

Our Intrepid Hero is Leo Graf, Engineering Instructor Extraordinaire, known across the galaxy (or at least, GalacTech, his employer) for his mad welding and safety instruction sk1llz. Falling Free is entertaining, but between lack of proper character development, minimal time spent on the thorny philosophical and ethical issues and having the actual adventure start more than halfway through the book (not to mention ending the story just as it got really interesting), the book doesn’t qualify as anything more than a slightly-better-than-mediocre experience.

Unfortunately, though the questions this book raised were enough to make me tingle from anticipation, the execution was disappointingly slight. To wit: What if a massive conglomerate with interplanetary interests commisioned biologists to genetically engineer a species of human maximized for life in freefall? What if this species was considered corporate property and not strictly human? And to drive the ethical considerations to the fore, what would happen if, for some reason, these engineered humans became completely obsolete? Regardless, I was pretty excited about digging into it, because I thought the premise teemed with all sorts of possibilities for drama and adventure. Bujold inspires a lot of hard-core love among the geeks, and I’ve been meaning to check out her Vorkosigan saga for several years now.įalling Free is set in the Vorkosigan universe, though it takes place about 200 years before Miles is born and its events are only tangentially related to the greater Vorkosigan saga. I mean, one of my best friends wrote about Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan for his college entry essay- and he got in. I’ve heard a lot about Lois McMaster Bujold.
