Dragon's Kin

Dragon's Kin is a science fiction novel by Anne McCaffrey and her son Todd McCaffrey, published by Del Rey Books in 2003. It is the eighteenth book of the Dragonriders of Pern series and the first that the two of them wrote together.

The story is set on Pern about five hundred years after the first settlers landed, and about two thousand years before the events that most of the series describes. Kindan, whose prospects are limited, lives in the mining camp of Camp Natalon, and the novel concerns the discovery that watch-whers are useful underground: they can sense gas pockets before the miners do and help find anyone trapped by a fall. Turning them from oddities into working animals takes people who are willing to learn what the creatures are like, and the book follows Kindan as that knowledge is gathered and put to use.

Anne McCaffrey invented Pern in a novella called Weyr Search in 1967, and the novels she later wrote with her son fill in the centuries before the Threadfalls of the better-known books.