Dragon Harper

Dragon Harper is a science fiction novel by the American-Irish writer Anne McCaffrey and her son Todd McCaffrey, published in 2007. It is part of the Dragonriders of Pern series that Anne McCaffrey began in 1967, and it is the twenty-first book of that series.

The story is set about five hundred years after the first landing on Pern and focuses on Kindan, a character who had appeared as a boy in Dragon's Kin and who here is an apprentice at the Harper Hall. In the school-like setting of the Hall he has to handle a bully, a relationship that is frowned upon, and his role looking after the new female apprentices after the Masterharper breaks the long-standing taboo against women becoming harpers. The larger problem arrives in the shape of an influenza-like pandemic that spreads across the planet and threatens human life on Pern in a way the periodic falls of Thread never have. The story belongs to a period shortly before the third return of Thread, and it is one of the books in the series that deals with a disaster coming from inside the population rather than from the sky.

Anne McCaffrey and Todd McCaffrey wrote three books about Kindan together, and those were the first of their collaborations. The Pern series as a whole is set on a colony world whose settlers lost their technology and organised themselves around dragons bred to fight the Thread that falls from orbit.