There are also several prequels, describing how various aspects of Pern society came to be. Subsequent books dealt with the culture clash between the old-fashioned time-displaced dragon riders and the people they had come to save, and with the gradual rediscovery of technology, which led to the unearthing of the original colony, and a final end to Thread. The heroine travels 400 years into the past, and brings forward the missing dragonriders, creating a Stable Time Loop. Fortunately, it turns out that dragons aren't just fire-breathing telepathic teleporters they can also Time Travel. Only a handful of people still believe Thread was ever real, and there aren't enough dragons left to fight it if it should return, which it does. Most of the books take place over two thousand years after Pern was first settled, beginning when Thread has been absent for 400 years, ever since most of the dragonriders mysteriously disappeared. She was the first woman writer in history to win the Hugo and Nebula Awards, for 'Weyr Search' and the original 'Dragonflight' ( Analog, December 1967/January 1968). She kept writing them for another forty years, though later in collaboration with her son, Todd, who eventually took over the series. Written by Anne McCaffrey, the first Pern novella, 'Weyr Search', was published in Analog, an adult science fiction magazine edited by John W. There's insufficient metal and fuel for such an industrial society, whether or not they want one.

There's also the matter that they'd been warned the planet's resources were 'negligible'. Using planes to fight Thread would mean living in an industrial society capable of supporting them dragons could be supported by the idealised medieval society the settlers had wanted. Rather than permanently resort to technological measures, the colonists used genetic engineering to create dragons, a solution compatible with their principles since, like the spaceships that had brought them to Pern, it was technology they could use once, then discard. Pern, an isolated world with no useful resources, seemed like the ideal place for people tired of technology to establish a pastoral utopia, until Thread, an alien fungus that could devour a cow in seconds, began to fall from the skies.

The dragonriders of pern anne mccaffrey