Falling Free
by Lois McMaster Bujold
1988

I've been reading a lot of Bujold's SF largely because I'm so enamoured of her "World of Five Gods" fantasy stuff.

Our protagonist in this case is Leo Graf, an engineer sent to a space station in a company-owned solar system where he's expected to educate the "Quaddies." Quaddies are modified humans meant for a free-fall environment: they have four arms and no legs, and are highly resistant to radiation and other problems normal humans encounter in space. But the company is the law in this solar system, and Quaddies are classified as "post-fetal experimental tissue cultures" rather than humans, and are essentially treated as slaves. Leo finds his political spirit and helps lead a revolution to save the Quaddies from a particularly unpleasant future.

Leo is a stereotypical perfectionist engineer, tightly focused on his work. The book endeavours to show his political awakening in the face of the Quaddie's mistreatment, but the initial stereotyping was pretty heavy-handed. The antogonist, the current administrator of the orbiting Quaddie habitat Bruce Van Atta, is a paper-thin character consisting entirely of greed, incompetence, and rage. The story is nominally about the Quaddies, but not only are the oldest barely out of their teens, they're all portrayed as sweet and naive, so we don't have any good characters there. The setting and the special abilities of the Quaddies themselves are interesting and Bujold's prose is never bad, but this isn't one of her better works. This won the 1988 Nebula award but ... I don't get it.