Falling Free

Uggghhh. Reading through the other Goodreads reviews of this, I seem to be one of the only people that didn't love this book, but instead found it creepy and lame. Serves me right for not reading the sample before deciding!

This is near future sci-fi, where a gruff and beefy engineer man, Leo, is sent to work on a giant space station to teach the workers there about engineering stuff. Once he arrives, he learns that the station's Corporation, GalacTech, has created a workforce of four-armed/no-legged teenagers nicknamed “quaddies”. Let me reiterate here: the quaddies are frequently described as “kids”, “children”, innocent naifs and so on. Ahem.

Leo is immediately queasy about this weird genetically-engineered worker drones thing since, okay, they're basically slaves. And when a new technological advance in anti-gravity renders them obsolete, GalacTech decides to put them all in - ahem - a concentration camp (!). Leo then decides to save them all. Let my people go!

Yo, so I found this story all sorts of wrong. First, the writing style is pure 1950s pulp, which is weird - since it was written in the 1980s. But women sigh and faint, men are brawny, teenagers act like Ron Howard on Happy Days, and the villain is a one-dimensional ham. I'm surprised at how blunt and sexist this story was (the women in the story are all either wives/moms or sex objects), coming from the same lady (lady!) that wrote the much subtler, feminist Paladin of Souls (which featured that unicorn of narrative - the middle-aged lady protagonist). Here, we have a romance between gruff, 50ish Leo and one of the (they were called “kids”!) quaddies. The slutty one, but still. So wrong.

Also, I felt just as uneasy as Leo did with the whole way the quaddies were described; it felt like it was always just a hair's breadth away from getting creepy and ableist. Able-bodied older white dude saves bunch of genetically-modified, four-armed kids. Insert skeptical face.

One (maybe the only) pro is the love of engineering.