Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels are either epic or domestic. The original trilogy (Dragonflight, Dragonquest and The White Dragon) are epics. The Harperhall novels are domestic. This one is a mix of the two. It starts out domestic with the retelling of Robinton's life and becomes epic when Ms McCaffrey starts rewriting what we know about Pern's history to ensure that Robinton plays a larger part in it to become even more awesome than he already is. Which really - in my not terribly humble opinion - only serves to make the series a little cosier and smaller in my eyes because it seems that just a handful of people are running Pern and contributing to its history and what gets done rather than what really happens with a continent and the various cultures that live on it. But it's Pern, which I would rather visit than just about any other place in fiction, and, thankfully, it's always readable for which I can forgive a multitude of sins.