panguitch's Full Review: Lois McMaster Bujold and Suford Lewis - Falling Fr...
"Your next baby is scheduled to be fathered by Rudy, in Microsystems Installation."
Lois McMaster Bujold is the famed author of the Vorkosigan series of science-fiction novels. This is a sprawling series with a confusing chronology (which quasar has taken pains to try and explain to me). One of her first novels, the Nebula Award-winning Falling Free is somewhat of a black sheep in the Vorkosigan universe. Not only does it occur several hundred years before the rest of the books, but it involves no recurring characters and only coincidentally affects any future action. It is in reality a standalone novel, though Vorkosigan fans include it for the foundation it adds to certain later events.
Falling Free is different in one other important way. It belongs much more to the realm of hard SF rather than the character-based space operas that generally populate the Vorkosigan ranks. The premise is that an interstellar megacorporation, GalacTech, has bred humans with a second set of arms in place of legs. These Quaddies are the ideal zero-gee manpower, and the first batch is just getting old enough to start earning a return on GalacTech’s investment.
Innocently stumbling into this R&D project comes Leo Graf, a classic engineer type whose expertise lies in training high-tech welders for space construction. He’s shocked at the Quaddies’ genetic programming, impressed by their functionality, and disturbed by the socialization GalacTech has cultivated in them. They have no concept of private property, their history textbooks focus on developments in engineering rather than culture or politics, and their obedience to corporate officials is unthinking. As he puts it, "they just seem ripe for exploitation."
Three Quaddies in particular demonstrate this. Claire and Tony are among the first selected for natural breeding—GalacTech wants these resources to be self-perpetuating. They and their child Andy are soon torn apart and reassigned like so much chattel. Their friend Silver represents a different exploitation, becoming the sexual plaything of the two-legged project manager.
"Were you born inhuman, or did you grow so by degrees—M.S., M.D., Ph.D. . . . "
The project manager, Bruce Van Atta, is actually an old acquaintance of Leo’s, though the two clash from the start. Bruce is a caricature, at first a blustering, foolish, and ladder-climbing executive, finally an absurd, maniacally vindictive tyrant. His fellow "downsiders" are either good-hearted people who have affection for the Quaddies, or agents of the warping agenda that turns the Quaddies into malleable tools.
Leo serves as a kind of everyman. Unlike Bruce he has no ambition, just a true love for his work. He dislikes the way the Quaddies have been socialized, but doesn’t intend to make waves. He’s likeable, but his portrayal is distorted by the grandfatherly way he relates to the Quaddies, making him seem older than he really is. This makes the love interest that latter affects him seem discordant.
The Quaddies are generally indistinguishable as characters, with only Claire, Tony, and Silver attaining any individuality. Silver is by far the most interesting character, and it’s not coincidental that she is the subversive element among the Quaddies, bypassing the project’s censorship by importing contraband using the very skills Bruce teaches her.
"He gave himself up to God and pressed the button."
The characters in Falling Free certainly take a back seat both to the ideas and the detailed feel of hard SF. Of course, welding is an odd technology around which to center a novel, and in fact the technology is less central than is typical for hard SF. So theme is the centerpiece, and the book touches promisingly on several ideas. The Quaddies represent biological adaptation to life in space. In addition, the notion of Quaddies being GalacTech’s property easily resolves into both a treatment of enslavement by big business and, most interesting of all, an exploration of socialization, censorship, and brainwashing.
Sadly, these themes are not exploited deeply—and the psychology of those employees who do see the Quaddies as humans but nevertheless participate in the project is never examined. Instead the ideas fall to the periphery as the action escalates. Then Bujold’s handling of the plot takes an abrupt nosedive at the novel’s end, so all I’m left with is unfulfilled expectations and a disappointing finish.
Moreover, there is little feeling of freshness about the novel. The characters are fairly standard. The action is unsurprising. The themes are interesting, but nothing important or new is said about them. As others have suggested, the motif of an isolated group of subalternated humans rebelling against corporate tyranny is downright Heinleinian. On a more superficial level, the Quaddies themselves reminded me of the Moties from Niven and Pournelle’s excellent novel The Mote in God’s Eye.
As a killing stroke, Bujold’s prose in this early novel sometimes lacks the polish her later work shows. Dashes, for example, are sprinkled far too liberally and sometimes crop up in odd places. Ultimately Falling Free is an entertaining and breezy three-hundred pages. But it’s little more, and certainly less than I thought it would be after the first hundred pages.
– Panguitch
According to the internal chronology Falling Free is the first book in the Vorkosigan universe, but I would hesitate to recommend it as a starting place because of its dissimilarity to the rest of the series.
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