Product Description

Five episodes in the history of Pern, from the very first space survey recommending colonization, to the last, where the early world, its young dragon culture undetected, is condemned to be isolated in space. Anne McCaffrey has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37310 in Books
• Published on: 1994-11-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From the Publisher
Five fascinating scenes from Anne McCaffrey's world-famous Chronicles of Pern.

From the Back Cover
Here are five gripping episodes of early Pern - from the very first space survey recommending colonization, to the last, where the early world, its young dragon culture undetected, is condemned to be isolated in space.

Here is the saga of the mass evacuation from the volcanic southern continent, an entire group of people moved across the dangerous seas, guarded and guided by a flotilla of dolphins. Here, too, is the story of the creation of Ruatha Hold - a mammoth undertaking in the early days of Pern.

And here is one of the most fascinating dragon tales ever written by Anne McCaffrey, when Fort Weyr was the only weyr, and when dragonriders and dragons were overcrowded to danger point. As news broke of three fresh weyrs to be established, a young girl, Torene, came to realize that her dragon could be the next Queen of the newly formed Benden Weyr.

About the Author
Anne McCaffrey was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College, majoring in Slavonic Languages and Literatures. A prolific bestselling author, she is best known for her handling of broad themes and the worlds of her imagination, particularly in her tales of the Talents and the novels about the Dragonriders of Pern. Anne McCaffrey lives in a house of her own design, Dragonhold-Underhill, in County Wicklow, Ireland.

Customer Reviews

Short and sweet
The Chronicles of Pern (First Fall) is an interesting overview in short stories of parts of the history of Pern brushed over in other, longer books of the series.
The stories of Pern, which are arguably Anne McCaffrey's centre-piece work, are set on a colony world of the distant future, which is recommended for colonisation on a very quick survey (The P.E.R.N. Survey) owing to the fact that several members of the survey team have fallen to accidents on earlier planets in the tour.
Many years later, when the planet is colonised by a mixed bag of notables wishing to escape the high-tech, post-war civilisation of the inner planets, the briefness of the survey comes back to haunt them. Marooned by lack of fuel, the colonists have no means of escape from the periodic menace brought to fall on their planet by the wanderer planet in the system, the Red Star, a menace which devours anything and everything carbon-based upon which it falls. No big deal? Think again.
To add to the colonists' troubles, they are forced to evacuate their key settlement in the South by a major volcanic eruption, achieving the huge evacuation with massive amounts of help from the colonising dolphins (The Dolphin Bell).
Eventually, the vast majority of the colonists settle in a large cave system on the Northern continent, safe in rock from the Thread, as they have called the invading menace, but reliant on the bio-engineered 'dragons' to defend them. The dragons are expanding and multiplying to fulfill this role, but the colonists, with their waning technological knowledge, are less able to defend themselves against the other consequences of living so crammed together, such as disease, and very soon, other 'holds' as the cave systems are named, must be opened up.
The story of 'The Ford of Red Hanrahan' follows the beginnig of one of them.
These new Holds force the dragonriders to protect ever-expanding landmasses from their central base, and eventually Sean Connell, the original leader and one of the earliest dragonriders, decides that they must expand to keep on fulfilling their duties (The Second Weyr). The story follows the history of the Weyr's expansion from the viewpoint of Torene, one of the newest queenriders.
The final story in the book, 'Rescue Run' is the follow-up on the attempt by one of the colonists, Ted Tubberman, to escape Pern by sending off the emergency homing device, against the wishes of the majority. A good two centuries after the colonisation, a warship in the area sends a team to investigate the unapproved cry for help, but lands on the Southern continent, now long abandoned by the main colony. Ross Benden, a distant relative of Admiral Paul Benden, the charismatic leader of the colony, is in charge of the investigation. Rescue Run follows his journey to Pern and what he discovers there.
All in all, this collection of short stories is worth reading if you have already read the rest of the Pern series. On its own it is not one of her better books as the short story format does not allow you to get to grips with the characters so briefly introduced, but to fill in gaps left by the longer books it is very much worth reading, especially 'The Second Weyr'.

Pern for the devotee
Much as I have hugely enjoyed the evolving story of Pern over the last three decades, there is something profoundly unsatisfying about Anne McCaffrey's short stories. I have puzzled long and hard about this, and believe it is a matter of characterization. She writes characters that you can grow to love (or hate) and about whom you crave to know more - F'lar, F'nor, Lessa, Robinton, Mellony - and few of her short stories give time for this essential identification to form. This is exacerbated when the stories are set around the start of Pern, a period with characters whom I have never been able to form the same closeness as the later inhabitants.

Although there is a linking, developmental theme within the stories, this is still a book really only for the Pern devotee; filling in background and historical detail of the rich tapestry that McCaffrey has woven over a lifetime of writing. As such, it is essential reading for the hardcore fan; for the more casual reader it certainly helps pass the time: worth the money, but unlikely to end up as well-thumbed as Dragonflight et al.

Excellent Prequel
Whilst definitely able to stand on it's own, this book provides the reader of the rest of the Pern books with an excellent insight of how the history of the planet came about. Thoroughly recommended both to those who have read the other books and those who are looking to "get into" an excellent series.