DRAGONFLIGHT, the first Pern story ever published, tells of a critical time in the history of Pern. It's been four hundred years since the last time Threads fell, and most of the Pernese believe the lethal silver rain is gone forever. So they think it doesn't matter that there's only one Weyr of dragons left on Pern, with only a single queen dragon to breed new dragons. But some of the dragonriders do believe Thread will come again. F'lar, rider of bronze dragon Mnementh, and the new Weyrwoman Lessa, rider of queen Ramoth, launch a desperate effort to prepare the planet and the dragons for the return of their ancient enemy.

DRAGONQUEST picks up the story seven Pernese years later. Pern has been saved, but at a cost. While the Oldtimers who came forward in time are trying to live the way they did in the Oldtime, the social changes during the Long Interval between Threadfalls has created a society that is no longer ready to simply wait out Thread attacks, or tolerate the Oldtimers' arrogant ways. When the Lords of Pern's Holds demand that the dragonriders find a way to end Thread forever, tensions begin building between factions that lead to a major confrontation.

DRAGONSONG and DRAGONSINGER together tell the story of a lonely girl named Menolly, from a Hold in eastern Pern called Half-Circle Sea Hold. Half-Circle is a working Hold with little time or tolerance for those who don't want to do sea-work. But Menolly isn't interested in sea-work; she would rather be a musician, a member of Pern's Harper Craft Hall. DRAGONSONG is about Menolly's life in Half-Circle Hold and how she comes to leave the place, and manage to become the owner of nine fire-lizards (the small, indigenous creatures that were engineered into the great dragons). DRAGONSINGER tells of Menolly's first days in the Harpercrafthall, and how she made a place for herself there.

DRAGONDRUMS is about another Harperhall apprentice, a boy named Piemur. Piemur was a great singer with a fine high treble voice. But now he can't sing anymore because his voice is changing. Instead, he's given new duties as a drum apprentice, and he finds himself in the middle of a series of adventures that change his life forever.

THE WHITE DRAGON tells the story of the most unusual rider/dragon pair in Pernese history: Jaxom of Ruatha and his white dragon Ruth. Ruth is a runt that no one thinks will ever amount to anything. But Jaxom trains him in secret, to fly, and breathe fire, and to fight Thread. Then a sudden disastrous action by the exiled Oldtimers causes a crisis that only Jaxom and Ruth can solve.

With DRAGONSDAWN, the series jumps back in time more than two thousand Pernese years, to the time when human colonists first landed on Pern. DRAGONSDAWN tells the story of that initial landing: how the colonists explored their new world, spread out, and built houses, homesteads, and towns. It also tells of the monstrosity that struck from the sky when the colony was only eight years old: the silvery organism called Thread, brought to Pern by its wandering sister-planet the Red Star. And it tells how the colonists mobilized to fight back against this rain of destruction from the skies.

MORETA: DRAGONLADY OF PERN jumps to the end of the Sixth Pass of the Red Star, fifteen hundred years after Landing. MORETA tells the story of one of Pern's greatest heroes: Moreta, the Weyrwoman of Fort Weyr. Near the end of Sixth Pass, Pern is stricken by an epidemic, a viral plague that kills both the people and the horse-derived runnerbeasts that are the main beast of burden. As a Weyrwoman and a Dragonhealer, Moreta becomes a leader in the fight against the Plague.

NERILKA'S STORY is a short novel, little more than a novella, set right after MORETA. It tells of the aftermath of the Plague, seen through the eyes of a young woman named Nerilka, a daughter of the Lord Holder of Fort Hold.

THE RENEGADES OF PERN returns to Ninth Pass, the time of F'lar and Lessa. In the time before Ninth Pass began, an angry young noblewoman named Thella fled into the hills. Over time she assembled a band of "holdless" renegades -- criminals one and all, killers and raiders, like landbound pirates -- and became a marauding force across the Northern Continent. After the Pass begins, Thella's path crosses those of a young trader named Jayge and a very special girl named Aramina, who has the rare talent of being able to hear any dragon. Intertwined with this story is a secondary story of how the Pernese found the old Landing site and began rediscovering the technology of their distant ancestors.

ALL THE WEYRS OF PERN is a grand-scale SF adventure which tells how the Ninth Pass Pernese began using their rediscovered technology, including a long-buried computer system called AIVAS, to develop and carry out a plan to finally drive Thread away from Pern forever. AIVAS is dervied from a computer system brought by the colonists, but over the centuries it has developed into something more than just a computer. As a fully developed artificial intelligence, it becomes a character in its own right, as vibrant and alive as any other on Pern.

