Falling Free
by Lois McMaster Bujold
Summary
Leo Graf is a welding engineer, competent, dull, honest, and used to being sent wherever GalacTech needs someone to teach a technique properly. His new assignment is a habitat in deep space, teaching quality control to a workforce he has not been briefed about.
They are quaddies: a thousand people engineered to live permanently in free fall, with a second pair of arms where their legs would be, because in zero gravity feet are useless and hands are not. They are quick, cheerful, well educated in the narrow subjects they need, and legally classified as post fetal experimental tissue cultures, which means the company owns them outright, controls their breeding, and can dispose of them.
Which it now intends to do, because artificial gravity has just been invented and a workforce that cannot function in it is a liability on a balance sheet. The plan is to sterilise them and put them down a gravity well where they will spend the rest of their lives unable to lift their own weight.
Leo does not have a dramatic conversion. He simply keeps asking procedural questions until the answers become intolerable, and then applies engineering discipline to the problem of stealing a space station.
Around three hundred pages, brisk and warm, structurally a heist, set two centuries before the Vorkosigan books and requiring none of them.
The quaddies themselves are written as teenagers, because that is what most of them are: curious, badly informed about the universe, and entirely unaware that the arrangement they live under is unusual.
Best for readers who want competence treated as a moral quality, and a novel that identifies a corporate euphemism as the villain and then holds it there.
Historical Context & Significance
Falling Free won the 1988 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the first of Lois McMaster Bujold's major awards and the beginning of a run that took four Hugos for Best Novel across the following sixteen years. It was inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 2014.
It is the earliest book in the Vorkosigan Saga's internal chronology, set roughly two hundred years before Miles Vorkosigan is born, and it shares no characters with the rest of the sequence. Bujold returned to the quaddies in Diplomatic Immunity in 2002, by which time they have their own society and their own government.
The legal device at the centre, in which a person is defined out of personhood by a category on a form rather than by any claim about their nature, is the same move the novel's readers have repeatedly pointed to in real employment and immigration law.