Part of the Vorkosigan Saga series , book 1

Falling Free

Name: Falling Free
Author: Mcmaster Bujold, Lois

by Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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About this book

As we have seen, in works such as Man Plus and The Ship Who Sang, body modification is often associated with making people fit to work in particular, usually hazardous, circumstances such as space. And, in R.U.R. or The Book of Phoenix, we see that people who have been made are often regarded as chattels, as possessions with no rights, until they revolt. Both those strands in posthuman fiction emerge in Bujold’s Falling Free. This is the story of the “Quaddies”. These are a special space labour force who have been manufactured to have a second pair of arms instead of legs, so that they are superbly adapted to work in zero gravity. But they are regarded as no better than slaves by the company that owns them; legally, they are not even classified as human. So when a new artificial gravity technology renders them irrelevant, the company plans to kill them all, until one man helps them to escape. Why it’s on the list: In a later novel, Diplomatic Immunity, Bujold shows that a couple of centuries later the Quaddies have a thriving society, so once again we see that biotechnology has created a new form of viable humanity.