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Falling Free
- Miles Vorsokigan, Book 4
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
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Nebula Award Finalist, Best Novel, 1988
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On the beautiful planet Pern, colonized for centuries, Land Holders and Craftsmen have traditionally tithed food and supplies to the dragonweyrs to which they are bound. In times past, the mighty telepathic dragons and their riders were the only protection from the dreaded, life-threatening Thread. Now those times may be returning....
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Poor reading
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The U.S.S. Merrimack was the finest battleship class spaceship in Earth's fleet, able to stand up against the best the Palatine Empire could throw at them, even able to attack and kill swarms of the seemingly unstoppable Hive. But nothing could have prepared the captain and crew of the Merrimack to face the Myriad - three colonized worlds in the midst of a globular cluster that the Hive had somehow overlooked.
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Great performance. Great read.
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The award-winning, bestselling author's first novel. The beamjacks work in zero-gravity constructing satellites in the vacuum of deepest space. And they're not going to let the military control them anymore.
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Hard to follow
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A Prequel
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In the final days of the empire, Cyborg Corps Colonel Leonidas Adler plans to die in a manner befitting of an imperial officer. He will fight until his last breath, giving his life to defend Emperor Markus, as it was meant to be. But when the emperor himself summons him for a final special mission, how can he refuse?
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Pretty good teaser for lighter space opera
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This is not military sci-fi
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Humankind has escaped a dying Earth and set out to find a new home among the stars aboard an immense generation ship affectionately named the Ark. Bryan Benson is the Ark's greatest living sports hero, enjoying retirement working as a detective in Avalon, his home module. The hours are good, the work is easy, and the perks can't be beat. But when a crew member goes missing, Bryan is thrust into the center of an ever-expanding web of deception, secrets, and violence.
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Nearly there
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One Long Running Space Battle ….
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The Reality Dysfunction
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In AD 2600, the human race is finally beginning to realize its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets scattered across the galaxy host a multitude of prosperous and wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary spaceborn creatures. Huge fleets of sentient trader starships thrive on the wealth created by the industrialization of entire star systems, and throughout inhabited space the Confederation Navy keeps the peace.
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Finally on Audible!! My favorite Hamilton series!
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On a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the East Coast of the US, including Washington, DC. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the Earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated effort to colonize space and requires a much-larger share of humanity to take part in the process. Elma York’s drive to become the first lady astronaut is so strong that even the most dearly held conventions of society may not stand a chance against her.
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Never achieves lift off
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On June 30, 1908, an object fell from the sky, releasing more energy than a thousand Hiroshima bombs. A Siberian forest was flattened, but the strike left no significant crater. The anomaly came to be known as the Tunguska Event, and scientists have never agreed whether it was the largest meteor strike in recorded history - or something else. Alien artifacts have been uncovered since the 1908 event, and a new star drive is discovered.
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Het
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 04-09-17
By: B.V. Larson
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What listeners say about Falling Free
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- Terry Erickson
- 03-06-24
The development of the characters. I found I cared about them quickly.
How it ended, I felt like the happily ever after moment happened and then it drug on.
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- Julian
- 04-07-24
The plot was original
Initially it was difficult to get into the story, but it didnt take long to capture my attention
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-17-24
While interesting not my favorite
While having an interesting and thought-provoking premise this book never really grabbed me. I think it has many very interesting ideas but the characters and story didn't click with me in the end.
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- Carol
- 02-20-13
Don't read this one first
The Vorkosigan series is one of the best! But this "prequel"--set 200 years before the "real" series--is an outlier, very different from the others and (in my opinion) not nearly as good. Its story is almost totally exclusive of the series; the "Quaddies" do figure in later Vorkosigan books, but in a fairly minor way until "Diplomatic Immunity," which comes well along in the series. "Falling Free" is best approached after you've already become hooked by the Vorkosiverse.
Start with either Shards of Honor or The Warrior's Apprentice. An interview with Lois McMaster Bujold appears with her book listings on Amazon and will advise the best order in which to read the series.
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177 people found this helpful
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- Kelly
- 07-27-12
Quaddie Backstory
I love the Vorkosigan universe and this is a great story. It stands completely on it's own and fills in a piece of history of the greater universe. The characters are interesting as is the story itself. The story does bring up some moral questions about slavery and personhood. Grover Gardner does a great job narrating as always. I always lean towards listening to a book if he's the narrator.
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- Jefferson
- 02-26-17
"What do you think one person can do?"
The shock of the SF new in Louise McMaster Bujold's Falling Free (1986) doesn't come from the space opera stellar vista of its opening sentence: "The shining rim of the planet Rodeo wheeled dizzily past the observation port of the orbital transfer station." Instead, it comes from the interstellar corporation GalacTech's 25-year bioengineering project: four-armed humans designed to work and live in zero-gravity ("null-gee").
