Books in the The Dragon Books series

Dragonholders, Lord Holders and Craftmasters crowded into the tiny inner room to learn the secrets of their beginnings. Ana AIVAS had other gifts to offer, stored information of old crafts that had been forgotten, of medicine, music and technology. But the greatest promise AIVAS offered was the chance to rid Pern of Thread forever.

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.

A new age is dawning on Pern, for since the dragons have changed the orbit of the Red Star, the horrors of Threadfall will soon be a thing of the past. But now comes a fresh and terrible catastrophe - a large cometary fragment is hurtling towards Pern and cannot be deflected.

Anne McCaffrey was one of the world's leading science-fiction writers, and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards as well as the Margaret A. Edwards' Lifetime Literary Achievement Award. She was deeply honoured to have been made a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2005, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2006. Born and raised in the US and of Irish extraction, she moved to Ireland in 1970 where she lived in the ¿Garden of Ireland¿, County Wicklow, until her death in 2011 at the age of eighty-five. She is the creator of the Dragonriders of Pern¿ series. Her website is www.pernhome.com.

Some fourteen hundred turns after men first came to Pern rode Moreta, on her great golden dragon, Orlith. It was towards the end of the Pass of the Red Star -- a time when every living creature on Pern was threatened by Threadfall -- when the courage and daring of dragons and their riders was all that kept the planet from extinction.

Kindan is an apprentice harper at the Harper Hall but he is finding the lessons very difficult and although he has his friends, Nonala, Kelsa and Verilan, he also has enemies, such as the bully Vaxoram.

When Fiona, the only surviving member of Lord Holder Bemin's family, impresses a queen dragon, she doesn't begin to realize the perils and privileges that come with her new role. As she grows into a young woman and her dragon reaches her full growth, she faces the possibility of losing her dragon to the sickness that has claimed so many others.

Pern AL 50: the geneticist Wind Blossom is nearing the end of her long life and is painfully aware that the colonists are running out of the modern technology the settlers brought with them to Pern and that they are forgetting how to use what they do have.

Mining is fraught with danger, but fortunately the camp has a watch-wher, a creature distantly related to dragons and uniquely suited to specialized work in the dark, cold mineshafts. Then disaster strikes, leaving Kindan orphaned and the camp without a watch-wher.