Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffC
So that puts Anne McCaffrey's books firmly into SF; rather than fantasy....
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The Pern series always
was SF. Pern is a lost colony, whose human (and dolphin) inhabitants got there by starship, and the dragons are the product of genetic engineering on the indigenous fire lizards. Humanity is knocked back to a pre-technological level and forgets its origins in the periodic fall of the parasitic Threads that the dragonriders exist to fight.
The problem is that a lot of folks come to the series partway through, where the back story isn't really mentioned. They see a feudal society, medieval level of technology, and fire breathing dragons, and say "Aha! Fantasy!" because those are the visible tropes.
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Dennis