I hadn't read the Brainship books in years so I decided it was time for a re-read and I happy to report that they stood up to the test of time. I really enjoyed the story and found myself very interested in the characters in these books. I am super glad I read them again. ( )

In McCaffrey's Brainships universe, children who are born with an immobilizing or other severe disability are raised and educated to be the 'brains' that steer Starships. They are also assigned a "Brawn" to be their companion and assist with activities that can only be done by a person with a functional body.
This is not my favorite edition in the series, but it was still pretty entertaining to read. Cari and Keff are our Brain/Brawn team for this one, encountering a planet that seems to be inhabited by some "primitive" natives who are oddly clueless and afraid, but treat Keff like a god when he first shows up. I hope it's not too spoiler-y to say that my first thought was that there must be some humans (or at least humanoids) on this planet who are acting as masters of these folks and keeping them dumb and docile somehow.
While this is a pretty familiar trope, the unfolding of the story was pretty original and quite entertaining. I also loved the chemistry between Cari and Keff and hope that we get another outing with them before this series is over. ( )

A fun read by Anne McCaffrey which touches on the topic of magic being simply advanced technology we don't understand. And in this case, the magic means that the main characters are limited in what they can do to fight against it. ( )

This is the fifth book in McCaffrey's "The Ship Who..." series, which features humans with severe birth deformities being encased inside starships and thus effectively given shiny new space-going bodies. In this one, a ship and her more traditionally-mobile partner discover a race of technologically primitive humanoids on an alien planet, then quickly learn that they're ruled over by humans with indistinguishable-from-magic abilities and a long history of power struggles. But, hey, our heroes are big fans of the future equivalent of Dungeons & Dragons, so maybe they're just the people you'd want dealing with alien wizards.

When I was young, I loved Anne McCaffrey's novels. Indeed, she was probably one of my very favorite writers. Unfortunately, in later years her writing tended to decline in quality until it mostly became... Well, I don't really want to use the word "hackwork," but I can't help thinking it, anyway. Mind you, I'm sure the fact that I'm no longer 14 and not nearly as impressed by a lot of the stuff I liked at 14 doesn't help, either. Eventually, I got so disillusioned with her work that I ended up getting rid of a small stack of her books, all given to me years ago by a well-intentioned soul, without even opening them. I realized that I just could not face the idea of reading them. This book was the only exception, as I did actually like all the previous books in this series. (Although how much credit for that goes to McCaffrey, and how much to her various co-authors, I won't venture to guess.) Even so, it took me a while to work up enough gumption to read it. Fortunately, it didn't entirely suck, and I think my low expectations helped me enjoy it more than I otherwise would have. It's certainly not without its flaws, including a rather tacked-on romance and a too-pat ending full of unconvincing details, but it is a moderately entertaining old-fashioned-style SF novel with pleasant enough main characters. Which makes it a breath of fresh air after the last few McCaffrey books I'd read. ( )

The later Anne McCaffrey books were not always the joy to read the earlier ones were. She was still every bit the setting creator, but this one, like a couple other I've read, takes superhuman characters and pits them against challenges they solve with ease. This one may have been more disappointing then Lyon's Pride in that what they were asked to do, to change the hearts and minds of a civilization, was worthy, and yet they accomplished it without the difficulties that would realistically have been encountered.