Dragon Harper: A New Adventure of Pern by Anne & Todd McCaffrey

Dragon Harper: A New Adventure of Pern, Anne & Todd McCaffrey, Corgi Books, 2008.

Warning: contains a plot spoiler!

Although a fervent lover of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, I had sworn I was not going to read any of the Pern books written collaboratively with (or more accurately, by) her son Todd. That was before I found that I had to read "a book with a dragon" to fill a square on my book bingo. A frantic scan of the school library revealed that I had read pretty much every dragon book available with the exception of Dragon Harper, so I decided to give it a try.

The last Pern novel I purchased was Anne McCaffrey's final solo novel in the series, The Skies of Pern, which she had published in 2001, at the age of 75. The novels published as collaborations with her son Todd, which I chose not to buy or read, were issued in the intervening years between then and her death in 2011, with the last published posthumously in 2012. According to a letter quoted on her Wikipedia entry, "In the Pern collaboration with Todd, she was mainly 'making suggestions or being a sounding board'."

I hate reading connected books out of order and, from the bewildering amounts of backstory being referred to in the opening chapters of Dragon Harper, it rapidly became clear that it was part of a series. This also meant that there was a lack of introduction of some key characters, who had clearly been treated in greater depth in previous books. 

Dragon Harper, which came out in 2007, is in fact the fourth of the novels published collaboratively by Anne & Todd McCaffrey and is considered the third book in a trilogy with Dragon's Kin and Dragon's Fire.

Although it was nice to be back in the world of Pern, I did not feel that Todd McCaffrey's writing stood up by comparison to his Nebula Award-winning mother's. It was not just the writing itself but more the characterisation and lack of... passion, emotional connection. He just did not manage to make me care about Kindan, Koriana, Nonala or Vaxorum in the same way I had cared about Lessa, F'lar, F'nor, Jaxom, Menolly, Robinton, Piemur and the other characters of the original two trilogies. When Masterharper Robinton nearly died in the original series I was in tears the first time I read it (and this is NOT a normal occurrence for me while reading), whereas 

<SPOILER ALERT> 

Vaxorum's and Koriana's deaths felt more like: 'Oh dear, how sad, never mind.' Todd McCaffrey's characters were more two dimensional and less real, whereas Anne McCaffrey's were individuals who felt to me like 'real people' that I knew. (Also, to be honest, Todd's character name choices were just weird, as opposed to his mother's characters' names, which were weird and interesting.)

Then there was the plot, revolving mainly around an influenza epidemic (with some hopeless romance thrown in). This seemed like a thinly disguised recycling of the scenario from Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern and Nerilka's Story. I wondered exactly how many more novels could be created in the Pern world using variations on the "dangerous pandemic" story. Sadly, I decided I do not care, and am also not interested enough in Todd McCaffrey's characters to want to know what else happened in the collaborative series, either before or after Dragon Harper.