it's an interesting series... most people call it fantasy but it's actually scifi. McCaffrey has been known to get very pissed at conventions when people call it fantasy :b
If it has organic flying dragons, as I seem to remember it having, it's fantasy by default. SciFi is for realistic crap, generally stuff that could happen but hasn't yet, etc. Fantasy is for anything that can't happen but we'll do it anyway (Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like are included in Fantasy).
There are different kinds of fantasy though. Swords and Sorcery is what comes to mind automagically, but that's not the only type.
if you started reading the series in the middle, then it's just dragons then. But if you start it in the beginning Pern is a world where technologically advanced settlers come to begin a new life after several generations of long wars. They find an almost utopian planet, a garden of unspoiled Eden, and they start colonizing it. About 10 years after they get there, before they have completely established the tech to keep their old tech running, Thread starts to fall. It's an organism that eats everything until it actually kills itself, but before then one piece of thread can consume acres...
The colonist rapidly use up what defenses they have and resort to trying to use the natural creatures on the planet, which are these tiny sized flying lizards that alternately flame and eat the thread. Luckily one of the colonists is a genetics engineer trying to escape from her military history and she is able to take the flitters and turn them into larger beasts... it's years before there will be enough dragons to fight thread on a mass scale, so the colonist have to leave the continent they originally wanted and retreat in mass to the northern continent which isn't as hospitable...
Most of the books take place centuries in the future where the tech is all gone and the dragons are now huge creatures. Oh I forgot, you impress your dragon, they share all your mental thoughts and love you endlessly. If you loose your dragon, you don't even want to live... it's such a close bond.
Anyways, in later books, it does read as fantasy medieval type setting but the tech comes back. In later book they've got computers again...
I've looked for one, and found a place that was supposed to run one using the GURPS rules created for Discworld, but no one ever posted anything but discussions about the books... I was very disappointed :(
I've seen quite a few on the net, but none of them seem to last very long. The Discworld MUD, on the other hand, has been running for quite a few years (six or seven at least).
