Falling Free
by Lois McMaster Bujold · first published 1988
9mentions
2recommended by
4HN commenters
2015–2026first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
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.
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…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…
on “Forgotten Greats of Science Fiction” ↗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.
on “Metals Fuse Together in Space” ↗…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
on “Metals Fuse Together in Space” ↗…imposed upon the quaddies implied by Yei's brief description made his skin crawl--and yet, the idea of a text that devoted whole sections to great engineering works made him want to stand up and cheer. (Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold.)
on “A theme-park chain where children pretend to be adults” ↗…anger go with a sigh. Wasn't it always so? He'd seen dozens of subordinates forge ahead, often men he'd trained himself. Yeah, and trust Van Atta to make it seem a weakness and not a point of pride. --"Falling Free", by L.M. Bujold
on “What Doesn't Seem Like Work?” ↗…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.” --- Lois McMaster Bujold, _Falling Free_
on “SpaceX CRS-7 Failure Investigation Teleconference Thread” ↗…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…
on “Metals Fuse Together in Space” ↗…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
on “My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story” ↗…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
on “xAI's first lawsuit against a user tests who is responsible for what Grok makes” ↗