This falls squarely in the “DON’T F%&K IT UP!” category. Please, please, please, do not mess this up.
Growing up, this was one of my favorite series and I had (they are now lost) many pencil drawings based on Michael Whelan’s dragon depictions on McCaffery’s covers. McCaffery built a HUGE epic across over 20 books and covering thousands of years and generations.
If you’re not familiar with the series, the story revolves around a planet (Pern) that every few hundred years comes across the path of a comet tail that has some weird life-form in it that upon entering the atmosphere rains down like threads and devours anything it touches. The thread dies shortly after landfall of starvation (because it eats everything), or drowns in water, or is burned in midair (hence the dragons).
The origin of the story is a human colony ship arrives on this great planet, wondering why there is no large growth and no large land animals. But it does have these really neat little lizards that breathe fire and can teleport. Shortly after arrival and settlement the thread falls, causing much mayhem. They quickly burn through their non-replenishable hi-tech supplies (batteries, metals, plastics, etc) fighting the thread and turn to the little fire-lizards for help by genetically altering them to be “bigger”. Over time they lose all recollection of their origin from Earth until they discover some artifacts many thousands of years later.
You can see why this is a plot that would make a great movie story with lots of sequels (see Lord of the Rings), but also it is incredibly hard to do. For goodness sakes, there are DRAGONS everywhere.
From Deadline via Ain’t it Cool News
Very easy to mess up. Very difficult to get right. Get it right or face the wrath of many McCaffery fans.
Get it right and become bigger than Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.