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My name is Pat and I live in Florida. My skin will never be smooth again and my hair will never see color. I enjoy collecting autographs and playing in Paint Shop Pro.,along with reading and writing. Sometimes, I enjoy myself by doing volunteer "work" helping celebrities at autograph shows. I love animals and at one time I did volunteer work for Tippi Hedren's Shambala Preserve.

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Legends

From the book Legends: edited by Robert Silverberg.

Paperback: 715 pages

Publisher: Tor Fantasy; (August 1, 2001)

ISBN-10: 0765300354

 The Runner of Pern: Anne McCaffrey: 60 pgs.

legends_zps4f1d9b0b[1]

pern_zps2219bb0e[1](sketch by Michael Whelan)

From Publishers Weekly (entire book)

Microcosmic glimpses of broadly imagined worlds and their larger-than-life characters distinguish this hefty volume of heavyweight fantasy. Silverberg collects 11 previously unpublished short "novels" by genre celebrities, each a window on a sprawling saga that has shaped the way modern fantasy fiction is written and read. Stephen King weighs in with "The Little Sisters of Eluria," set early in the Dark Tower saga and deftly weaving threads of horror, quest fantasy and the western into a dangerous snare for his indefatigable gunslinger, Roland of Gilead. Ursula K. Le Guin contributes "Dragonfly," a tale about a young woman who would be a wizard that offers a savvy dissection of the sexual politics that govern Le Guin's Earthsea empire. Neo-Arthurian fantasy gets its due in George R.R. Martin's "The Hedge Knight," a prequel to the Song of Ice and Fire series. Only a sliver of fantasy insinuates Silverberg's own "The Seventh Shrine," a Majipoor murder mystery that becomes a fascinating exploration of clashing cultures. Although most of the selections are sober sidebars to serious literary fantasy cycles, Terry Pratchett's "The Sea and Little Fishes" is a giddy Discworld romp that pits cantankerous witch Granny Weatherwax against her crone cronies, and Orson Scott Card's "Grinning Man" is corn-fed tall talk in which Alvin Maker outwits a crooked miller in the alternate America of Hatrick River. Some entries, among them Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar tale "The Wood Boy" and Anne McCaffrey's "Runner of Pern," shine only as light glosses on their authors' earlier achievements. Still, there's enough color, vitality and bravura displays of mythmaking in this rich sampler, which also includes tales by Terry Goodkind, Tad Williams and Robert Jordan, to sate faithful fans and nurture new readers on the stuff of legends still being created.

The Runner of Pern is a short story by Anne McCaffrey..

Anyone who knows me knows I love the Pern books!  So long ago when The Legends books came out and each one had a short story by Anne… well.. even though I am not a short story lover, those books became part of my “library”!

(Prior to the return of threads falling and Dragons flying in the sky searing the threads)…The Runner of Pern is about a young girl named Tenna who is born to a family of runners.  Although Drums could send messages faster runners were still used to transfer many types of messages that weren’t “emergencies”.

Runners would be the equivalent to mailmen..but (of course) they run instead of drive to deliver the mail .

The story revolves around Tenna and her becoming a runner and then letting her run to deliver mail farther and farther away, so that she might earn her way to being a Journeyman.

One nite while running someone on a “runner beasts” runs past her knocking her into a *sticklebush* which leaves mean needles under your skin and could get nasty if not gotten out.  Tenna winds up staying at the Hold to be doctored and while there she gets to go to her first Gather.  There she meets the young man that nearly ran her over with his beast and a friendship is made.

Anne could have written so many small stories that happened on Pern during the time she wrote her books.  Every little thing just makes Pern  more and more “real” to one who loves her stories.

It was a good short story.. it won’t turn me into a short story lover but memories of what is happening at the Weyrs while Tenna is becoming a runner churns in my mind while I read this story.

If you are not a lover of Pern, more than likely this story wouldn’t mean a thing to you.  It’s a small part of a very big story of Pern.

6 Comments:

Blogger Cath said...

I thought I had this book and read it but I think it must have been something else because I honestly don't remember a story by Anne McCaffrey in it. Sounds like you enjoyed it. I don't think she ever wrote anything I *didn't* enjoy.

6:12 AM  
Blogger Carl V. Anderson said...

LOVE that Whelan sketch!!! Wow!

3:38 PM  
Blogger DesLily said...

carl: me too! you are so lucky that you will see him again!!!

4:10 PM  
Blogger Carl V. Anderson said...

Check out my latest post. Want me to try to cut you down one of those billboards in a few weeks? LOL!

4:40 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, I love this story! I love the complex culture of Pern, and I think this story (short as it is) has a lot to do with my feelings about Pern as an elaborate, brilliantly-operating world with its own professions and its own solutions to society's needs.

And I think it may be in part this story that makes me have fits in later Pern books when they start bringing in technology. I mean...a telegraph? Really? But...but...what about Tenna and her family of runners and an entire culture that's just being REPLACED by a machine??? And okay, yes, society evolves, but I never could see why it was necessary on Pern when they were so brilliantly functioning anyway.

Well, that's enough ranting...lovely, lovely story!

11:06 PM  
Blogger DesLily said...

marveloustales: I think Anne took many things from society on the whole..how people are forced out of work by technology..if that were a "new story" (which, of course, it is not) I'd say you could compare it to the post office delivering mail and the takeover of email. It would seem Anne was ahead of her time!

6:45 AM  

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