Falling Free
From the back cover: Leo Graf was just your average highly efficient engineer: mind your own business, fix what's wrong and move on to the next job. Everything neat and according to spec, just the way he liked it. But all that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat. Could you just stand there and allow the exploitation of hundreds of helpless children merely to enhance the bottom line of a heartless mega-corporation? Leo Graf adopted 1000 quaddies--now all he had to do was teach them to be free.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
9mentions
4people
2015–2026years
22% recommend78% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Falling Free is a great place to start, as it has a stand-alone plot and introduces the setting very well. If you like it then I'd also recommend the Vorkosigan saga.
- Not forgotten, but not well known either, Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction series, the Vorkosigan Saga is one of the best reads I ever found.
The first couple of books, Shards of Honor and Barrayar, are a superb mixture of futuristic technology, society, and humanity. The protagonist, Cordelia deals with a number of situations that would bring the best of us to our knees, with strength and compassion.
Unlike most "aseptic" or cold SciFi out there, including Star Trek, these works put the human element up front. I cannot recommend them highly enough. The rest of the saga follows different characters and is worthy in itself (I'm especially fond of Falling Free and a couple of the later books) but the first two books shine in my opinion.
She won several Nebula and Hugo awards, but she remains not well known. Several sci-fi friends of mine had never heard of her.
- The words that sprung to mind for me were "valuable scapegoat", and hence a sci-fi quote:
> Leo realized suddenly that Van Atta was not going to let him get a word of defense in edgewise if he could possibly help it. Van Atta was onto something infinitely more valuable than mere vengeance for a punch in the jaw—a scapegoat. A perfect scapegoat, upon whom he could pin every glitch in the Project for the past two months—or longer, depending on his ingenuity—and sacrifice qualmlessly to the company gods, himself emerging squeaky-clean and sinless.
-- Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
Some fault lies with the users, therefore, the company is obviously utterly blameless. /s
- That reminds me of a fiction-quote by one of my favorite authors, where a welding-instructor has just finished sharing a (somewhat literal) post-mortem anecdote of falsified safety inspections.
> He gathered his breath. “This is the most important thing I will ever say to you. The human mind is the ultimate testing device. You can take all the notes you want on the technical data, anything you forget you can look up again, but this must be engraved on your hearts in letters of fire.
> “There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important to me in the men and women I train than their absolute personal integrity. Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal. That’s all.”
> He let his breath out, and regained his good humor, looking around. The quaddie students were taking it with proper seriousness, good, no class cut-ups making sick jokes in the back row. In fact, they were looking rather shocked, staring at him with terrified awe.
-- Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
- That reminds me of a fictional space-engineer:
> "Some of them are visibly fused. Some idiot must have welded them.”
> “Welded, yes. But not by some idiot. By the sun.”
> “Leo, it doesn’t get that hot—”
> “Not directly. What you’re seeing is spontaneous vacuum diffusion welding. Metal molecules are evaporating off the surfaces of the pieces in the vacuum. Slowly, to be sure, but it’s a measurable phenomenon. On the clamped areas they migrate into their neighboring surfaces and eventually achieve quite a nice bond. A little faster for the hot pieces on the sun side, a little slower for the cold pieces in the shade—but I’ll bet some of those clamps have been in place for twenty years.”
-- Falling Free (1988) by Lois McMaster Bujold
- The question isn't quite as hard as with Terry Pratchett novels (yes, I do place Bujold in that tier) and I think the major choices boil down to:
1. Cordelias' Honor: Unusually, this is not about the character who will star in the next umpteen novels, but it does a lot of world-building and introduces some important characters who will be pervasive supporting cast later. (It's an omnibus that merges what was originally published separately: Shards of Honor, Aftermath, Barrayar.)
2. The Warrior's Apprentice: The first of the books focusing on the main protagonist of the rest of the series, however if you value knowing the world-building, backstories, and references to earlier books, then this would be a weaker start.
3. Falling Free: A stand-alone novel 200 years earlier in the main universe, which can be good or bad depending on your appetite.
Honorable mention: The Curse of Chalion if you prefer fantasy. [0]
_________
[0] There's also The Sharing Knife series which is... I dunno, fantasy of the hinted-post-apocalyptic variety? Somehow I was never drawn into those, in my dim memory they were disappointing.*
