yos and swung from extreme to extreme for no readily apparent reason? Well, in this one he seems to have caught on that this isn't a good way of portraying emotion. There were no themes that people could relate to in their own lives. So, given the number of female characters he was writing about (and how he seems to think his entire readership is female), what better way to connect than to make every single female get pregnant. Every one of them. And then, as if making out that from the second you conceive you have all manner of crippling handicaps wasn't bad enough, he starts a game of "how many ways of causing miscarriages can I come up with?" Seriously, one of them even runs off her Weyr ledge, randomly, with no provocation (unless the 7 year old sharing her weyr is somehow a psychotic murderer and pushed her). What's more, her Queen doesn't react to this in any way, an issue I'll get to later. Also, you can't tell at 8 weeks that you are pregnant with twins. Yet this magic midwife they have (who, by the way, is about 15 years old) can both tell she's pregnant, and that she's having a multiple birth, before the point that many women even know they are pregnant.
It's not a story about the Dragons of Pern dying out, it's all about the pregnancies. Everything else is secondary.
One of the characters, Lorana, goes Between times, knowing it will kill her 20week unborn child. Understandable, kinda, given the entire future of the planet is at stake. However, it makes no sense to go forwards in time to bring dragons back to help now, when without that help the dragons die out. I'm glad that attempt bore no fruit - other than, of course, to tell us in the first chapter that all the major characters will survive the book, leading to no tension in any other situations at all, and that Lorana herself would survive long enough to have another child. On her return, she went 10 years back into the past, and spent 2 days in the company of a Trader who could see the future and knew he was going to die. This chapter was supposed to be about Lorana being able to get to grips with her grief and learn that life carries on and live for the good times. Which would have been fine, if I was at all convinced she was actually grieving, rather than just on occasion putting a hand on her tummy and sighing.
All of this of course, was on a Queen dragon that she 'borrowed' from another Rider, who didn't seem at all phased to be away from her Rider for over a month. She just got a bit wistful near the end, in the few sentences she was allowed to utter.
Speaking of the Dragons...
I mentioned before that we simply didn't care that the dragons were dying. It gets even worse in this book. The whole issue of how the species is dying is reduced to "We lost x this Fall". None of the Dragons have any character, even the lead characters' ones, so we simply don't care about them. The Dragons are pretty much treated as talking horses, and they don't get to talk that much. Ex-Riders happily get on and off other Dragons, and recover from losing their own within a page of them dying. They get injured, but unlike their riders who can complain (never scream or cry) they just lie there and get treated, like livestock being treated by a vet.
The mating flights - they happen across the space of a page, and you never get an impression that there's any hardship involved in controlling your Queen on her first flight. Or that the Bronzes get tired (in the last book, one did 3 flights in one day), or are in any way frustrated afterwards. Or in fact, that there's any sexual tension beforehand, during or after at all. In a book about humans, you'd think that kind of situation would be good for writing about - but no. It's just a convenient way to get the female characters pregnant.
And the Impressions - they made me want to cry, and not in a good way. The one part of the book that is supposed to be about a magical moment, where two people are bonded together for life in a complete and irrevocable way, mind and soul, and it's reduced to:
Weyrwoman: "What's his/her name?"
New Rider: "x"
Weyrwoman: repeat for each new pair
The rubbish with the pointless skipping back and forwards in Time continues. Apart from the necessary ones to get the Weyrlings to grow up, there's a number of times they go to, for no more reason than to bring in a host of characters whose names begin with 'J'. There's no need for any of it, save to pad.
One incident of multiple Timings, is when Lorana comes back and takes a young guy called F'jian away several nights in a row. This makes his girlfriend (a queen rider) believe he is being unfaithful and leave him, getting very upset. Then he dies, timing it to save his Weyrleader from getting eaten by Thread. He then turns up at points in the future when his ex-girlfriend 'needs him most'. Some would say this is a touching and nice sub-story. Unfortunately it comes across as Lorana caused his last few days to be a misery, and makes him so very tired that he dies in a threadfall as a result. Poorly handled and ultimately pointless.
And the Traders - oh god, just leave them out of it! There's no need for it! Yes, you need to Trade to feed the Dragons. You did all that in the first of the three books about Fiona. Why do you feel the need to do it again, in an identical way, this time?
So, having waded through about 600 pages of set-up, we get to the last 50 pages of the book. At which point, 7 months is crammed in, and a situation that - if handled better - would have been a beautiful set piece, full of genuine emotion and concern, danger and poignant Impressions, rather than 2 pages of hurried bollocks. Todd seems to forget that these books are about Dragons as well as humans. If over 300 hundred eggs are being attacked by Tunnel Snakes and giant cats at the same time, and the baby dragons are dying, don't you think the golds and greens would actually be a little upset by this? Instead, the only indication of caring is that one gold picks up a cat and throws it into some rocks. The rest is Fiona and her women running around and flapping. There are over a thousand candidates there too, and yet the description we get makes it seem like there's a dozen people on the entire hatching ground.
Seriously, Todd McCaffrey has utterly missed the point with his books. And that is, that the Dragons are as much characters as the people. They are not just riding beasts, there to enable the humans to Time Travel.
The whole three books (Dragon's Heart, Girl and Time) could have been done in 1 book, and might then have been an interesting read. As it is I shall not touch another of his books, and shall settle for re-reading his Mum's work instead to erase the travesty that is his version of Pern...