Dragonsdawn

Over 6,000 people of the Federated Sentient Planets spend fifteen years in deep sleep on a one-way trip to establish a colony on Pern. When the colonists first landed on the untouched, uninhabited world of Pern, they thought they had finally found the place they sought…a tranquil, serene new world that would allow them to create their own civilization, far away from the reaches of war and corruption that scarred their old worlds. As they threw themselves completely into the creation of the new colony, they were unaware that they were about to face an enemy more sinister than they could have anticipated. Several years after their landing marks the first Fall of the voracious, mindless Thread, which devours everything in its path and lays waste to their thriving world. Completely isolated from all help, their only hope of survival is if they can somehow genetically engineer a fire-breathing indigenous creature, known as a dragonet, into a larger form capable of destroying the Thread as it falls.