Book completed

[eve_prime]

Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is a Vorkosigan Saga prequel, which introduces a sub-species of humans called the “quaddies.” An acceptably evil corporation has genetically engineered a thousand children with two sets of arms, the lower set replacing the legs, which they are treating as a labor source that they own, because they’re great at doing work at zero-G. An engineer, Leo Graf, arrives to train the teenagers among them in his specialty, welding, and is appalled to learn that they’ve just been rendered obsolete. The corporation plans to confine them to a barracks (with gravity, which will seriously handicap them), but there are other forces at work that would like to get rid of them entirely. How can Graf help the young people solve their problem? We readers know that 200 years later, they’re still around – Miles Vorkosigan has met at least one, a musician, and in the next full-length book he’ll be working with their whole colony – so we expect he will succeed somehow.

This book is more “engineering fiction” than science fiction – it turns out Bujold’s father was a world expert in this type of engineering, and she’d picked up enough of it that she could write a convincing novel when she didn’t have the time to research something new. I expect that Graf was also based on her father.