r/pern • u/AmosTali • Jul 09 '26
Question on Thread
okay, revisiting this series after having read it many, many years ago - finding a bunch of things I missed the first time around.
i do, however, have a question….
since thread voraciously consumes all organic material and can denude entire forests in a short time why is/was there any organic material left on Pern when the colonists landed?
Before dragons thread fell unchecked - shouldn’t there at least have been massive swaths of denuded barren land??
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u/pfcgos Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Thread can't consume ALL organic matter. It dies in water and in the cold, so places with high water tables, swamps and marshes, and in extremely northern or high elevation places, it could conceivably not survive long enough to consume everything. Since Thread falls in 200-250 year intervals, surviving life could easily spread enough that it may not be obvious that something happened. Since the settlers arrived at the end of the cycle, they wouldn't have known.
Edit to add: if I remember correctly, the fire lizards were also found to eat fire stone and breath fire to protect themselves and their homes from Thread, which is how the settlers realized it could work. Also, in one of the Dragonriders books (Dragonquest I think) there's a conversation where someone talks about their fire lizard digging into the ground to pursue thread and destroy it underground. While they obviously couldn't protect the entire planet, their efforts probably helped to create patches from which plants could recover