The novel “Falling free” by Lois McMaster Bujold was published for the first time in 1988. It won the Nebula Award as the best novel of the year.

Leo Graf is an engineer who takes care of quality control in space habitats. Working for GalacTech, a very important space corporation, on their Cay Habitat is instructed to train a group of Quaddies, the product of genetic engineering applied to human beings to make them suitable to live and work in microgravity conditions.

The Quaddies have no legal protection, in fact they’re GalacTech’s property because legally they’re the product of their biological experiment. For Leo Graf it’s not easy to work in that situation and he’s very disturbed by the idea that the Quaddies are considered a product to be used and sold to other space habitats. The situation becomes even more serious when the news arrives of the invention of an artificial gravity generator, a technology that will make the Quaddies obsolete as a work force in space habitats.