1988
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
Falling Free is technically part of Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, as it takes place in the same universe as the other books in that series. But since there is essentially no overlap with any of the key characters in the other Vorkosigan novels, it can be read as an independent story.
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
Falling Free is technically part of Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, as it takes place in the same universe as the other books in that series. But since there is essentially no overlap with any of the key characters in the other Vorkosigan novels, it can be read as an independent story.
I found Falling
Free primarily dippy and also a bit creepy.
It is set on
a remote space station owned and operated by the Ampad Corporation. Ampad has
staffed the station with custom-made, genetically engineered workers called
“quaddies.” The company has no intention of ever letting the quaddies walk on a
planet’s surface; they are designed to spend their entire lives in a
gravity-free environment. So the company engineers have manipulated the
quaddies’ genes to grow an extra pair of arms where their legs should be.
The quaddies are a real money-saver for Ampad. With four
hands, they are able to work better in free-fall than a regular two-handed
person since they can hold on to stabilizers with one or two of their hands
while working with the other two or three. And breeding their own permanent
in-station work force is cheaper than hiring planet-bound contractors that have
to be periodically replaced.
The quaddies have been psychologically conditioned to be good-natured and friendly. Unfortunately, however, the company doesn’t give a darn about them and sees them as expendable slaves. The quaddies aren’t ever allowed off the station. They are forced to reproduce with whomever the company says they have to reproduce with, regardless of if they like that other quaddie or not. They can be sterilized at will.
The quaddies make up the bulk of the station’s work force, but the company hires a few two-armed, two-legged people to fill supervisory roles like trainers and managers. For the most part, the two-legged employees are 100% evil and mean and regard the quaddies as subhuman.
But one of the two-legged guys, welding instructor Leo Graf, isn’t prejudiced towards the quaddies and quickly grows attached to them. And when he finds out that the company is thinking about installing cheap newly-developed artificial gravity systems in the station, which would mean they wouldn’t need free-fall-only employees anymore, he realizes that he has to help the quaddies escape before the company decides to sterilize and/or possibly kill all of them to cut costs.
The reason I say this book is dippy is because the plot is pretty simplistic and the characters just weren’t interesting or complex enough to make up for it. I lost most of my enthusiasm about a third of the way in. The quaddies are also almost uniformly upbeat, optimistic, charming, friendly, kind, and earnest. Annoyingly so. I wish that some of them were a little cantankerous or at least just not so innocent and nice all the time.
The creepy part was that Leo Graf, who, based on his many years of experience, I understood as being a somewhat older man, had a romantic relationship with what seemed like a really, really, really young quaddie. I’d like someone to tell me I have the ages wrong because it gave me the heebie-jeebies.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
The quaddies have been psychologically conditioned to be good-natured and friendly. Unfortunately, however, the company doesn’t give a darn about them and sees them as expendable slaves. The quaddies aren’t ever allowed off the station. They are forced to reproduce with whomever the company says they have to reproduce with, regardless of if they like that other quaddie or not. They can be sterilized at will.
The quaddies make up the bulk of the station’s work force, but the company hires a few two-armed, two-legged people to fill supervisory roles like trainers and managers. For the most part, the two-legged employees are 100% evil and mean and regard the quaddies as subhuman.
But one of the two-legged guys, welding instructor Leo Graf, isn’t prejudiced towards the quaddies and quickly grows attached to them. And when he finds out that the company is thinking about installing cheap newly-developed artificial gravity systems in the station, which would mean they wouldn’t need free-fall-only employees anymore, he realizes that he has to help the quaddies escape before the company decides to sterilize and/or possibly kill all of them to cut costs.
The reason I say this book is dippy is because the plot is pretty simplistic and the characters just weren’t interesting or complex enough to make up for it. I lost most of my enthusiasm about a third of the way in. The quaddies are also almost uniformly upbeat, optimistic, charming, friendly, kind, and earnest. Annoyingly so. I wish that some of them were a little cantankerous or at least just not so innocent and nice all the time.
The creepy part was that Leo Graf, who, based on his many years of experience, I understood as being a somewhat older man, had a romantic relationship with what seemed like a really, really, really young quaddie. I’d like someone to tell me I have the ages wrong because it gave me the heebie-jeebies.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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