It was when I read this collection of stories right on the heels of re-reading Dragonsdawn that I started to understand how much Anne McCaffrey loves logistics.

Seriously. She loves to give her characters a huge urgent practical problem, and then set the most practical among them to solving it. Whether it's dramatic or not. She wants to tell you all about how they dug the caves with rock-cutters to make Holds and Weyrs and they had to make the cutters last as long as they could, how they made hypocaust systems using underground heat, how they did this big push to move everything to the northern continent and there was all this vital materiel they had to move and they labeled it in different colors according to its priority, and the dolphins helped carry the smallest packages, how oxen that were reluctant to ford a swollen stream could be pushed along by a dragon flying behind them at exactly the right angle... etc, etc, etc...

I know it might sound like I'm criticizing, but I'm not. I re-read a whole lot of McCaffrey's books recently when my mom gave me a bunch of books she didn't want anymore, and this was the one aspect of them that I fell in love with on the re-read. It's something I wouldn't have appreciated as a teen, which is when I originally read her stuff. But now I live in the country in a place where we do a lot of stuff for ourselves (no stone-cutters, but, y'know, chainsaws and stuff) and I am finally understanding physical logistics. The focus you snap into when a real necessity presents itself ("OK, we have to make this work, how do we do it?"), and the joy of seeing it done right.

So, I like that. I'm not always crazy about the way she handles characters (the Chosen and the Not--but she doesn't do this as much when she's busy doing logistics, anyhow!) but I sure do like the logistics.