Bujold's protagonist Leo Graf meets the "quaddies" in the first chapter: "Leo blinked, and caught his breath in shock. The boy had no legs. Emerging from his shorts were [sic] a second set of arms." At first Leo thinks the youth is the result of a birth defect that would make him "a cripple, downside" (on a planet with gravity), but he soon learns that the 1000 quaddies (of both genders and of varying ages up to twenty) are "The first generation of GalacTech's new super-workers." Leo is impressed by how well suited they are for their null-gee setting on the orbital habitat they call home: "Leo thought of a flock of canaries, of flying squirrels, of monkeys, of spiders, of swift bright lizards of the sort that run straight up walls." The problem for Leo "wasn't the arms, or the quick, too-many hands. . . It was their faces . . . . They were the faces of children." For he senses that the kids have been engineered and educated to be obedient slaves ripe for exploiting by the company, which defines them as "capital equipment" and "post-fetal experimental tissue cultures." (The exploitation of obviously human "non-human" products of genetic engineering prefigures the bleaker Never Let Me Go [2005])
"Crowding forty, sandy and square," Leo has been summoned to the orbital habitat to teach the quaddies null-gee engineering (welding, inspecting, etc.). During his long career as GalacTech engineer, Leo has trained many engineers and designed many efficient and safe space stations and the like. Despite his misgivings, Leo adheres to the remit of his job. What would he do were GalacTech to terminate the quaddie project for being unprofitable or obsolete? What would he do if forced to choose between company loyalty and his sense of what is right for the quaddies?
Complicating things for Leo is his former bad student Bruce Van Atta, now the executive in charge of the GalacTech project and hence Leo's boss. Van Atta looks down on the quaddies ("four-armed creeps"), and is quite the exploitive male chauvinist pig, calling females who displease him (like his ex-wife) "bitch" and the c-word and sexually exploiting a girl.
Despite depicting Van Atta negatively and some strong female characters positively, Bujold does engage in a little sexist ageism, painting two of the less pleasant female characters as middle aged and ugly, like the GalacTech VP: "Dumpy, on the high end of middle-aged, frizzy gray hair cut short, she might have been somebody's grandmother, but for her eyes." And, hey, I got a bit uncomfortable about a budding romance between a teenage girl and a man about forty. (I've never read a Bujold novel featuring a romance between an older woman and a younger man.)
Two other eyebrow raising points. First, I find it hard to believe that, among all the advanced, far future tech (artificial gravity, jumpships, wormholes, holovids, uterine replicators, etc.), condoms would still be in use. (Perhaps Bujold is educating or encouraging her circa 1986 readers to practice safe sex at the dawn of the AIDS era.) Anyway, she shouldn't tell her story so that at a crucial point I (who am no scientist or engineer) think of gasoline before Leo (consummate engineer improviser) does.
Bujold thoroughly imagines the inchoate vision and culture of a new type of four-armed human sub-species. The quaddies have been educated for "maximum socialization" to help them share limited null-gee living and working spaces. They use some special language, like "uppers" (for their upper arms) and "lowers" (for their lower arms, legs on usual humans), and instead of saying "the next step will be…" they say "the next reach will be…" (because they move about their null-gee habitat by reaching for handholds). The little quaddie kids play a dance-like game: "It involved creating a sort of duo-decahedron in mid-air, like a human pyramid only more complex, hand to hand to hand changing its formation in time to music." Bujold even imagines sex with a four-armed person in null-gee! Because the quaddies have never been on a planet (where the gravity would oppress them), they don't know much about how "downsiders" live (apart from what they can glean from contraband holovids like The Prisoner of Zenda). When some quaddies wind up on the planet Rodeo (about which their habitat orbits), Bujold effectively demonstrates what it would be like for people born and raised with four arms in null-gee to experience gravity on a planet.
In addition to exploring the nature of freedom, humanity, and home, the novel encourages us to make a difference by disobeying bad orders and following our consciences. At one point, Van Atta says to Leo, "There's only so much one human being can do." Not long after that, Leo begins wondering where his own limit for making a difference might lie.
Falling Free is read, like all the Vorkosigan books, by consummate professional and uber-Bujold-voice Grover Gardner. He reads every word and sentence in just the right way and with plenty of apt emotion and intelligence.
Although Falling Free is not so memorable and Leo is no Miles, it is a solid Bujold book-- entertaining, fast-paced, witty, unpredictable space opera comfort food with a political/social bite. I recommend it for fans of Bujold's Vorkosigan saga (for which it is a prequel), although readers new to her work should probably start with the early Vorkosigan books featuring young Miles, like Warrior's Apprentice (1986), or Miles' mother Cordelia, like Shards of Honor (1986).
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11 people found this helpful
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- David
- 01-19-11
good book
I listened to this years ago as a rental from Books in Motion. I wish they just used the same recording. The narrator on this version is bland, vs the rental which had a full cast. The book is still good and worth listening to.
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1 person found this helpful
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- G. Parish
- 07-28-15
An engineer's problems
What happens when an engineer is confronted with corporate evil? What is he willing to give up to fight for what is right and how hard must he fight to save his family and friends? This is the tale we see here and while being familiar it is extremely well done.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-09-22
Enjoyable read
It was enjoyable. Not top notch for reader or story but I enjoyed the listen.
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- Ashley Shirley
- 08-25-21
good story about freedom
a little bit slow at times, but raises many interesting thoughts about individual rights and freedom.
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