Fire lizard

Pern is a fictional planet created by Anne McCaffrey beginning in the 1960s, the setting for the Dragonriders of Pern series of science fiction books. In the story it is "Rukbat 3", the third planet in orbit around the star Rukbat, counting outward.

No Pern fiction has been published since June 2012, several months after Anne McCaffrey's death. There are two collections of Pern stories; twenty-three novels, some written jointly or solely by Todd McCaffrey, the son of Anne; and a few authorized companion books by other writers. The figure shows the habitable portion of Pern's northern continent and a tiny portion of its southern continent, which are the setting for the first novel Dragonflight (1968) and its sequel Dragonquest. East–West it shows approximately that hemisphere known prior to the last two books (2011, 2012). North–South it does not show the abandoned region of "Landing" and early colonization, further to the southeast, whose rediscovery and resettlement is one unifying theme of the stories that follow Dragonquest in Pern historical time, perhaps one third of the series.

The Atlas of Pern (1984), a companion book by Karen Wynn Fonstad in consultation with Anne McCaffrey, provides geographical detail for a region extending further south and east, covering the habitable portion of the so-called Southern Continent. In their geographical scope The Atlas maps cover the settings of all but the last two books, Dragon's Time (2011) and Sky Dragons (2012). Those two are set largely on the smaller and heretofore unknown Western Continent, on the other side of Pern from the settled Northern Continent.

The name "Pern" is revealed in "The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall" to come from the notes made by the original colony survey team. The name was taken from the acronym of the indicators for the planet: Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible.

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