In the beginning, before Thread, before the Dragons, before the Holds and the Weyrs and the elite Dragonriders of Pern, was just the great ships gliding through space with nearly six thousand colonists prepared to tackle the mighty task of beginning a new world on a strange planet.

It was a jewel of a planet, with rivers and seas and mountains, and breathable air and growing things. Then came the terror. The strange, unidentifiable circles in the grass suddenly revealed a meaning, and every living thing was at risk. Many died - a horrible and consuming death. All resources, every man, woman and child had to fight the terrible nightmare of Thread.

But a new creature was about to save the planet. From the delicate fire lizards a new life was born - a new symbiosis between man and beast.

Anne McCaffrey was one of the world's leading science-fiction writers, and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards as well as the Margaret A. Edwards' Lifetime Literary Achievement Award. She was deeply honoured to have been made a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2005, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2006. Born and raised in the US and of Irish extraction, she moved to Ireland in 1970 where she lived in the ¿Garden of Ireland¿, County Wicklow, until her death in 2011 at the age of eighty-five. She is the creator of the Dragonriders of Pern¿ series. Her website is www.pernhome.com.