Falling Free

Miles Vorsokigan, Book 4

By: Lois McMaster Bujold

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

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)

Another Satisfying Prequel to Miles Vorkosigan

What did you like best about this story?

This compelling story draws you into the fate of the Quaddies, genetically engineered slaves with a second set of arms in place of legs. Their desire to procreate and live as normally as they can, to experience the kind of lives we, as humans, take for granted, became far more absorbing to me than I had anticipated.

What does Grover Gardner bring to the story that you wouldn???t experience if you just read the book?

Lois McMaster Bujold is a truly fine writer, with a superb ability to capture your imagination when you least expect it...Grover Gardner does complete justice to her storytelling, narrating convincingly and without any distractions for the reader. Lois's "voice" still rings true.

Any additional comments?

I recommend you read this book as background after experiencing a few of the early Miles Vorkosigan novels.

The quaddies seek freedom

This is my first Lois McMaster Bujold book. One of the people I follow recommended it. I am always willing to try an author I have not read before. This book touches on some interesting problems in sociology and genetic modification that are current issues in today's world. In this book Leo Graf and engineer is assigned to teach advance welding and its inspection at Cay habitat. When he arrives he finds that the Habitat contains 1000 genetic modified people designed to live in negative gravity. Their bones do not demineralize and they have four arms and no legs. The discovery of a way to produce gravity now makes them obsolete and as they are owned by the corporation that created them they were ordered to be eliminated. Leo sets off to save them and so begins an interesting story. There is really no battle scenes or even much violence in the story but it is a story of how they have to set about to modify the Habitat to travel in space and how to escape the corporation. There is some humor, a love story and lots of suspense. The story will keep you reading and leave you with some things to think about. Grover Gardner did and excellent job narrating the story. He is becoming one of my favorite narrators. I understand this is book one of a series.

thought provoking adventure

written with insight. delivered with humor. entertaining from beginning to end. great story! I recommend it.

Not quite what I expected; but good.

I had read some of the books from the Vorkosigan saga as a teenager and thought I would start at the beginning. It was only after that I found out this book, although it is within the same timeline, has no direct tie-in with the rest of the Vorkosigan saga. Oh, well, I used a credit; so I listened to it. It was a fun story, as I should have expected. I felt the characters were well developed and the conflict they felt as the story line progressed was relayed to the reader very well. I'm glad I made the "mistake" of getting this book and I guess I will see if there is more connecting this to the rest of the series as I get more of them.

interesting concept, well written

I enjoyed "Falling Free" because of its interesting concept of a group of humans genetically engineered as workers. This brings up ethics issues, and the characters have different views of the issues. So far, so good.

There are some general ethics issues. For example, debates on the merits of transparency versus cover-up.

And, I believe the Sci-Fi elements of the book are a strength. Clever and feasible technology.

However, the book had a few shortcomings as a novel. I did not find myself becoming particularly attached to any of the characters.

This book is a finalist for the Prometheus Awards "Hall of Fame" to be announced at Worldcon in September 2012.

John Christmas, author of "Democracy Society"

Uncomplicated moral science fiction

I was a little surprised to discover, post-reading, that Falling Free was published in 1988 because it had the feel of a work much earlier in the SciFi genre (the tone reminded me a bit of the Lensman series, or maybe Heinlen). That said, I like early SciFi so it was all good!

The plot isn't particularly complex and it goes exactly where you think it's going to, nary a twist in sight. The characters are not really three-dimensional, although they're very nicely painted 2D. Basically it's a fun read about an engineer who runs into a moral dilemma and engineers his way around the evil bureaucrats and their perilously binding, emotionless red-tape and into a brave new world.

Actually quite good.

Takes a while to get going but when it does (around the 1/3rd mark), it becomes genuinely gripping. This is probably the sort of thing that would appeal to Honor Harrington readers, but it is frankly somewhat better- much, MUCH more condensed and to-the-point.

#hopepunk

A Vox article on #hopepunk recommended this title. It met my expercations, would recommend! :)

Recommended not only for SciFi fans

Because besides being a good science fiction story, this is a well-written character study of how people react when called upon to show what they’re really about. Some will turn out courageous, nice - others may turn out plain evil. Many may be evil without having realized when they’re compromised they’re values…

As a science fiction story, the book shows you what’s being lost when newer SF books (even if they’re excellent in they’d way) are being structural (like the Three Body Problem) or transactional (like The Expanse) - there’s a degree of trade off between that and character description and development.

A new human species makes its preview.

Loved the quadis, hope to hear more about them! This is a story that deserves a sequel. I’m looking forward to one!