”I’m not sure… what one human being can do. I’ve never pushed myself to the limit. I thought I had, but I realize now I hadn’t. My self-tests were always carefully non-destructive.”
This test was a higher order of magnitude altogether. This Tester, perhaps, scorned the merely humanly possible.
Chronologically the first novel set in the Vorkosigan Universe, Falling Free begins 200 years before Miles Vorkosigan’s birth with the assignment of expert engineer and welder Leo Graf to the Cay Habitat. Graf expects his new job to be run-of-the-mill – up until he meets one of the permanent residents of the Habitat and realizes, to his shock, that the boy has a second set of arms instead of legs.
As we discover, the residents of the Cay Habitat – the Quaddies – were genetically and socially engineered by GalacTech - an intergalactic corporation - to work in zero g. Because of their unique origin and status, everything about the Quaddies’ lives is tightly controlled. They are only allowed to watch approved vids; they are only allowed to read approved books. They have no freedom to form spontaneous relationships with each other; they have no freedom to breed without the approval of their overseers. Indeed, legally, they are classified as “post-fetal experimental tissue cultures”; they have no human rights of any kind. As Graf witnesses the multitudinous ways in which these clearly sentient beings are exploited for their labor, he grows increasingly uneasy with the whole arrangement. It will take a change in GalacTech’s fortunes, however, to finally spur Graf into definitive action.
Said moment arrives when a competitor develops a means to generate artificial gravity, thereby rendering the Quaddies obsolete. GalacTech decides at this juncture to cut its losses by sterilizing the Quaddies and housing them on a nearby planet. Graf recognizes that this plan will effectively disable the Quaddies, leaving them with no quality of life to speak of, and he conspires with the Quaddies to steal the Habitat and jump it to another of sector of space where the Quaddies can live their lives in zero g unmolested.
Overall: 8 – An early outing for Bujold that still manages to showcase her considerable talent for storytelling despite its flaws.
Characterization: 7
It is not unheard of for people with astonishing levels of incompetence and power-hungry near-sadism to attain positions of authority, but Bruce Van Atta – the administrator at the Cay Habitat and this novel’s principal antagonist – is written with less subtlety than I prefer. I also don’t care for the choice Bujold makes to pair Silver with Leo Graf. Given the treatment Silver has received at the hands of other downsiders (see below), I am not confident that she would be so willing to trust yet another downsider, no matter how heroic he might be – especially since the narrative suggests that Graf is a considerable number of years Silver’s senior. Other than these complaints, however, the characterization in this novel is pretty solid.
Plot/Pacing: 8
At times, Bujold succumbs to the urge to info-dump – at one point, for example, the story pauses while Graf reflects upon his various career-oriented accomplishments – but such moments are rarely excessively distracting.
Concepts/Themes: 9
Despite the fact that, as suggested above, this novel doesn’t represent the best novel that the talented Lois Bujold has ever produced, there is still much here that a more conservative reader can enthusiastically endorse. For example, consider the plight of Quaddie couple Claire and Tony:
Tony surged across the room in excitement. “At last! Real work! But -” he paused, stricken. Claire, one thought ahead of him, felt her face becoming mask-like. “But how’s Claire supposed to start a baby next month if I’m on my way to where?”
“Dr. Minchenko will freeze a couple of sperm samples before you go,” suggested Claire. “Won’t he…?”
“Ah – hm,” said Dr. Yei. “Well, actually, that wasn’t in the plans. Your next baby is scheduled to be fathered by Rudy, in Microsystems Installation.”
“Oh, no!” gasped Claire.
Dr. Yei studied both their faces, and arranged her mouth in a severe frown. “Rudy is a very nice boy. He would be very hurt by that reaction, I’m sure. This can’t be a surprise, Claire, after all our talks.”
“Yes, but – I was hoping, since Tony and I did so well, they’d let us – I was going to ask Dr. Cay!”
“Who is no longer with us,” Dr. Yei sighed. “And so you’ve gone and let yourselves become pair-bonded. I warned you not to do that, didn’t I?”
Tony and Claire, the Habitat’s first breeding couple, respond in a very natural, very human way to their parenting a child: they develop a familial – indeed, a marital - attachment. But, as illustrated by the passage above, those overseeing their development intend for them to adopt a very unnatural clinical detachment from the act of reproduction. I don’t know about you, readers, but when I come across something like this in a novel, I’m reminded of every radical totalitarian plan to destroy the family that has ever taken root in the leftwing intellectual imagination – not to mention the more insidious attacks upon the family’s inviolability that take place every day in modern Western society. Thus, Graf's (and Dr. Minchenko's) dismayed reaction to the corporation's attempts to pry the first Quaddie family apart reads to me like an authorial defense of the family’s sacrosanctity.
There’s more. We also have Silver, a Quaddie who is essentially used for the sexual gratification of two downsiders and thus loses her faith in the possibility of romance:
”Weren’t you in love with him? At first, anyway?”
[Silver] frowned. “It was exciting, to be beating the rules with him. But Ti is… well, is Ti. Love like the books – I always knew it wasn’t really real. When I got to looking around, at our own downsiders, nobody was like that. I guess I was stupid, to like those stories so much.”
That, to me, sounds like the lament of every woman who has ever participated in our modern-day mating dance. All of this sex without love and commitment has stripped the meeting of man and woman of its rightful sense of wonder and mystery. And on this, Leo Graf seems to agree. His response to Silver’s observation above is quite telling in this regard:
”I suppose they’re not realistic – I haven’t read them either, to tell you the truth. But it’s not stupid to want something more, Silver.”
Indeed not!
Lastly, like many works we will praise here, this novel is a ringing endorsement of genuine freedom – not the freedom to be coddled from cradle to grave, but the freedom to strike out on your own and make a life for yourself without the interference of the corporation or the state. As Claire muses:
”I don’t think by freedom he means free time… More like survival. Like – like not having to work for people who have a right to shoot us if they want… We’ll still have to work, but it will be for ourselves. And our children.”
In short: we see here in one of Bujold’s earlier novels the same humanism – the same moral center – that characterizes her later work.
Too many women I have known lately have sounded very much like Silver. The more I try to date and reach for something better than a job and a casual circle of friends, the more I am convinced that the way the "game" is played today is hopelessly broken.
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