The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [6]
Falling Free came to be written as a result of a phone conversation with Jim Baen. I had written my first three science fiction novels "on spec," that is, without a prior contract or even contact with a publisher, which is pretty much the norm for first-time novelists. They'd sold on one memorable day in October 1985, in my very first phone conversation with Jim, when, after reading The Warrior's Apprentice, he called me up and offered for all three books. I was then faced, for the first time, with writing a novel with a known publishing destination, and intimidating expectations.
I had been thinking of following up a minor character from The Warrior's Apprentice named Arde Mayhew, a jump pilot afflicted with obsolete neural implant technology who would be on a quest for a ship that would fit him. I pictured him finding his prize among a group of people dwelling in an asteroid belt whose ancestors were bioengineered to live in free fall, and who were eking out a living, among other ways, as interstellar junk dealers. Jim was not much taken with Arde, but he seemed to perk up when I came to describe my proto-quaddies, and opined that a tale about them might be more interesting and science-fictional.
The quaddies' reason for being, or rather, being made, would be knocked asunder when a practical artificial gravity was developed. As I researched what was then known about free-fall physiology, it seemed to me that most of the obvious changes wouldn't necessarily leave people unable to return to a gravity environment. I came up with the notion of a second set of hands to replace legs after conversing with a NASA doctor about the dual problems the astronauts faced of leg atrophy, and their hands growing excessively tired as they took over the task while working of bracing oneself in place that on Earth is done by gravity. Having reasoned my way backward to their two-hundred-years-prior genesis, I decided to begin the quaddies' tale at the beginning, came up with the main characters, and from there, just followed their actions to their logical conclusions.
I decided to make my protagonist a welding engineer because I knew the type—my father was a professor in the subject, and one of my brothers had taken his degree in the specialty. This also seemed to handily solve my technical research problems; wrangling preschool children at the time, I knew I wasn't going to be able to get very far from home to do research, or much of anything else. This would have been early 1986.
I was about five chapters into the tale when my father died of a long-standing heart condition, in July of that year. At the timely invitation of then senior Baen editor Betsy Mitchell, I took a needed break to write my first novella—also the first work I'd ever sold before I wrote it, a scary step into a larger world for me as a writer. "The Borders of Infinity" had its start in about four pages of notes I'd scratched out for a potential Miles tale that drew on my early reading about WWII military prison camp breaks, an interest I shared with this volume's editor—Lillian lent me Escape from Colditz and other works on World War II way back in high school. Then there was the copy of Bridge Over the River Kwai that surfaced in my house. My notions didn't support a novel, but turned out to be perfect for the shorter length. Updating the