This timely and thought-provoking deconstruction of the Dragonriders of Pern series by silveradept. True identity of the stick-carrying man on the Led Zeppelin IV album cover discovered. Imaginary books about the imaginary Hyperdimensional universe. The many varieties of domestic peacock. Political commentary from historian Heather Cox Richardson.
Portrayals of women with dragons continued to rise throughout the 1970s, boosted by the rising genre of adult comics, forerunners to today’s graphic novels. The French magazine Metal Hurlant (Howling Metal) showcased many of these new artists like Caza, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Moebius, who later went on to design book covers and movie and TV …
Before the printing press and paper production on an industrial scale, there were very few mass-produced dragon depictions in popular culture. Most of the ones I referenced in Parts I and II of this series were oil paintings intended for the nobility or wealthy merchants, or in illuminated manuscripts for the Church. The majority of …
Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series put dragons on the map in the science fiction and fantasy world as both plausible alien creatures and the brand-spanking-new fantasy trope of the all-knowing, intelligent animal companion. The first two stories, “Weyr Search” and “Dragonrider” were published in Analog magazine in 1967; they later were incorporated into the first Pern …
Anne McCaffrey wrote a long-running series of books about the backward planet of Pern and its giant, telepathic dragons used to combat “thread” – an invasive space spore that filtered down from an adjacent orbiting body — by burning from the air with their fiery breath. Pern had a pseudo-Medieval culture and the dragons a …
No other creature is as evocative of the contemporary fantasy genre as the dragon. They combine snakes, lizards, dinosaurs, large mammalian predators, and human intellects into one massive, armored, fire-breathing package. (Their drives, however, are their own.) The current version of the dragon dates from within the last 100 years. Tolkien gave us a deadly …