

It won the Gandalf Award for Book-Length Fantasy and the Australian Ditmar Award for international fiction. The White Dragon placed third for the annual Locus Award for Best Novel and it was one of five nominees for the annual Hugo Award for Best Novel.

In 1987, the magazine Locus ranked The White Dragon number 23 among the 33 «All-Time Best Fantasy Novels», based on a poll of subscribers. The first part of the novel was published three years earlier as A Time When, a special publication by the New England Science Fiction Association for its annual convention Boskone in 1975, where McCaffrey was Guest of Honor. The White Dragon was first published by Ballantine Books in Jule 1978. The White Dragon is the fifth book in the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey.

He was Lord Holder, but not confirmed so. His birth had been as bizarre as Ruth’s Hatching-he from a dead mother’s body, Ruth from an eggshell too hard for the half-sized beak to break.
