So I dug back into Dragon's Dawn (Anne McCaffrey's Pern series) this week. The book is a lot shorter then I remembered, and it rushes at a head-long pace towards a pretty so-so conclusion. I think my problems with it were:

- Too hard to identify the protagonists, and then keep them straight. There were a lot of story threads going on at the same time, which made it difficult. We really needed to spend a longer time with each protagonist before the story thread jumped to yet another person.

- Pacing. Disaster piled upon disaster piled on top of yet another disaster. Which would have been a lot more interesting, had there been more pages between.

- Scattered focus. I think this goes hand-in-hand with having too many protagonists, all introduced at the same time.

I'll still probably plow ahead with the series, hopefully the author learned from her mistakes. But since Dragon's Dawn was published in 1988, at about the mid-point of the author's career, I'm not overly hopeful.

(It may simply be that I prefer the works and writing style of C. J. Cherryh or Lois McMaster Bujold.)