For some reason, I don't seem ever to have got around to reading this one. Better than I expected.

Bujold's writing is clearly a bit patchier than the later books - and there seems to be a lot more infodumping than she usually uses, when talking about the jump systems - but it's pleasant to see a fragment of the Vorkosigan universe outside of her standard setting. No wars, no dashing mercenary fleets or political machinations, just a small corporate research base with the profit motive getting out of hand.

It's a nicely constructed idea. A researcher has (somewhat surreptitiously) created a genetically-modified race of people to live in zero-gravity, mainly obvious by the fact they have four arms. The problem is, to the company, they're not people; they're property, legally defined as experimental tissue cultures, and when the economic justification for them collapses, so does any reason to keep them around.

The bulk of the novel is the attempts by the protagonist to contrive some way of rescuing the population from... well, the unpleasant fates for an expensive failed experiment are fairly apparent. The story pushes along at a nice clip; heroic feats of engineering manage to actually convey being heroic rather than just background detail; characters who had previously been fairly definitely on the side of faceless evil suddenly turn out to have had consciences all along. The deeper ideas of individual rights and responsibility, political indoctrination, bureaucratic indifference, are all gently highlighted and left for the reader rather than being beaten on loudly, which I appreciated.

Leo Graf thought the Cay Project would be just a routine engineering safety training job. He wasn't expecting 1000 genetically engineered children.

This is a fun Sci-Fi space adventure, an easy read. If you like that sort of thing. ( )

This is my first scifi novel by Bujold (I started with her fantasy) and I really liked it.

The quaddies--a young population of people geneticially modified to have four arms and generally be ideal for working in zero gravity--have been developed and raised by a big corporation that intends to exploit them for their labor. Leo Graf, one of the corporation's engineers, gets increasingly involved with the quaddies as he realizes what may happen to them in the long run. He ends up working with them to help them free themselves.

This is a story that could easily have been used to pound home various political messages. On one hand, it's about a group of *different* people, who have many useful abilities but are abused and marginalized by others. Bujold does a beautiful job of bringing out the worth and humanity of the quaddies, but she doesn't make it into a moral that dominates the whole book. On the other hand, the story of the quaddies breaking away from their corporate oppressors could have cued in a number of Heinleinesque reflections on rights and liberty, but Bujold mostly lets her readers sort out the ideas triggered by her story on their own time. I felt that she struck a good balance, letting the story and characters dominate while the ideas existed quietly but importantly in the background.

This book is many things; it tackles the question of individual responsibility in the face of monolithic administrative indifference, it considers the rights of the genetically modified to be people and not 'experimental tissue cultures' to be disposed of when no longer convenient, and it makes engineering a fascinating and even exciting thing. And it does all these things without ever getting bogged down in the philosophical or ethical details, or dropping the pace.

Overall, a good, well-paced read, which leaves you wanting to know more about what happened next, without leaving any loose ends lying around. ( )

A review of the Unabridged audio version of Falling Free, from The Reader's Chair:
http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=696 ( )