Falling Free

Miles Vorsokigan, Book 4

By: Lois McMaster Bujold

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

Leo Graf was just your average highly efficient engineer: mind your own business, fix what's wrong, and move on to the next job. But all that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat, where a group of humanoids had been secretly, commercially bioengineered for working in free fall.

Could he just stand there and allow the exploitation of hundreds of helpless children merely to enhance the bottom line of a heartless mega-corporation?

He hadn't anticipated a situation where the right thing to do was neither safe, nor in the rules. Leo adopted a thousand quaddies. Now all he had to do was teach them to be free.

©1988 Lois McMaster Bujold (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

Nebula Award Finalist, Best Novel, 1988

"Superb....Read, or you will be missing something extraordinary." (Chicago Sun-Times)

"Bujold's best work in my opinion." (Science Fiction Chronicle)

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.

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.

"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).

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.

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.

Enjoyable read

It was enjoyable. Not top notch for reader or story but I enjoyed the listen.

good story about freedom

a little bit slow at times, but raises many interesting thoughts about individual rights and freedom.

great story and performance. Loved tech detail.

Enjoyed character interactions and story of overcoming adversity. Bujold is favorite author. She takes you into a different environment with familiar character types and had them solve problems.

Quaddies with four hands.

The development of the quaddies and how they functioned in the space ship was the best part.

Vorkosigan Series is EXCELLENT

Would you listen to Falling Free again? Why?

I would definitely listen to this again. This series is enthralling and I have already listened to several pars of it more than once.

What about Grover Gardner’s performance did you like?

I love the narrator of these books. He brings it off perfectly.