Menu
shadow
SF CORE Best Lists
SF ERA Best Lists
SF GENRE Best Lists
OTHER Best Lists

Falling Free

Falling Free

Author: Lois Mcmaster Bujold

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.

Books in Vorkosigan Saga Series (37)

Buy on Amazon

Similar Recommendations

There's lots of military sf out there, but if you're looking for something that has the same romantic feel, you really need to try the Honor Harrington books by David Weber, there's 20 or more of them now, stories of the space navy that are closely modeled on the Horation Hornblower novels of C.S. Forester.

Another series worth checking out is the Familias Regnant sequence by Elizabeth Moon. There are seven novels to date, in which Moon draws on her own military experience to provide a convincing account of military operations in space.