Not the author her mother was, but I’m glad at any chance to visit Pern again. ( )

When Todd started writing with his mom, I was cautiously optimistic. I grew up on Pern, loved Pern, and re-read the series every couple years. I knew Anne was aging, and I was hopeful that Todd, having grown up with her and writing with her, would be able to take over and continue to tell stories in a world I loved. Like I said, I was optimistic. Right up until I read the first few books. Todd made radical changes to the canon, used the same repetitive plots over and over, and wrote the flattest, most Mary Sue-ish characters in the series.

Now I realize I was perhaps too hard on Todd. Gigi is by far the weaker of the two and Anne made do with what she had.

Todd played pretty much in his own timeline, picking a pass that wasn't used in his mother's stories. This gave him a lot of freedom while writing - freedom to make his own characters, plots, small adjustments to geography, etc. I thought that was respectful of his mother's creation. Don't get me wrong - he still fucked up canon in ways that didn't make sense (as opposed to the small errs that Anne made, which were largely typos in dragon names or colors), but it was at least temporally isolated from the rest of Pern.

Gigi just dives into some of the most popular, most well-established and well-loved characters of the series to reprise one of the biggest stories in the series. Its a super ballsy move that would take a lot of knowledge and skill to pull off, and Gigi, sadly, does not have either. There's multiple small issues with the canon. For example, Gigi seems to mistake the Terran horses for the Pandoran direhorse. Horses have 4 legs, not 6.

But I can almost, almost ignore those. Like I said, Anne made small typos too. Here, Gigi is writing about Piemur, Sebell, Menolly, and Robinton. None of their personality is captured. The dialogue is stilted and without any character voice (plenty of painful fake accents, though). There is no plot to speak of and what little plot there is is recycled from other Pern books and underdeveloped. Oh no, the dragons are sick again, oh wait here's a convenient, ancient cure. Oh no, we don't have enough dragons to fight Thread oh wait we convinced some to do a time jump. Todd overused these plots to death and Gigi appears to follow the trend.

Piemur lacks any real agency - he just wanders place to place as he's told reporting information people either already knew or don't care about. His biggest contribution is a half-page speech at the end that was painfully cliched and the resulting success doesn't feel earned.

At this point I think I'm done hoping that Pern will continue. Anne gave us over a dozen solid Pern stories. We should be content with that.

TL;DR: This is the Pern equivalent of Star Wars prequels, or the Twilight book Life and Death - a story that could be told, but didn't need to be told, wasn't told well, and contributed nothing to the established story/setting. ( )

So wonderful to return to Pern after all these years. ( )

So wonderful to return to Pern after all these years. ( )

Both Todd and Gigi have successfully carried on the Pern Adventures. Dragon's Code is center around journeyman Harper Piemur's adventures. I'm not going to regurgitate characters and plots, but I have definitely been hooked again with this 24th book in the Pern list. ( )