Dragonriders of Pern

Dragonriders of Pern is a science fantasy series that Anne McCaffrey began in 1967 and that her son Todd McCaffrey has continued since 2003, writing alone and with her. Pern is a planet whose human settlers have lost most of their technology and even the memory of where they came from. When the elliptical orbit of the Red Star brings it close, Thread - a spore that devours anything living - falls on Pern for some fifty years, and the Pernese fight it with fire-breathing dragons, each bound for life to a rider by Impression at its hatching. Theirs is a pre-industrial, broadly feudal society of dragonriders in their Weyrs, Holders, craftsmen and harpers, and the holdless. The books span more than two and a half thousand years of Pern's history, from the first landing in Dragonsdawn to the Ninth Pass of the original trilogy. Anne McCaffrey asked readers to take them in the order she wrote them, which is the order here, though she suggested reading the Harper Hall trilogy before The White Dragon. The two novellas that became Dragonflight made her the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction, and the first to win a Nebula.