[Dragaera] The Red Badge of Courage

[Jerry Friedman]

Thanks, Mark.  I'd be honored to have anything I wrote
quoted at your site.

Vide infra.

--- Erzsébet of Catspirit Wood <dalton_0907 at gaeacoop.org> wrote:

> 
> Mark Mandel wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Jerry Friedman
> <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> >> Cracks in the Orb!  I didn't mention an obvious reference to
> >> Pern.  Two quotations from /The White Dragon/ (1978):
> >>
> >> "'Great Shells and Shards!'  Robinton slapped his
> >> forehead."  (p. 603, /The Dragonriders of Pern/ omnibus).
> >>
> >> "'Shards, but I can't go another step for a while!'"
> >> (p. 696, that's Piemur)
> > 
> > 
> > Uhhh.... No. That would be a reference FROM Pern TO Dragaera. That
> > would go into the "External references to Brust" at
> > http://cracksandshards.com/asstd-shards.html#external if we had
> > Timeriders; but _The White Dragon_ was published five years before
> > _Jhereg_. Nice try, and it looks connected, but the connection would
> > have to go the other way. Are there a lot of such lines in Pern, that
> > SKZB might have picked up his interjections from?
> 
> I very nearly think so. "Shells," "shards," etc., as references to 
> dragon eggs, are extremely common as parts of oaths in Pernese speech,

Yep.

> and have been since the first book, I believe.

Strangely enough, nope.  The first trilogy is searchable at
Amazon, and /The White Dragon/ is the first place where
"shards" is used as an oath.  "Cracks" isn't used even there,
though I'm sure it is in later books.

The characters swear a lot less in /Dragonflight/ (and
maybe /Dragonquest/ than later, though F'lar or somebody
does get off a "By the First Egg!"

> Which is what I thought 
> Jerry was referring to, not the other way around.

Indeed.

> I have no idea if SKZB
> was influenced by these things, however. (I don't know if he's even read
> the Pern books.)

The "shards" and the other things I mentioned make it seem
very likely to me.  If not, it's a remarkable set of
coincidences.

Jerry Friedman


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