Author: Anne McCaffrey
First Book Published: 1967
Medium: Book Series
Damn thorough. It may not be the main focus of the story, but the weird sex stuff in the story is as explained as you could possibly want.
Middling. It is important to the plot at some point in most books, and sometimes very important, but it's rarely the most important thing going on and only so many words will be dedicated to it.
Good and weird! Right weird! Pretty damn weird.
I'm very fond of it. Caveat: there are about a thousand Pern books and I have read about five (plus the YA spinoff trilogy) so I can't give a full judgement of the full series. It has had quite a bit of influence on other sf/f fiction authors over time since it's a very successful series. And it has this tantalizing hint of background gay which, while it doesn't give this series full gay points, absoltuely captured my imagination at age 15 and has been taking up valuable RAM since.
Ha ha ha, holy shit.
The Dragonriders of Pern series (which I shall synecdochally refer to as 'Pern') has just the wildest sf/f sex stuff going on and it is almost always just in set up in the background. It's plot-relevant sometimes but usually just... there. The chutzpah of having somehting this wild and treating it like yet another little brick in the worldbuilding wall sends me. This takes some explanation, though, so bear with me.
Pern is one of my favorite examples of a series that is both science fiction and fantasy. We begin with a comfortable genre trope: an exoplanet is colonized by space-faring humans from the future. However, something about that planet causes them to rapidly change their society in such a way that they lose knowledge of their previous technology and now use the tools native to their new planet to survive. I've read a few of these, and I suspect Pern influenced many of them. None of this is a huge spoiler, either. The first book doesn't lead with this information but the rest of them come with an entire primer about the planet, its solar system, how it was colonized, some pretty hard sci-fi stuff.
The stories themselves, however, read a little more like fantasy (though the fantasy and sci-fi elements blend more and more as time goes on). Pern is periodically ravaged by an incredibly deadly scourge called 'thread.' Every (approximately) 200 years, an alien substance called 'thread' rains down on all of Pern. Thread kills all it touches, destroying life and eating away stone. Every time it falls, it falls for fifty years. Then 200 years of no thread pass, then 50 years of thread, and repeat. Pernese history is divided into threadfalls periods, so there are series set in the first fall, the third fall, ect.
There is only one thing that can safely destroy thread.
(there will eventually be a ton of awesome dragon pictures here. The website is under construction. Imagine them for now.}
Dragons are a native species on Pern which are. Dragons. They're dragons. They fly, they breath fire, that fire is hot enough to destroy thread in the air. Pernese humans bred dragons to be big enough to ride and then started crafting the societal system of Weyrs, dragon-breeding and -training fortresses where people of particular talent can become dragon-riders, people who bond with freshly-hatched dragons, raise them, and train together with them to become a flying death machine. It's a planet of horsegirls, but way better.
Now, did you notice that I said 'bond' with them? That's a deliberate choice of words. Pernese dragons are essentially sentient. How intelligent they are varies based on their subspecies (I'll get there) but they all have intelligence, emotions, reasoning, the urge to form complex societies with pecking orders, ect. The smartest of them are smarter than their riders, frankly.
Most humans cannot speak to them, because dragons do not primarily use their voices to speak. Rather, dragons speak to each other using psychic communication. And, crucially, a human dragon rider who is properly bounded to their dragon can mentally communicate with them, and can feel each other's emotions from a pretty good distance. They are so emotionally and spiritually attached that when a rider dies, the dragon almost always dies too, and often the opposite is true. Retired dragonriders who have lost their mounts are depicted as feeling a pain like losing a spouse, if not worse.
...Before we get to it, let me not get your hopes up too high. Sadly, here is no cross-species dragon/human banging in Pern that I know of (in reality, though, someone would fucking do it, and we all know that.) But there is soemthing that is, frankly, just as good.
Let's start by talking about how dragons reproduce. Then we can get to the really good stuff.
...Now that I think about that, for my audience, dragon fucking may be the good stuff. So, listen up, freaks.
Dragons come in different subspecies, and those subspecies have both internal and external differences that are pretty extreme. Subspecies are gendered; a gold dragon is ALWAYS female, a bronze is ALWAYS male. Subspecies also have class conotations and, frankly, only a list or chart will do this justice.
...Eh, let me make a table. I just haven't made an HTML table in a while and it's fun.
| Color | Satus | Rarity | Gender | Size | Anything else? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GOLD: | Highest status. | Very rare. | Always female. | Very large. | Called Queens. |
| BRONZE: | Highest status. | Rare. | Always male. | Very large. | Especially strong and fast. |
| BROWN: | Middle status. | Rare. | Always male. | A good size. | Like a Bronze, but less. |
| BLUE: | Low status. | Common. | Always male. | Small. | Fast and agile. |
| Green: | Low status. | Most common. | Always female. | Small. | Greens are sterile. |
There is also one white dragon, like there is on that picture, but the books make it clear that Ruth is a genetic anomaly.
(and I'm not talking about the fire lizards okay this is going to be long enough as it is)
Now. Okay. Dragon sex. Note that I said that greens are all female, but 'usually sterile?' I won't get into the complicated reasons why that happens; the point is that half of all dragons are sterile females, then another half are virile males, except for a literally handful of Golden Queens, who do lierally all the reproduction. You know, like bees. The female Gold, once she's old enough, will go into a heat state. Once she feels the burn coming on, she takes to the sky, an the elegible males around her can smell/sense that she's ready to mate. A chase ensues in which eligible males in the area race to eb the one to catch her; the one who does gets her. In practice, a bronze almost always wins because they're bigger/faster/stronger than other male dragons, but a Brown wins often enough that it's not unheard of. HOWEVER, the human politics of the Weyrs, with captive-bred dragons, has some weird effects on this; since the riders of bronze dragons are often important men themselves, and they're all clamoring to have the status of the Weyrleader, the man whose dragon is mating with the...
I'm getting ahead of myself.
Ideally, each Weyr only has one Golden Queen. They're bitchy and they want the space to themselves. A newly hatched Queen is usually sent off to an empty Weyr without one if possible. These golden Queens ARE attached to dragon-riders, though whether they actually ride against thread varies based on society and time period.
Whether this is really a dragon preference or a human preference is up for debate, but the fact remains that humans and dragons tend to bond along gendered lines. Gold Queens bond with human women. Male dragons bond with human Men. Green dragons... let me get there last, because that is an interesting point that changes based on when a particular book is set.