THE DOLPHINS OF PERN is about the other colonists of Pern. The original Pern colony included a number of dolphins that had been genetically engineered for greater intelligence and an ability to speak. But in the chaos that followed the First Threadfall, the humans lost contact with the dolphins. The dolphins never stopped hoping that things would change and the humans would rediscover the age-old friendship . . . and now, in Ninth Pass, they finally have. AIVAS's records and a chance encounter lead a young Pernese boy named Readis to rediscover the dolphins and become Pern's first dolphineer in more than two thousand years.

THE CHRONICLES OF PERN: FIRST FALL is an anthology of five pieces of short fiction set during the time of the colonists. "The P.E.R.N. Survey" tells of the original explorer-ship survey that cleared Pern for colonization, two hundred years before the colonists landed. "The Second Crossing" is the story of how the colonists used a small ragged fleet of sailing-ships to move an enormous amount of materials from the old Landing site in the South, where it was menaced by Thread and volcanic eruptions, to the new Fort Hold in the North. "The Ford of Red Hanrahan" tells of how Red Hanrahan left Fort Hold with a small band of settlers to found a second Hold in the mountains north of Fort: the future Ruatha Hold. Finally, "Rescue Run" is set just after the end of First Pass, and tells of how a human spaceship visited Pern again, for the last time.

THE MASTERHARPER OF PERN tells the story of Robinton, a harper prodigy who rose to the rank of Masterharper and became the greatest Masterharper in Pern history. In the process, it also acts as a kind of prequel to the original Dragonriders trilogy, by describing the events leading up to Ninth Pass through Robinton's eyes.

THE SKIES OF PERN is a very different kind of Pern story. As a result of the discovery of the AIVAS computer, a vicious conflict has erupted within Pernese society. A faction of Holders and crafters want to preserve the traditional Pernese culture by destroying all traces of the "new" technology provided by AIVAS. The reactionaries aren't above using force to get what they want, either. In the middle of this conflict, Pern is threatened by a new menace from the skies: a huge meteorite that strikes the planet with enough force to trigger planet-wide earthquakes and massive destruction.

DRAGON'S KIN is a collaborative work between Anne McCaffrey and her son Todd. She wrote the outline and he wrote the main story, as the first step in him taking over the series from her. As the title implies, it focuses not on dragons but on their cousins, the photophobic, nocturnal, thoroughly bizarre creatures called whers. The wher is the result of a failed attempt at creating dragons by the First Pass colonists. They're used by the Pernses as guards (hence their usual name of "watch-whers") and for other dark operations, like underground exploration. The main story is about a mining hold that has just acquired a new watch-wher hatchling, and how the wher and its assigned handler learn to bond and work together.

DRAGONSBLOOD is Todd McCaffrey's first solo Pern novel, and it's markedly different in tone from his mother's writings. It tells the story of a time in Third Pass, when disaster struck Pern in the form of a plague. Unlike most Pernese plagues, though, this one affected the dragons, not the humans. Only a bizarre psychic link across time between the Third Pass dragonriders and the First Pass colonists has any chance of saving the magnificent dragons, their riders, and the Pernese colony.

DINOSAUR PLANET and DINOSAUR PLANET: SURVIVORS together tell the story of an explorer expedition to a planet called Ireta. The planet has a number of anomalies. For one thing, the resources the team is looking for should be there, but they aren't. However, some animals remarkably similar to Old Earth dinosaurs are. Meanwhile, the expedition's mothership has vanished, and some of the expedition members are taking advantage of that to stir up trouble.

THE SHIP WHO SANG is a collection of short fiction about an unusual concept: a Brain Ship whose pilot is a human who was severely deformed at birth and could not have led a normal life. Instead, she was enclosed in a metal shell and turned into a cyborg whose 'body' was a starship. Brain Ships travel the starways with their partners, called Brawns. The particular Brain/Brawn (BB) ship that stars in these stories is named Helva, a vivacious female with a talent for singing and a knack for finding trouble. Helva went on to star in a second book, and McCaffrey collaborated with other authors on several more stories in the Brain/Brawn milieu. I have one of those follow-on stories:

GET OFF THE UNICORN is an anthology of a dozen of McCaffrey's short stories. There's a Pern story, "The Smallest Dragonboy;" several miscellaneous stories, and three stories that were later used as the basis for novels.