Friday, June 22, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold




Falling Free is technically the first book chronologically in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga (4th published), but it takes place 200 years prior to the rest of the books in the series and thus is entirely stand-alone.  I'd intended to skip it originally, but its setting would be revisited years later in a later book in the Vorkosigan Saga, so I opted to read it as an audiobook after all.

In retrospect, I think I would've been better off skipping Falling Free.  It's....not bad, but it definitely feels rougher like Bujold's earlier works, and it lacks the humor and wit of the rest of the series (since our humorous Vorkosigan family isn't involved).  If you're trying for completeness in the Vorkosigan Saga books, you won't have problems reading Falling Free, but for anyone else, It probably won't be for you.


----------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------------
Leo Graf has spent his life as an engineer and a teacher of engineers, and has long thought the worst things in life were bad work that could cause the worst type of accidents.  But when he arrives on a Galactech station on the far edge of known space, which is situated in zero-g, he discovers something he'd never expected:  the company has created a genetically engineered race of people labeled the "Quaddies" - people with arms in place of legs (and thus, with four arms, the name "Quaddie").  Even worse, the quaddies largely have the maturities of children, and are treated like slaves - working without compensation and taught using company propaganda to not understand anything other than the work Galactech wants done.  Leo can't help but feel unease at the situation, especially when he discovers the Quaddie Habitat's administrator is the egotistical and racist Bruce Van Atta.

But when it becomes clear that the company is about to put an end to the Quaddie experiment and eliminate the entire lot of thousands of individuals, Leo puts his engineer's skills to work.  Together with help from the Quaddies, Leo embarks on a plan to steal away and give the Quaddies something they've never truly had:  their freedom.
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Falling Free's hero is a different type of hero than in the rest of the Vorkosigan series - Leo Graf is an engineer and he looks at the problems he faces as an engineering problem to be solved.  While he's a hero who solves things with his intelligence rather than violence (Leo wouldn't know what to do with a gun if you give him one), he's not a guile hero - he doesn't like to solve problems like the Vorkosigans with clever words or trickery, but rather by building solutions with his bare hands (and with the hands of Quaddie helpers).  The strength of this book comes in watching Leo engineer solutions throughout, and how he adjusts to changing situations.

Unfortunately, the book sometimes gets a bit too caught up in this theme - particularly near the end where some of the characters are conducting a daring rescue - which occurs entirely off screen - and the book repeatedly comes back to Leo attempting an engineering experiment to pull off their final escape, which got rather frustrating.

It doesn't help that the non-antagonist side characters aren't particularly interesting.  The main one is the Quaddie Silver, who is unfortunately shoehorned into a potential love interest for Leo (despite the fact she's at best barely an adult in maturity and her experiences with sex have come entirely from using her body to get things for her fellow Quaddies).  Silver's fine as a smart intelligent and resourceful Quaddie, but as a person of little maturity due to the state of the Quaddies, she's not particularly interesting as a second main character.  The other Quaddies are similar - it's easy to get outraged at their treatment, but Leo is such a driving force himself that their agency is rather lacking and makes them individually less of characters.

There's a glimpse near the end of the type of writing which makes the rest of the series so appealing, but for the most part this is a relatively witless book, which is a change from Bujold's other works in the series and elsewhere.  And having read the book that revisits this setting in the time period of the Vorkosigan works, you really aren't missing anything by skipping Falling Free.
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